Small Press

While I can admire perfection, not only can I not achieve it, but it isn’t something I can engage with. The perfect poem or piece of art is on a pedestal. I am interested in text and art that rolls around in the dirt and plays.

It’s one thing—an important, vital thing—to read stories from other lives and get to know them, and it’s another—also vital thing—to read stories about experiences and emotions and situations you or your friends have lived, to feel those things as deeply as it can be felt because you are linked to them.

Education is key, and I don’t mean writing classes, I mean editors taking the time to not just tell an author, “Set up a Twitter account and a Facebook and promote your work,” but actually take the time to school them on how to use those platforms, and to give them greater assistance in doing events and interviews.

in my opinion, the small press gift economy is one that fosters good will within the community. we look to each other as our first readers, our first editors—with a sense of trust and generosity.

I just didn’t have that kind of patience or will to wait. I just wanted to do. That need for immediacy and something new is something that I really instilled into Maudlin House. I wanted to created something was fresh and real.

It’s important to me to be part of the literary community, and it’s important that my authors participate in the literary community. This isn’t just about do-gooding either: the literary community buys literary fiction.

VA is more interested in writers who create impressionable images with their words. So, rather than try and break into a market to which we don’t relate, we’re creating our own and shoving it in people’s faces everywhere we can from house parties to barroom readings to your more predictable bookstore settings.

I’d like to see a return to the traditional handsell of bookselling that was the mainstay of the likes of the afore-mentioned J. Laughlin. There is nothing more exciting and satisfyingly rewarding than publishing a good book and getting it into the hands of truly engaged, concerned and discerning readers, regardless of what format they choose.

I originally planned to publish a few books for a few local poets, but once I did a couple of titles, I fell in love with the whole process of reading, formatting, editing, designing, and publishing. Now, NBP has published over one hundred titles for poets across the United States, and we’re still going strong.

In general, we’re hoping the publishing world becomes less stuffy, more about sharing ideas and work and just having fun. Not everything has to be so “serious,” in that the institutionalized aspect of it is so off putting and snobbish and gatekeeping at times. Most of all, we want more experimentation all around.

Our indie punk / rock record label sensibility attracts creative, unique, wild and wooly individuals, each with something important to say about life and how we’re all muddling our way through it. While on different tracks, there’s certainly a common spirit. People notice this about the content we’re putting out there, and how we’re choosing to present it. We couldn’t do it without the writers. Obviously.

With no literary publishing experience to speak of—just a love of reading and writing poems—Founding Editor Sid Miller (and associates) released the first issue of Burnside Review in 2004 in Portland, Oregon. Legend has it it was laid out in Word. It was. Things got better.

Our latest release is Widowing by Janet McCann. She wrote a collection of poems commemorating the endearingly antagonistic and love-filled life shared for 50+ years with her husband until his death in ’16. We wanted to make a book that was an embodiment of separation, so we constructed one bound on both sides that you have to break down the middle and tear apart the pages to read.

What I hope(d) to do through The Operating System platform is to aggregate and disseminate critically valuable resources that can amplify and assist creative individuals and organizations in their own process of evolution. This is why we’re called “The Operating System”: because we’re literally inspired by systems of social, cultural, bodily, institutional, network (etc.) operating, and we’re constantly searching for ways of improving those systems, for the good of all of us.