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!