Women Publishers' Roundtable: Final Installment

Welcome back to the Women Publishers' Roundtable at Delirious Hem!  Here you'll find the most recent interview question that was sent to these small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question #8: What's next for your press? What can readers look forward to?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  We’ve just lined up all of our 2013titles and we have a whole slate of new and returning poets in the upcoming series, including second dgp books by Emilie Lindemann, Sarah Sloat, BrandiHoman, Trina Burke, Leah Browning, Eva Schlesinger, Lisa Cole, Carol Berg, Erika Lutzner, and Erin Bertram.  There a couple of more anthology-like book arts projects in the works, as well as some broadsides, mini-chaps, zines, and other freebies I’ve been pondering. All good and exciting things.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  For readers, we’ve got a lovely and dynamic new book coming back from the printers this month: Cynthia Arrieu-King’s MANIFEST, a Gatewood Prize winning book that was chosen by Harryette Mullen. Our 2013Gatewood Prize will open on March 1 and we’re thrilled to have the amazing and talented Eileen Myles as this year’s judge. We have a new title from Stefania Heim forthcoming next winter. We’ll be debuting a new website this year, as well, which will include some exciting new content and poetry. Internally, we’re working on a lot of improvements to enhance our book promotions and marketing. It’s a really exciting time for us!

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  This year Birds of Lace is publishing chapbooks from twelve writers! It is a little overwhelming but also very thrilling, because the chapbooks are stellar and it’s the most ambitious BoL has been to date. Recently released were Carina Finn’s My Life is a Movie, Megan Milks’ Twins and Seth Oelbaum’s macey [triolets]. Coming up we have chapbooks from Maia Elgin, Jeanine Deibel, Carrie Hunter, Jiyoon Lee, Samantha Cohen, JD Scott, Anne Marie Rooney, AndreaQuinlan (also published by dancing girl), and Kari Larsen (another dgp alum!). The awesome zine project It’s Complicated, edited by Judy Berman and Niina Pollari, collaborated with BoL for its first chapbook in a series which is very exciting. Later this year BoL will put out its first call for full-length books to be published perfect-bound. I’d like to plan more readings/events but this may not happen for some time.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press):  We’re super excited, after a hiatus in production, to be publishing a few great works by Tiffany M. De Vos, Joseph Quintela, Kiely Sweatt, Mary Lou Buschi and Kristina Marie Darling. Plus we’re starting our Review, which will publish a few poems each week. We’ve also been hosting a Parlor each month, which is kicking back up in March in NYC. The Parlor is mixed-media and very bohemian. We’ll have poetry, burlesque, dance, music, art, and whatever weirdness we see fit. It’s a place for people to talk, meet artists, and share their work with one another. We aim to promote Patasola poets as well as emerging/established poets. We’ve had big success with the past few months, and we’re excited to continue.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith and T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publication):  Oh, man. We have so many projects! Besides our journals, the Best of the NetAnthology, and upcoming e-chapbook contest, Sundress is publishing collections by Donna Vorreyer, David Cazden, and Virginia Smith, e-chaps by Christine Jessica Margaret Reilly, Emilia Phillips, and Emily Janowick, and two anthologies—one of contemporary Quaker poetry, and a multigenre one exploring women and place. Flaming Giblet is putting the finishing touches on The Butterfly Lady, its first novel in five years, and is already looking at three more manuscripts. And, of course, there’s our biggest project: the Sundress Academy of the Arts at Firefly Farms. Whew! It’s all very exciting stuff.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  We just released our first title, F IN by Carol Guess, and two more are on the way:  Eva Heisler's Drawing Water and Kristy Bowen's the shared properties of water and stars.  I'm very excited to start sending out review copies and organizing events for these amazing authors.  Soon we'll begin selecting manuscript for the 2014 series.  Stay tuned!

This is the final installment of the feature, but I hope you'll continue to watch these excellent small presses.  Thank you to everyone who participating in the Women Publishers' Roundtable!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Seventh Installment

Welcome to the Women Publishers' Roundtable at Delirious Hem!  Here you'll find the latest interview question that was sent to these small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question 7: What advice do you have for women who are in the process of starting a press, or hope to start one in the future?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  I think starting small is key. We’ve grown a lot in the past 9 years, but in the beginning, it was important to keep things manageable (both time-wise and financially). Writers and other creative types are often overstretched as it is between day jobs and teaching gigs and being students themselves. Starting small lets you see what works and then you can build from there. I’ve gone from putting out 4 or 5 books / year and investing a couple hours a week to putting out nearly a book a week (sometimes more) and spending about 6 hours per day working on press stuff.) It can be a small thing or a big thing, but you have to get started and build on momentum. It’ll be whatever you make it.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  Think ahead. Do you see yourself still doing this in five years? In ten years? What is your vision for the eventual outcome of the endeavor? Set the scale of what you’re starting to your level of commitment. No one is entirely altruistic; we all get involved in publishing to serve ourselves in some way. But I think when we’re talking about publishing full-length collections, we have to consider the future of the press, because book publication does affect peoples’ lives. It’s a requirement for tenure, and those who are kind enough to entrust you with their work should be assured that your press isn’t going to collapse a year later when they’re in front of the tenure board. There are lots of other ways not tied to academia in which book publication affects peoples’ lives. If you don’t see yourself doing this for a long time or finding the smart people you’ll need to keep it going for the long haul, I’d say you should do something smaller in scale. If you wanna go big, go big, but make sure you’ve got the infrastructure to support that goal.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  Start wherever you can. If you have access to the internet make a literary journal on tumblr or blogspot or wordpress. Talk to your friends and their friends and publish writing you love and are challenged by; a chain of people and events will always lead you to more work you love, especially if you’re conducting communications through the internet. Photocopy poems and staple them together, do research to find out which copyshop in your town is cheapest, or if you can photocopy somewhere for free. Hustle (in the friendly way) your friends and loved ones and fascinating/talented acquaintances. Read lots of literary journals/go to readings and find out whose writing you love; if they are alive get into contact with them and publish them. Read reviews of books and chapbooks and purchase them so you can support a press in action and get a feel for what’s being published/what still needs to be published. Be an unabashed fangirl: Rebecca Brown sent me new work for the third issue of Finery, a handmade zine, and she is a totally legit, serious writer of some of my favorite books ever; I just asked her to contribute after a reading and she totally did. Dancing Girl Press and Switchback (obviously, because I love both presses and have admired/read their books for years) gave great advice. Start small and see what happens. Email people who’ve started presses you love and ask how they did it. Be brave and excited and creative in your definition of publishing.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press):  Start small, as Kristy said. Even I got over my head. Know what you want, and if you’re unsure, just read everything you can get your hands on. Get a group of supporters together, even if it’s a poet-friend who can donate an hour of time, when you need it. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Go to literary readings, encourage people, support people, be thankful, be humble. Build a social media presence, take part in it. Don’t give up. Apologize if you’ve made mistakes. Know that you will make mistakes and you will grow. Be unabashedly proud of everything you do. Know that you can only do so much, but what you do is to be done with love and time and attention. Remember your mission. Grow with it, and change it when it needs to change. Remember what inspired you in the first place when you’re tired. Remember it’s all for love and the promotion of something way bigger than yourself. Literature and people’s lives.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications):  Be fearless.   Solicit people you love despite how famous or unfamous they are.  Don't stress about image too much.  If you publish good shit, people will come back.  Don't ever be intimidated.  Don't ever let people you don't know make you doubt your decisions. Be respectful but speak your mind.  Have fun with it.

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): Other thoughts? Well, it’s important to not be afraid to make mistakes along the way, but don’t let them pile up. Deal with them. Work with your authors; maintain an open line of communication. Network. Seriously, if you like what another press, author, artist, etc. is doing, get in touch and make those connections. As you grow, be idealistic but realistic. Dream big, but do what it takes to realize those big dreams. Otherwise, you’ll just disappoint yourself.

By the way, I want to point out that I wish I had had even half of this advice early on.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  Start by supporting other people.  Volunteer as an assistant editor or a reader, review books, guest edit magazines.  This will help you learn the publishing landscape before you dive into starting a press of your own.  You'll also learn practical skills that you'll need later on down the road, like copyediting, how to use Wordpress and Blogger, etc.  Perhaps more importantly, supporting others will help you build relationships with people in the literary community.  These more experienced writers and editors can give you advice, support, and resources when it comes time to start your own press. 

Be sure to stop by for the last installment of the Women Publishers' Roundtable, which will include a discussion of future projects from these excellent presses!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Sixth Installment

Hello and welcome to the Women Publishers' Roundtable!  Here you'll find the last interview question that was circulated among these small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy! 


Interview Question 6: Who do you envision as the audience for your press? For a feminist/woman-centered press more generally?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  I once had someone argue that women-centered presses were a bad idea, that they segregated women’s writing off into a separate sphere (presumably a sphere of interest only to women, which is completely inaccurate.) While I won’t even go into his ridiculous assumption that somehow male=universal and female=other, I did begin thinking about what dancing girl as a feminist press actually does and why it does what it does. If women continue to be published at a far less statistical advantage than the work of men, obviously there is a gap in the conversation of American poetry, a gap that I hope the titles we release work toward filling.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  We spend a lot of time talking about our audience. Who are they? We’re always a little baffled by it, and that’s something we’re hoping to keep better track of in the coming years. But just from our un-scientific observations, we have a pretty diverse readership. For one (to piggyback on what Kristy said), our readers aren’t just women. They also aren’t just poets. This I think goes back to what we’re trying to accomplish with our mission. We know that the audience for our books will always overlap with the submissions pool, but by making closely edited and beautifully designed books that touch a range of aesthetics and experiences, we enable ourselves to reach a broader audience.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  I am unabashedly most interested in providing literature for women and queers, in their vast expanses. What that means to me is that I’d like to lessen the loneliness and strengthen the nature of relationships within my community, connect people. A confused hot/loveline. I also think that most humans are freaks who feel like freaks, sometimes secretly and sometimes not, and it’s nice to read something gross and funny and smart and feel hope, excitement about being alive at the same time that such great writing and art is being produced and shared. I hope Birds of Lace has an audience that would delight and surprise me. What I want from a feminist press is a diverse range of writers/experiences and lives being written about in ways that are complex and sometimes confusing but always sprout a new carrion-eating/producing creature in your brain.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press): We seem to have a very diverse range of readers—poets, writers, friends, males, females, people of all sexual backgrounds, academics, working folk, and we’re very happy about it all. We want our work to appeal to everyone, recognizing that some work is very specific and may appeal to certain kinds of people. We just want to include everyone in the conversation. We just don’t want to publish safe work. We want to our work to be able to speak to people because it’s bold and daring, and has the power to infiltrate any one’s mind who is open to it. Anyone is welcome to love us, join us, submit to us.

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): Obviously, as both Kristy and Whitney have pointed out, our audience is strongly made up of the kinds of people who would submit to and publish with our press, but that isn’t the end all and be all of our audience. I think as we’ve grown, we’ve reached out to a lot of different people who appreciate not just good writing by women, but good writing in general. One of our biggest growth areas has been among young writers, those who are perhaps not well published but invested in knowing what’s “out there” and becoming a part of that plurality of voices. I think they are a strong subset of the feminist/women-centered press’s audience(s) because they are the most likely to take the lessons at the heart of such presses and apply them in a larger capacity—reviewing, promoting, and celebrating books by women without that “female=other” construction in their minds.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications):  I used to think I knew exactly what our readership was like at Sundress, but in the last five years, it's so hard to tell.  Our projects are so diverse that's I think it's hard to pin us down.  Certainly we're not as experimental (as a whole) as T.A. is at Flaming Giblet, but we're open to pretty much all types of writing as long as it resonates on some emotional level.  Thirteen years later, I'm still not a fan of clever for clever's sake.

That being said, I think a lot of people make assumptions about us because of our name; Sundress definitely has a gendered assumption to it.  But the more people become familiar with the Bestof the Net or our journals (which include magazines devoted to sports poetry and trailer park philosophy), the less I think they consider us a “women's press,” which is too bad.  Because we're a pretty fucking badass press, run by a lot of badass women.  (And Nick McRae.  Hi, Nick!) 

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  One of the questions that comes up most frequently when I'm talking with someone about the press is, "Why don't you publish men?"  I find that our decision to publish exclusively female writers gives the impression that our audience is only women, and that men aren't welcome.  This is completely untrue.  Noctuary Press strives to create dialogue about the gender politics inherent in our definitions of genre, and this is an issue that concerns everybody in the literary community.  It's strange to me that the question of audience never really comes up with literary genres that are predominantly male, or, this question is never phrased in terms of gender.  Kristy's absolutely right that many people have created a dichotomy in their minds, where male = universal, female = other.  Because the press strives to interrogate this kind of thinking, and the ways that it manifests in our treatment of genre, I hope that we'll cultivate an increasingly diverse audience.   I say this because I believe that everyone benefits from greater diversity and inclusion in the publishing world, not just women or other underrepresented social groups.

Please stop by for the next installment, which will include the editors' advice for women hoping to start small presses!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Fifth Installment

Welcome back to Delirious Hem's Women Publishers' Roundtable.  Here you'll find the latest interview question that was circulated to this group of small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question 5: Given the increasing availability of resources for small publishers, do you feel that book publishing has been largely democratized? Based on your experience as a woman publisher, what work has yet to be done?

Kristy Bowen (Editor, Dancing Girl Press):  I always like to try to imagine doing what I do 25 years go (or at least pre-internet days) and I’m not sure it would be possible. Not only would it be logistically different to physically produce & distribute books, it would also be really difficult to connect with an audience, or to even FIND an audience, all of which has been remedied by online communities of various sorts—list servs, blogs, social media platforms, etc. Since women still encounter the sort of roadblocks that shouldn’t exist, I imagine 25 years ago those sort of things would be even more difficult in a more limited channel of dissemination.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Editor, Switchback Books):  I wouldn’t say it’s democratized. You still have to acknowledge the tremendous privilege it is to say, I’m going to start this thing, I’m going to take another person’s creative work and manifest it in some consumable way and they will trust me to do this. Not that many people are given the educational and socio-economic conditions from which to boldly declare that. To say, I have free time during which I can work for no pay. That’s the reality of small press publishing. Even publishing online isn’t free (the investment in time and access to/understanding of technologies has a price), and we need to be aware of that in the ways we perceive the economics of publishing. As far as what work is yet to be done? Woof. This is a question I don’t feel at all qualified to answer.

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Gina Abelkop (Editor, Birds of Lace Press):  Democratized to a degree. It does cost money and access to resources to print literature, as Switchback books states above. That said, there are so many exciting things happening in independent publications and literature. I see many excellent projects gaining funding via Kickstarter or benefit events. I certainly don’t think publishing has ever been as democratized as it is now. What work is to be done? Oh, so much. There is much work to be done for the inclusion, respect and representations of women, people of color, queers, genius freaks taking the time to think/write through, around and outside of the questions of being human , and so many more- not that all those populations can be conflated in terms of privilege or lack thereof, but that these voices have been and continue to be relegated to the margins and to literary ghettos.. There is a world of work to be done that extends beyond issues such as the afore mentioned but these are the issues that concern me, and the project of BoL, most.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Editor, Patasola Press):  I don’t think it’s largely democratized at all. I think one does have to have to spare time (or make it). It does take some financing. Paying for conferences like AWP gets super pricy, and only some people can afford that. It also takes the ability to thread an audience and build a network, and it takes some cultured credibility to be trusted. It’s difficult. It’s not easy for women, these days, I think. I get the question: “why are you a feminist press? why do you focus on women?” and sometimes, the question comes with, “so why won’t you publish men?” I don’t think that we have to be “othered” because we have that focus. That’s a problem. I do publish men, but I also see the necessity to promote women full-force. Having to answer those questions shows there is a problem. However, with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and countless other resources, I think there’s a grand playing field. It’s just time to level it out.

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T.A. Noonan (Editor, Sundress Publications): Democratized? I wouldn’t say that. I agree with Kristy that we couldn’t even come close to doing what we do without the technology available to us now. But, as Whitney points out, there is a tremendous amount of privilege necessary to run a press. To manifest the work in some kind of consumable form, publishers need to be able to read the work, appreciate it, work with the author and establish trust, edit the text, design the book, find the appropriate audience, market to that audience, and a bunch of other things that aren’t coming to mind. This takes resources—not necessarily monetary, but resources nonetheless.

It is easier than it used to be, though. And I think that because we create these networks, we have the ability to disseminate crucial works more freely, which in turn, helps create larger networks of readers, authors, collaborators, and supporters who are willing to take risks.

Here’s an observation, though: the fact that we have to ask what still needs to be done is a testament that there is so much more to do. I also don’t really feel qualified to answer the question in any kind of complete and cogent way, but I have some ideas about what I think should happen in my ideal universe. I’d love to see more publishers focusing exclusively on female and female-identified writers. The technology needs to be even more accessible in terms of cost, purpose, and ease of use. I wish the writing and publishing community would look more to the DIY and crafting community for inspiration; the ways in which they promote and distribute their work and the strength of their networking is simply astonishing.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Editor, Sundress Publications): I would say that in terms of means of production, certainly.  With POD, online publishing, or blogging, there are ways to publish both online and IRL for ultimately free.

However, that doesn't mean that the playing field is even.  There's still the time you need to be able to invest to read submissions, promote books/issues, solicit authors, so on.  You also need the skill to be able to code and design.  You need the right friends who are willing to promote.  There's always a hierarchy of taste, prestige, connections, etc.  I'm privileged enough to have a job that allows me the time to be able to do all of the things that Sundress does—book and e-chap publishing, the Best of the Net anthology, contests, print anthologies, lit journals, AWP readings, etc etc—and I'm blessed to have an amazing staff of volunteers and interns who give their time to do it with me for some free booze from time to time.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Editor, Noctuary Press):  I agree that the means of production are certainly more accessible than they were, say, twenty-five years ago.  In my opinion, much of the work that has yet to be done pertains to the way that we (as readers, as artists, and as a culture) assign value to literary texts.  Sure, texts can be easily produced and disseminated to readers.  But the way most people define "legitimacy" is very old-fashioned.  I don't think we can claim that publishing has been democratized until texts that are published and disseminated by alternative means are considered just as legitimate, worthwhile, and valuable as other literary texts. 

Please stop by for Part Six of the Women Publishers' Roundtable, which will include a discussion of marketing, promoting, and building an audience for a woman-centered press!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Fourth Installment

Wecome to Part Four of the Women Publishers' Roundtable!  Here you'll find the last interview question sent to this group of small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question 4: Why did you choose to disseminate these texts in the way that you did? In other words, why a chapbook and not a perfect-bound book, and vice versa? Why did some of you turn away from the book/chapbook format altogether?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  The decision to do chapbooks came from equal parts economics and my own love of papery things. Perfect bound books were too expensive to produce, and yet, having been publishing wicked alice electronically, I had this yearning for something physical, something tangible Since I was funding the whole venture out of pocket, it was a relatively inexpensive, low-risk , project to launch—needing little more than a booklet stapler, card stock, a printer, and some late night assembly marathons. There was also this flurry of chapbook publishing going on at the time (circa 2004) with a number of publishers appearing on my radar that were publishing chapbooks (sometimes exclusively, sometimes in tandem with other media (Effing, Horseless, NMP, BigGame Books, Ugly Duckling, Noemi, all sorts of author-issued chapbooks). It seemed like a great time to dive in.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  I can’t speak for the Founding Editors as to why they chose to make perfect-bound books, but I can say that I think it’s heavily tied to our mission. Implicit in the idea of promoting the work of women poets as a way of making up for what other presses aren’t doing is the idea that we should respond by doing what we wish they were doing—and that’s publishing and promoting full-length collections of poetry by women. While we do aim to make beautiful books (and succeed), the book-as-art-object is less important to our mission than the book as a professionally-produced-and-promoted object. We love chapbooks (and we did do a limitededition collection of four chapbooks by Monica de la Torre), but perfect binding is part of the package we’re trying to offer to women poets.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  DIY publishing is cheap and fun. I made zines in high school and the cut-and-paste, photocopied style seemed accessible to me in that it seemed do-able without much know-how. In the late 90s/early 2000s I came across Roxanne Carter’s Persephassa press. She was printing people’s work at home, binding the chapbooks/books/journals herself, selling them online. It hadn’t really occurred to me that such a thing was possible, that you could just distribute work you loved like that. Making chapbooks is fun and creative and I like using my hands do it. I buy paper from Mr. French (which I also came into contact with via Persephassa) for the covers and usually do the design myself, though sometimes I get to work with very brilliant artists like Rhanimals and Susanna Troxler, who both did illustrations for Carrie Murphy’s chapbook, Meet the Lavenders. Jeanine Deibel, who we’re publishing in March, designed her own cover. I absolutely want to do perfect-bound books as well, because they’re a different kind of beautiful and can be distributed in larger numbers, and I believe in the physical preservation and documentation of art by people who aren’t usually canonized. Anna Joy Springer’s The Birdwisher was our first (and so far only) perfect-bound book but eventually I’d like to do something like two fancy (gold foil, french flaps, etc), vastly proliferated perfect-bound books and 3-5 handmade chapbook titles a year. Until I have the monetary resources to do so I will very happily provide limited edition chapbooks, because they’re cheap to produce/purchase, the entrance of their words into the public realm is vital, and they are beautiful objects.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press):  We’re totally volunteer-run with almost no budget, so we opt for an on-demand model. We buy ISBNs and use an on-demand model to print the books. We’re open to both chapbook and book formats, and we usually go perfect-bound for all projects. We may, in the future, go with saddle stitch, and we’re happy to explore that in time. Nothing is closed to us. One day we hope to print a book with gold-plated pages. Oh, and maybe a pop-out. And tiny books. We are concerned with our books being available as an always-available item with an ISBN, and we think that is important for authors to have, but that doesn’t mean that a chapbook without isn’t valuable. The chapbook, which exists as a sort of temporary beauty many times, is still gorgeous to us, of course!

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): Sundress does or has done a little bit of everything: chapbooks, limited edition art-object chapbooks, e-chaps, perfect-bound books. I think the only thing we haven’t really done yet is an e-book. There are some limitations there, especially for more experimental and/or visually engaged texts, but we’re working on that.

Lately, we’ve been doing a lot more in the way of perfect-bound books because there is that sense of “the book as a professionally-produced-and-promoted object,” and for a lot of writers, it’s a crucial part of representing their work as something to be taken seriously. Despite this, we have a huge investment in online publishing (hence our continued interest in e-chaps), and I personally must profess a serious love of the “book-as-art-object.” So, I think it depends on what we personally and collectively want to accomplish with our authors and as a press.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications): What she said. Personally, there's a part of me that would like to see everything we publish be online.  That's where the readers are, and ultimately what we want for our press is to get our writers' work in front of as many eyes as possible.  It's not that I believe print is dead, nor do I wish it so.  I just have numbers—which show that our free e-chapbooks receive hundreds of downloads a month, something any print press would love to say about their more tangible publications.  That being said, the books are awfully pretty.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  When I first started Noctuary Press, I was determined to create perfect-bound books with ISBN numbers.  This is still an important part of the press's mission.  This is mostly because the book as a cultural object embodies the idea of "legitimacy" for many writers.  And so much of the time, women's writing that takes place at the peripheries of existing genre categories is perceived as "illegitimate."  This is often because the channels of distribution presuppose that writing will fall into legible, and often very limiting, genre categories.  The text that can't be disseminated becomes the illegitimate text.  I wanted to offer a place where women's writing that challenges genre categories can be perceived as legitimate.  I also wanted to offer a channel of distribution, allowing this work to be disseminated to an appreciative audience 

Please stop by for the fifth installment, which will include a discussion of technology and the small press!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Third Installment

I hope you enjoy the third installment of Delirious Hem's Women Publishers' Roundtable.  Here you'll find the most recent interview question that was sent to these small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed. 

 

Third Interview Question: How does your press, its mission, and its overall aesthetic relate to your creative work? What becomes possible for you when curating texts, rather than writing them?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  I always joke that it’s so much more enjoyable to put other people’s work into the world than to put my own out there. I guess it’s a question of permission, maybe. I feel completely comfortable saying “here is this book, I love it and you will too” about someone else’s work, yet to do so with your own work is kind of awkward’ As to the creation of the work itself, I have learned so much about putting manuscripts together and how to make things work by immersing myself in other people’s projects on a daily basis. It’s also incredibly humbling, to see what’s out there floating around and vying for the same publication spots as my own work (and why I increasingly get less and less concerned by rejections as the years go on). I often think though that I tend to publish the sort of books I wish I had written (but for whatever reason, can’t do quite as good a job at it…)

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  When I get intimate with other people’s poems, I can’t help but want to write my own. Not that that always happens, exactly, but in the midst of editing a book, I walk around with a chorus in my head. The cadences, sometimes full lines from the book I’m working on, are so stuck in my head that I start to perceive the world around me a little differently, which I guess is a way to get myself started writing. I’d always rather work on someone else’s poems, though. Over several years and projects, I’ve developed a lot of confidence in my ability to edit, whereas there’s always heaps of (sometimes overwhelming) doubt in my own writing. Working with Switchback Books and the amazing manuscripts that I get to read (even the ones we don’t end up publishing) reminds me of the vast possibilities for poetry. The stuff I’d never give myself permission to do, I see others do with stunning results. It’s a humbling reminder to take risks.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  Engaging with the work Birds of Lace puts out takes so many different forms. When making chapbook covers I am often on my living room floor watching a movie, using my hands to do something repetitive which feels really good- it’s creative but doesn’t require much of my energy, so it can be done after work in the evenings. It’s a way to feel productive when I feel too lazy/low-energy to be productive in more energy-consuming ways. Reading the poems and fictions themselves is always inspiring and makes me want to step up my game, to meet them or even just attempt to meet them, the playfulness of reading a text and seeing a way to have a conversation with it. Sometimes I’m inspired via the personal interactions I have with the authors I publish or BoL readers, through emails or Twitter or Tumblr; the internet has allowed many of us to have continuing contact/relationships with people who make things we love. I enjoy packing orders up and going to the post office to mail them, the idea that I will mail something to someone and they will read it and we’ll all have this fine line of connectivity, a warbling affinity.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press): Mostly as an editor I lay out the manuscript, printed, on a table near a window and look at the words, feel them, imagine them, play with them, and obsess over them. I feel it is more important to publish other people than it is to publish myself, and will always feel that way. I absolutely need others’ beautiful writing to inspire my own—at least inspire me to go harder, fuller, bloodier, to try something new. In a way, publishing permits me to explore work in a very intimate way. Also I see all the authors working with Patasola as my children. There isn’t really anything better than seeing the authors and poets blossom, of their own accord, or with Patasola. I also think that reading and re-reading texts lets you take a looking glass at a human being, and it reminds you, at the end of the day, that we’re all people, and we all think really crazy, wild, little things all the time, and that we’re always dreaming and defining and deconstructing, and we’re all capable of beauty.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications): I think for me it helps me to think of narrative in a different sort of way than I would with my own writing.  Not necessarily the narrative of a singular poem or narrative poetry as a whole, but rather the way that a collection can tell a story.  So often we're taught to overlook these temporal/autobiographical movements in the ordering of collections in favor of thematic/literary links that we forget that poems are more than the sum of their parts.  Working with authors in re-ordering and thus re-imagining their manuscripts makes me think about the stories that my own writing tells beyond the arc of a single poem.

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): I want to echo Whitney’s word “humbling.” Holy smokes, is that ever the truth! It’s a blessing to work with so many different authors who are doing so many cool and amazing things, and I’m so inspired by the authors we get to work with. My problem is that I often get so obsessive about working with others that I sometimes put my own work on the back-burner—which is maybe not the healthiest thing, but it feels right. Sometimes. But even when I’m neck-deep in someone else’s writing, I’m still thinking about what I want to accomplish with my writing, so the whole process feeds itself in this never-ending cycle of excitement and possibility. That sounds a little cheesy, but it’s true.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  I love what Whitney said about how our work as editors reminds us to take risks.  Reading manuscripts by Noctuary Press authors (Kristy Bowen, Carol Guess, and Eva Heisler) has taught me a lot about what's possible within contemporary cross-genre writing.  Their work has shown me that prose and the poetic line can coexist gracefully within the same narrative space, that algebra can be beautiful, and so much more.  Although I work with prose forms, and the press also publishes this type of writing, I find that the work I'm drawn to as an editor is often much different from my own.  These writers take on subjects, literary forms, and genres that I've never worked with before.  I love how my work with the press reminds me, almost constantly, of the importance of experimentation, challenging oneself as an artist, and keeping an open mind. 

Please check back for the next installment, which will include a discussion of books, chapbooks, and alternative ways of disseminating literary texts . . .  

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Second Installment

I'm absolutely delighted to bring you the second installment of Delirious Hem's Women Publishers' Roundtable.  Seven small press editors have been sent interview questions about the contemporary publishing landscape. Here you'll find the latest interview question and the resulting conversation.  Enjoy!

Second Interview Question:  Once you decided to start a press, how did you find a specific editorial focus within contemporary women's writing?

Kristy Bowen (Editor, Dancing Girl Press):  It’s hard for me to pinpoint a specific focus since so much of what we publish is geared by my purely subjective likes and dislikes (which vary all over the place.) Genre-wise, we usually say we are looking for poetry, but I find myself very often drawn to more prose-oriented and hybrid work, as well as occasional image-based and vispo projects. Aesthetics-wise, we probably lean a bit more towards innovative/experimental/conceptual work, but I appreciate traditional lyric or narrative poems as well. Some of our pet passions are work that engages the visual arts in some way, as well as work that engages other texts, history, fairytales, other cultural reference points.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Editor, Switchback Books):  We haven’t found a specific editorial focus and that’s really part of what I love about Switchback Books. A lot of the books we publish are winners of the Gatewood Prize for a first or second book of poetry, so we work frequently with first-book authors and, while we read every manuscript for the contest, the final winning book is chosen by a prominent woman poet judge. So each of our books reflects a slightly different editorial perspective. The place where the diversity of our catalog really plays out is when we go to book fairs. Someone who’s unfamiliar with our press comes up to the table and we can just start talking about what they do, who they are, what they like to read, and before long, we can recommend a book from our table that we’re sure they’ll love. That’s part of how we get those books into people’s hands—by publishing a multiplicity of voices and aesthetics.

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Gina Abelkop (Editor, Birds of Lace Press):  Birds of Lace’s editorial focused isn’t quite fixed but is certainly recognizable, I hope. When reading submissions, it is just what makes my heart go harder when I’m reading it, what I hope will make the hearts of rangy but kind weirdos and sweethearts beat harder too. We don’t publish cis-dudes because we don’t. I am interested in printing the work of women and queers who are historically and infamously underrepresented in both the mainstream and the alternative/small press literature and art worlds, and the world in general. Especially those who are upstarts in their own ways ie feminist killjoys, dyke bitches, pissed off fags, shy brilliant darlings, secret geniuses, enthusiastic dressers, friendly sweet perverts.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Editor, Patasola Press):  Patasola Press doesn’t have a fixed editorial focus at all, and we never will. Our writers are all very different, but much of our work deals with what it means to who we are — as women, as Americans, as travelers, sexual beings, as lovers, as mythology. I wanted to publish women whose voices are so purely their own—and if they’re all different, even better. I publish voices that aren’t afraid, that aren’t apologetic, are urgent and bold and bloody, even if in a silent way. We also like to consider work by first-time authors, and that’s really important for us. We’re so tired of seeing the same names over and over. There are lots of people who don’t get the time they should be demanding because they don’t have publication credits, or whatever, and it’s important to really read their work too.

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T.A. Noonan (Editor, Sundress Publications): Do we have a specific editorial focus? I mean, I’ve noticed that we have a general preference for works with a strong narrative current, but I think that’s because our editors enjoy the stories that writers have to tell. That said, we don’t have a very strongly defined aesthetic. In terms of its books—full- and chapbook-length—Sundress is most invested in poetry, but our Flaming Giblet Press imprint works with prose, hybrid, and experimental texts, especially ones that are challenging because of their form, subject, etc. Our journals do their own thing. And then there’s the Best of the Net series, which showcases work from dozens of online journals. We end up representing a lot of different voices, aesthetics, and experiences because we have so many different projects, editors, judges, etc.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Editor, Sundress Publications): I'm with T.A. here.  I don't think I ever went into it with a specific focus in mind.  Our first book, Especially the Deer by Tyurina Allen, Julie Ruble, and Mary Beth Magin, was part of what we then called The Artemis Project, which published women 25 and under.  Looking back on the collection, there's definitely no hinge to the aesthetic between the work of the three women involved.  Similarly, the work in our more recent collections ranges from T.A. Noonan's experimental narrative in verse to Marcel Brouwers' ode to travel and wordplay.  Our forthcoming books deal with issues as various as fairy tale retellings, miscarriage, meditations on place, and bisexuality.

 

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Kristina Marie Darling (Editor, Noctuary Press):  Although Noctuary Press was initially conceived of as a press that specializes in cross-genre writing, I definitely agree with you all that diversity is important when making editorial decisions.  I mentioned earlier that Noctuary Press attempts to fill a gap in the existing publishing landscape, and to reprenset writing that takes place at the peripheries of existing genre categories, writing that might otherwise be excluded from public discourse.  One of the most important aspects of our editorial mission is to showcase the diversity inherent in contemporary cross-genre writing by women.  Although most of our books are written in hybrid genre prose, they engage with such diverse subjects as murder mysteries, coming of age stories, and algebra word problems.  For me, learning about the diversity of aesthetic approaches within contemporary women's cross-genre writing has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running a woman-centered press.   

Please check back for the third installment, which includes a discussion of the editors' own creative work!

Women Publishers' Roundtable

I'm thrilled to introduce the Women Publishers' Roundtable, a conversation with seven inspiring and innovative small press editors.  This feature will appear in several installments, each of which will include the editors' responses to a different interview question about the contemporary publishing landscape.  So without further ado...

The Roundtable Participants:

Gina Abelkop (Pisces) swims in the river and lives with a pug (also Pisces) named after Ava Gardner. Her first book of poems, DarlingBeastlettes, came out in 2012 from Apostrophe Books, and recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Radioactive Moat, and Ghost Proposal.  She edits Birds of Lace Press and blogs here.

Lisa Marie Basile received her MFA from The New School in Manhattan. She is the author of Andalucia (Brothel Books) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press). Her forthcoming chapbook, war/lock, will be released by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014. Her work can be seen in PANK, kill author, La Fovea, John Hopkin's Doctor TJEckleburg Review and elimae, among other reviews. She is the founding editor of Patasola Press, and an assistant editor for Fifth WednesdayJournal. She's also managing member of the Poetry Society of New York, which produces the Annual NYC Poetry Festival.

A writer and visual artist, Kristy Bowen is the author of several book, chapbook, and zine projects, including the forthcoming beautiul, sinister (Maverick Duck Press, 2013) and girl show (Black Lawrence, 2013). She lives in Chicago where she runs dancinggirl press & studio, devoted to paper-oriented arts and publishing work by women writers/artists.

KristinaMarie Darling is the author of twelve books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (RavennaPress, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and (with Carol Guess) X Marks the Dress: A Registry (Gold Wake Press, forthcoming in 2014).  She edits Noctuary Press.

S. Whitney Holmes is the Executive Director and Editor of Switchback Books, as well as an editor for The Offending Adam. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Barrelhouse, and others. Her chapbook, Method of Loci, is available from dancing girl press. She lives in Chicago.

T.A. Noonan is the author of two full-length hybrid collections, The Bone Folders and Petticoat Government, as well as the chapbooks Dress the Stars, Darjeeling, and Balm. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, RHINO, specs, Phoebe, Harpur Palate, and many others. She is the Associate Editor of Sundress Publications and oversees its Flaming Giblet Press imprint. Currently, she lives on Florida's Treasure Coast with her husband.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011).  Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review.  She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications, the Best of the Net Anthology, and Stirring.

 

First Interview Question:  What is your press's mission? When starting your press, why did that particular mission seem urgent to you?

Kristy Bowen:  The dancing girl series was initially an offshoot of wicked alice, the online journal of women-centered writing I had started in 2001. Since my educational background , both at the grad and undergrad level, had very much been centered around writing by women and the literary establishment’s historical gender imbalance, it was sort of an obvious route, to create something that explored those traditions and interests. In the intervening years, it’s become even more obvious that the gender imbalance, no matter how far things have come, is alive and kicking here in the contemporary lit world just as much as ever. So I think the mission has become more actually more urgent as time goes on.

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S. Whitney Holmes:  SwitchbackBooks is a nonprofit feminist press publishing and promoting collections of poetry by women, including transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, and female-identified individuals. I must interject here that I did not start the press—Switchback Books was started by three ambitious and talented Founding Editors: Brandi Homan, Hanna Andrews, and Becca Klaver. That said, the urgency of our mission is in the numbers, as Kristy mentions. Women writers are consistently published and reviewed less frequently than men (sometimes only ¼ as often), and many major publishers’ catalogs only reflect 30% women writers. And this is despite the fact that we know most readers are women! That’s why it’s so important to me and to our Founding Editors that the mission says “publishing and promoting”—we aren’t really getting anywhere if we’re just “publishing.” We need to make sure that we’re providing as many readers as possible the opportunity to encounter the diverse voices our catalog has to offer. The most urgent part of our mission is getting these books into the hands of readers.

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Gina Abelkop:  Birdsof Lace began in 2005 when I was lucky enough be in Amy Mattison’s feminist poetry class in which I was getting to read really smart, weird, funny, brutal and beautiful poems several times a week. It felt urgent, to make that kind of work available to whoever on earth may be able to find their way to it, needing it or wanting it or just fantasizing that it existed. Participating in the printing of literature that played, in some way, in the realm of fantasy. Work that does funny things to the brain, makes it behave differently, sometimes in tiny insistent ways and sometimes like a flower-rotted mallet to the head. The mission has remained the same: to print work by women and queers that drags your guts merrily through the sea, gives you flowers/takes them away, is generally playful and sly, generative. Birds of Lace likes vile, un-funny and thoughtful humor.

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Lisa Marie Basile:  PatasolaPress began in early 2011 because I wanted to promote writing about identity. I knew female writers who deserved to be published, and I felt moved to take part in my small way. It had always been on my mind—I knew I wanted to promote women in the arts. When I saw VIDA’s Count, I wasn’t surprised, but I was saddened and angered. The urgency was also to create a place for writers to explore identity and location. I believe gender falls into these genres as well. We’re interested in publishing work that takes a deeper look at what it means to be who we are. We definitely want to publish emerging female poets as well. In traveling, I met so many women who were emerging poets and writers in the 2010-2011 years while starting my MFA at The New School, and when I met Rae Bryant, whose voice is, to me, feminist, unique and tremendously beautiful, I knew I wanted to start with publishing her book of short stories.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith:  When I founded the press in 2000, there weren't nearly as many journals/presses on the internet as there are today, and very few of them focused on women-centric writing.  What I wanted to do with Sundress was to create a space that wasn't specifically “by women, for women,” but rather a press that had what I considered a feminine aesthetic.  Poetry that wasn't obsessed with solely the clever, but rather a mix of head and heart.  It was early 2000, and the writing world was still having a little bit of a Language Poetry hangover, and I felt that much of the poetry that I was reading seemed more interested in a Lynchian motif of cool rather than writing that made you hurt or wonder or spark.  I wanted Sundress to do something like that. 

I think someone founds something literary (press, journal, anthology, etc etc), it's ultimately about creating a place that would publish their own stuff.  You don't edit an anthology of fairy tale poems if you don't have some Cinderella sonnets somewhere in your closet.  So maybe in some ways, I wanted a press like me. 

Now, we still want those same things, but we also revel in publishing first books, publishing books by authors you don't know yet, by poets who are disenfranchised in some way, whether that's social class, gender, age, education, region, etc.  Those books that book contests forgot.

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T.A. Noonan: I can’t speak to the early days of Sundress, but having been a part of the press (in one form or another) since 2006, I’ve seen the effort Sundress has made to publish and promote female writers. Like Kristy, Erin and I both found ourselves deeply invested in feminist and gender issues, writing by women, and the prioritization of male authors over female. The press, therefore, became a way for us to combat that imbalance. A lot of this work takes place in Stirring, the flagship journal of Sundress, and Kristy’s wicked alice. I think as we’ve gotten older (one hopes that means wiser and smarter, too) and technology has made it easier to publish more excellent work in print and online, we’ve had tremendous opportunity to do the work of righting the balance. Of course, that means a greater responsibility; the urgency is there because there are so few excuses.

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Kristina Marie Darling:  I started Noctuary Press in the fall of 2012, and was definitely inspired by some of the other presses that are represented at the Women Publishers' Roundtable.  I imagined Noctuary as keeping a record of, and bringing visibility to, women's writing that takes place at the periphery of existing genre categories.  So much of the time, writing that's not easily categorized as "poetry," "fiction," or "nonfiction" is excluded from public discourse, and more often than not, the writing that's excluded is women's writing.   I wanted to offer a tangible public space for innovative women to work across genre categories, but also to interrogate these notions of genre, and to explore the gender politics inherent in these genre categories.  For me, this mission seemed especially urgent because there are so many presses publishing cross-genre work, yet much of this work is merely rebellious, and doesn't engage with the notion of genre in a meaningful way.  With that in mind, I saw Noctuary Press as filling a gap within the existing small press landscape. 

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Please check back for the next installment, which will include prizes, vispo, and fairy tell retellings...