Small Press

Instead of seeing the world in such dualistic terms as East versus West, North versus South, we envision the gathering of the most progressive elements everywhere, and the publication of such a gathering in our list.

“I strive to incorporate the practice of meditation throughout the entire publishing process. Poetry and books are patient, waiting to be created and read, so we attempt to work and grow like a small but well-tended garden. We search for flowers. We try to subvert the hurry of everything around us. I don’t have a car, so when it’s time to deliver chapbooks, I walk on a trail to the post office and look at trees as I follow the creek that runs through our town.”

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.

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.

So, poets who decide to go with Glass aren’t going to see their books on Amazon or in SPD. But they will have an editor who has selected their book because he loves it and thinks people need to read it. So, they will have a publisher that will champion their work for as long as it takes to get their book in people’s hands. And they will have an editor who will do everything possible to create a book that they are in love with. And they will never have to send a penny to me (the poets selected for the Glass Chapbook Series get, in return for letting me publish their work, fifteen complimentary copies plus a copy of the other chapbooks published in their year. They can purchase additional copies at cost but they are not required to purchase any). This is the basic agreement I make with my authors: Glass isn’t big and fancy but Glass will put in 1,000,000% in order to make your book a success.

Vikki is 38 and I’m 40 so we’re both the tail-end of Generation X and I think sometimes what we do harks back to a pre-internet time in the nineties. A time when the news cycle wasn’t so hectic and popular culture wouldn’t dream of featuring an article about a piece of technology like some new fitness app. Nor would there be hand-wringing think-pieces about this or that or any of the general “Capitalist Realist” hegemony of the present-day. It’s only a small hankering for the past. We’re not nostalgia-bores, we just want to keep a bit of that attitude alive whilst still checking our iPhones for email.

Website Submission Guidelines Interview with Kristy Bowen, Editor How did dancing girl press start? In 2001, I had started an online lit zine, wicked alice, which was publishing women-centered writing. A couple years…

At Black Radish, coping means taking responsibility for what we want to make happen. Each member of the collective contributes directly to the funding of the press through annual dues, as well as supplying sweat equity. Recently we have shifted to having a designer to do interior layout for us, though everything else is in-house. After paying for SPD’s services, we plow all sales back into the press to pay for printing, mailing, books fairs, conferences, and readings…

We love working with authors who are at the beginning of their journeys, and though we can’t afford to put their faces on the side of a bus or something, our hope is that working with us allows them to gain positive experience and eventually move on to bigger and better things. It seems thrilling to us to imagine where writers we’ve published will be 5 or 10 years from now, maybe teaching workshops or winning fancy awards or influencing culture in some way.

The name of the press is a little tongue in cheek. I’m well aware that small (micro? nano?) presses don’t always have a lot of staying power, and short books of experimental (innovative?) poetry and prose don’t necessarily have a lot of persistence. My initial idea of Persistent Editions was somewhat absurd and performative: “printing” in or on tangible, persistent media, such as stone, concrete, wood, etc. So in that case there would be some kind of literal persistence—meant to be a bulwark or maybe just a helpless contretemps against the inevitable flow of time, and the futility of trying to keep track of anything in the accelerating communication/media landscape. Persistent Editions was meant to be the opposite of Twitter—the text that you can’t move, that does not slide easily down a screen. While I love Twitter, and use it, I think there is a need for the opposite as well.

The idea of a set mission might rankle the three of us a little, despite our Olson-influenced name. But we do have goals—one of those, which is surely true of all small presses, is to participate in and encourage the growth of the poetry community. Another is to insist on the value of the “small” in small press. We value the handmade, the patience and attention to detail that the crafts of printing and sewing require. As objects, the aesthetic of our chapbooks lies happily between the DIY aesthetic of zines and the gorgeous history of book art and fine press. In content, we look for work that is formally experimental, but we try not to fall too firmly into one aesthetic niche. We don’t want everyone to write the same way! So some of our books will be austere or minimal, while others will be manic and exuberantly expressive.

From the start our focus has been poetry, primarily work that might be described as modernist, but far-flung and eclectic. Our sixty-odd books include British and Australian poets; translations from ancient Chinese, Greek, and Persian; innovative new work alongside lost modernist classics; the living and the dead. In this way we hope to find new paths to the present. Our mission is to present such work in finely made yet affordable editions.

So now we go about a more traditional way of raising money that seems to be working very well. These traditional methods included an online campaign and a direct mailing to donors and friends of the press. In the direct mailings we sent a letter informing people of who we are, what we do and how we plan on utilizing this funding. We told them how their donations would actually help worthy poets get a book published and into the world. Initially I had my doubts about how well this would work out based upon the cost of the program, however it was the most successful campaign we have ever had.

This is the thirty-sixth in Entropy’s small press interview series, where we ask editors about their origins, their mission, and what it’s like to run a press. Find the other interviews from…