cross-genre

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’re interested in literature that is visionary—embracing or interrogating Mystery as it enacts a sense of ecstasy or otherworldly consciousness/experience. But I think that, in terms of aesthetics, there’s such a wide variety of ways to render that, and so many different topics or perspectives could lend themselves to that work. We are also interested in work that promotes interfaith and/or intercultural exchange.

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…

But I do have a somewhat old-fashioned sense of the slow-burn—lots of books have a long shelf life, and just because they’re not blockbusters right away, doesn’t mean they aren’t long-lasting, important, and live-giving works of timeless literature. In fact, I think ALL of 1913’s books are exactly that!

Running 1913 for the past 10 years as a mostly solo act—with design help from my partner Ben Doller—has definitely shown me my limits in extreme detail. Like, maybe I’m just not good at marketing and selling (true—I’m self-banned from 1913’s AWP book table because I give all the books away and am socially anxious). So I’ve enlisted the help of a new team of assistants and interns, who will take 1913 into the future as of this summer, and I think this might be the energy boost we need. Working on a press is really such a great way to engage in literary community, especially when you’re coming up as a writer. But after 10+ years, I’m exhausted…and I really dislove getting rude emails and dealing with the many gripes and snipes that come in regularly, ugh, so it’s good to be passing the matchstick.

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…

Letter Machine Editions started as a conversation between Noah Eli Gordon and me in Denver. We were sitting at the bar at City O City, and we were talking about the great small presses that our friends run—Octopus Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Action Books—and others. Then we started discussing what we’d publish if we ran a press. Before the end of the night that “if” became a “when,” I think—and then it was just a matter of time and energy and money and follow-through.