avant-garde

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 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.

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’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.

Most of our books could be filed under ‘experimental’—we all know what that is supposed to mean, though I have issue with that appellation. We are particularly interested in work that’s standing firmly—be it nude in boots and shouting from puddles, or more ornately said in oceans of robes—in gender, sexual and social identity issues, Indigenous Australian literature, ecopoetics, archival poetics…though any work that uniquely and unabashedly uses language, idiom, shape and negative space would interest us.

Basically, I made something of mine and found it relatively easy to do, and so I made something by someone else. And then another thing. And then another thing. I was a little more outgoing (read also: loud) than many of my immediate peers, so had no problem utilizing that enthusiasm to promote some of their work on top of my own. I started organizing readings to help (in part) to promote the people I was publishing (The Factory Reading Series goes back to 1992) and even co-founded the ottawa small press book fair to help sell some of the books a number of us were starting to make around that time (twice a year since, founded in October 1994).

On a daily basis, we’re inspired and influenced by every other indie press around: it’s a lot of hard work to run a press—often thrilling, but frequently full of difficult and thankless tasks—and I admire everyone who is doing this, who is giving of themselves to help facilitate the continuation of independent literature, all the other editors and publishers working hard to bring new books out into the world.

The idea of bringing out the innovative, risk-taking work by women being turned down by editors at male-dominated presses grew, in part, out of the Coop experience. Virtually every literary press in the country in 1974 was run by men, one notable exception being Alice James Books, a feminist press formed on the east coast a year earlier.

Timeless, Infinite Light is an Oakland-based small press that publishes contemporary writing with a tendency toward the experimental, radical, and mystical. We are committed to promoting critical poetic work by emerging and established writers, and we prioritize authors whose identities are often excluded from the literary mainstream. We believe in the radical potential of collaborative, hybrid, and embodied writing, and promote work that resists structures of oppression, both in form and content.

Paul Ebenkamp’s first book, The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen (from Timeless, Infinite Light), is a buoyantly jagged mix of lavish verse and full-color, noised-out, handwritten visual poems. Paul Ebenkamp’s…

And the name obviously comes from “the dark wood” of Dante’s Inferno, but also from the notion that when whiskey is aging in commercial barrel houses, enough of it evaporates (called the “angel’s share”) to turn the bark of nearby trees (or actually the moss on the bark) black. It’s what revenuers looked for back in the day as a tell tale sign in hunting down illegal stills. I suppose that comes as close to anything in describing my aesthetic. That, and something Fred Moten said in one of our recent email exchanges: “poetry should be at least ten times more beautiful than that pig on Green Acres.”

My mission is to publish a mix of established poets and the first book of others. The press is now an official 501(c)(3) non-profit and will rely on donations and sales going forward.

I can answer that with a single acronym: POD (print on demand). It’s the most important force in publishing in my lifetime. It has inadvertently disrupted the corporate monopoly, leveled the playing field and democratized what was essentially a closed (and rigged) system. POD makes it possible for anyone to be a small press publisher and produce quality editions that can potentially reach a worldwide audience. It’s also environmentally friendly.

Those who oppose POD are sociopathic snobs and crypto-fascists. Around here, POD stands for Power of Democracy.

Our mission is to create a “record of what passes in the night.” We seek to document and make permanent writing by women that exists outside of conventional genre categories. More often than not, these kinds of texts, because they are not legible in the way that most would expect, are othered, excluded from publishing, and withheld from an appreciative audience. With that in mind, Noctuary Press is a kind of intervention into a publishing landscape that orbits around very conventional ideas about genre.