What I hope(d) to do through The Operating System platform is to aggregate and disseminate critically valuable resources that can amplify and assist creative individuals and organizations in their own process of evolution. This is why we’re called “The Operating System”: because we’re literally inspired by systems of social, cultural, bodily, institutional, network (etc.) operating, and we’re constantly searching for ways of improving those systems, for the good of all of us.
We like works that engage in some level of strategic play with regards to structure and language; we like writing that inhabits its own textual body with weight and force; we like autopsy reports, 17th century maps, Calvino, and poker bluffs. We’ll read anything that stinks of earth.
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.
Part of what we love about editing the journal and the press is that we get to read writing from so many writers who we may never have known about had they not submitted work to the reading period. That’s part of our mission—the esteemed fringes, the unguarded egresses. We try, in each chapbook series and each issue of the journal, to balance both genre of work and writer identity in many ways, so this balancing also undergirds our aim.
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 started out of a framepack & computer screen tight-roping language, trying to figure out what can’t be said & how to say it. I guess the ramble can be summed up with—narcissism leading to boredom leading to community leading to fulfillment.
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.
We place a large emphasis on experimentation and what we mean by that is we value writing that is more art than entertainment. While plot is always important, we are very invested in language, symbolism, and exploring the taboo. We appreciate the unfamiliar and we appreciate writing that makes us work towards an understanding. We like metafiction, poetry-like prose, and works that test different forms and platforms. Our mission is to have a catalog full of work that speaks to large Truths in new and unexpected ways.
The press arose from our founding editors’ observation that the publishing world lacked explicitly inclusive feminist presses. There were (and are!) many excellent presses promoting women and LGBTQ writers; GGP’s contribution to the field was meant to be an explicit invitation to feminists of every gender and sexuality to consider (and/or challenge) what constitutes feminist work.
But implicit in that notion of “list-recognition” is the kind of on-the-ground work all editors are responsible for doing in terms of seeking—and really seeking—real diversity in their publications’ pages. And, strange as it sounds at the dawn of 2017, that also means breaking down the hierarchy between print/online poetry, academia/alt-ac poets, etc.
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.
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.
Our mission is to reduce racism, sexism, phobia, inequality, and ignorance by publishing impressive work from a diverse group of people, hopefully in an entertaining way but without shying away from topics that may be uncomfortable. We also want to improve the business of publishing. This mission seems even more important today.