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.
I like that the chapbook is flimsy, cheap, and limitless. I like that the chapbook is easy, and that it comes with possibilities. You can read it in a single sitting, you can share it with your friends, you can keep in on your bookshelf forever, you can toss it in the recycling bin.
We like works that engage in some level of strategic play with regards to structure and language; we like writing that inhabits its own textual body with weight and force; we like autopsy reports, 17th century maps, Calvino, and poker bluffs. We’ll read anything that stinks of earth.
ND/SA publishes new poetry chapbook manuscripts by emerging, diverse New York City writers. We are generally excited by a unified text with a strong sense of voice and purpose and a startling use of beautiful, difficult language.
It’s simple really: I look for queer/trans writers who are making beautiful, powerful work. I love the weird, experimental, avant-garde work that is coming from the margins, and I want to center that work as best as I can. To tack down exactly what I’m after at Damaged Goods is something I haven’t done yet. I’m just publishing work that speaks the loudest to me.
We hope to continue publishing work that fuses, deconstructs, grafts, (re)imagines, connects, & disentangles the myths, customs, language, narratives, ideologies, apparatuses, & presuppositions of the contemporary milieu & moment. There’s so many incredible people making incredible art. We’re here to help bring it alive.
Part of what we love about editing the journal and the press is that we get to read writing from so many writers who we may never have known about had they not submitted work to the reading period. That’s part of our mission—the esteemed fringes, the unguarded egresses. We try, in each chapbook series and each issue of the journal, to balance both genre of work and writer identity in many ways, so this balancing also undergirds our aim.
We’re dedicated to cultivating innovative and unconventional work by both established and emerging writers that pushes the bounds of literary norms. Everything we publish is an extension of our own interests: we want writing that’s a little off, views the world a little askew. We really like self-aware work that operates within a genre, but at the same time pokes at the molding a little. The hard-to-classify.
My parting words for anyone interested in publishing books: always trust your gut; prepare to spend a lot of money and make none in return; assume that you will experience some major setbacks; accept that you will disappoint others despite your best efforts to please everyone. If you still want to publish books after taking all of this into consideration, you are doing it for the right reasons, and you’ll likely be thrilled, just as we are, to publish titles that deserve to be distributed the world over.
We started out of a framepack & computer screen tight-roping language, trying to figure out what can’t be said & how to say it. I guess the ramble can be summed up with—narcissism leading to boredom leading to community leading to fulfillment.