avant-garde

Website Submission Guidelines Interview with Ken Hunt, Editor How did Spacecraft Press start? Spacecraft Press began in 2014, when I was having a conversation with derek beaulieu. We were talking…

I wanted to find an approach that would encourage writers to promote their work while also creating an urgency for the reader. The answer was Disappearing Chapbooks. Collections with a shelf-life of 72hrs.

Eric Westerlind and I both work in the service industry to support Fathom. Our printer, Eberhardt, is also run by an independent artisan, struggling month to month. The money’s made on our backs and the books are too. We ‘cope’ by gritting teeth, keeping the friends and writers we admire close, and believing in our mission to make and share the dire books. 

We’re not exempt just because we’re editors: if we’re going to ask for this type of work, we better be able to do this type of work. We have to know what it feels like to make it. It’s beyond us, but we’re not beyond it.

Tangerine’s mission is very simple: to search out authentic voices and publish them, be they dead or alive, new or lost and forgotten. Talent is everywhere it seems, there’s no shortage of that. But original work is the key, a certain way of seeing things. We’re not after book-shaped mirrors.

I decided to start an independent press in 2010, out of frustration really. I’d been working as a visual designer in some capacity for years but was never able to break into the book publishing industry. Eventually, in my mid-fifties, I realized that the only person who was going to hire an old man like me to design covers and page layouts was me.

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.