hybrid

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.

We hand-bind all of our books. The covers for our journals are made from 6-packs of local breweries. We’ll gather friends to help us, buy some beer and pizza, and spend a lot of time cutting boxes, and sewing our books.

Website Submission Guidelines Interview with Chelsea Tadeyeske, Founder and Editor-in-Chief How did pitymilk start? In late 2012, I finally decided to trust that I knew how to make things pretty…

We’re pleased to bring you the newest installment of the Where to Submit list, headlined by a photo from Pelle Cass’s “Selected People” series. Cass writes: This work both orders the…

Our influences include: punk music, sustainable agriculture, Final Fantasy VII, our two cats, our friends, drinking in backyards, pizza / bookmaking parties, etc. 

Education is key, and I don’t mean writing classes, I mean editors taking the time to not just tell an author, “Set up a Twitter account and a Facebook and promote your work,” but actually take the time to school them on how to use those platforms, and to give them greater assistance in doing events and interviews.

It’s important to me to be part of the literary community, and it’s important that my authors participate in the literary community. This isn’t just about do-gooding either: the literary community buys literary fiction.

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.