diy

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.

VA is more interested in writers who create impressionable images with their words. So, rather than try and break into a market to which we don’t relate, we’re creating our own and shoving it in people’s faces everywhere we can from house parties to barroom readings to your more predictable bookstore settings.

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.

The birds in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights are an influence. 0 to 9 is an influence. Birds, LLC is an influence. Fuck You is an influence. Getting kicked out of many bars and clubs in New York in the late 90s is an influence. [out of nothing] is an influence. Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters are an influence. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love is an influence. The joy on my children’s faces as they dance to a Flo Rida song is an influence. d.a. levy is an influence. “Not Knowing” is an influence. Being in a grindcore band when I was 14 is an influence. The video for “Genius of Love” is an influence. You are an influence, as are all of our beautiful friends.

We are as delighted to publish a single sentence as we are in publishing a novel-length work. What matters is language, playfulness, openness to the encounter, the way it creates a space that’s very much its own. In this way we envision the process of bookmaking as creating a physical space for the words, where the book is not just a repository or vehicle for these words but is considered just as essential to the work. The materials at hand (whatever we can afford), the printing process, and the text itself are the major influence on the aesthetic of our projects.

We have just been working with the bass player Jørn Stubberud (also known as “Necrobutcher”) of a legendary Norwegian Black Metal band called Mayhem. He wrote an illustrated autobiography and we are his English publishers. The book is called “The Death Archives: 1984-94.” It is very dear to us.

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.

Pelekinesis has deep roots in the Southern California DIY art and music scene, with connections to music labels like Shrimper and the underground zine culture. Literary influences stretch back to experimental productions like Aspen Magazine and on up through Mondo 2000, with an eye on independent presses and small publishing houses. The Design of Books by Adrian Wilson and The Book by Douglas C. McMurtrie have been a constant source of inspiration, as have local bookstores and libraries. The presence of mass media imagery has been a great influence in many ways and the rise of technological developments that allow for high quality manufacturing on a small scale has provided the impetus for further exploration.

Website Submission Guidelines Interview with Joshua Young, Founder & Editor; Abigail Zimmer, Poetry Editor; and Ian Denning, Prose Editor How did The Lettered Streets Press start? Joshua: My father and I wanted…

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…

Guillotine is basically just me! I work with a designer, who sets up the interiors and designs the covers, and I do everything else from editing pieces to printing covers to hand-sewing 350 chapbooks at a time to stuffing envelopes. My influences are all over the place; I’m obviously influenced by a long time spent in punk and DIY and zine-making communities in terms of how I run the press and put together the chapbooks—the covers are letterpressed, the chapbooks are handbound, I don’t do (or have plans to do) ebooks.

I will shut Hyacinth Girl Press down before I charge a reading fee. If someone wants to support my press, I ask that they purchase a chapbook and I am incredibly excited and grateful for every order I receive. If someone cannot or does not choose to support my press, I do not begrudge them.

My press will never be one that sponsors AWP (though that’s for more reasons than money related ones), it will never be a press that awards a $5,000 chapbook prize or gives a 2,000 copy print run (though we do give chapbooks print runs and reprints—we are not print on demand). But I make no airs about any of that. I will love your chapbook and I will try to do right by it and you so long as you (the writer) are a decent human/otherwise creature to work with. I will send out review copies and I will wrestle with university bookstores and I will give myself callouses to put your chapbooks together and I will never, never, never ask you for money.

So, we have been able to create our own aesthetic—something a little more laid-back, with a vibe closer to, “this is something we’re passionate about that’s also fun as hell,” and less, “this is a very serious business that can only publish from a certain list of writers or we’ll lose all our precious cool factor.” We’re not super obsessed with being perceived as anything other than two Stevie Nicks-wannabes who also like to read good stuff.

We think poets as such should be lousier business people on the whole, kind of like those politicians who mine the family fortune on a pipe dream (but not rich, not politicians). The least exciting presses are typically the ones who’ve sorted the market part out without breaking a sweat, and in most cases it takes a special effort or an accident to remain vital once you can afford an employee. It’s not just that we think you should be willing to lose money with your poetry press (which, in general, we do): we think your press should be a refusal of professionalization, at least if the work you publish rejects same (& if it doesn’t, we probably have very little interest).