It’s hard to find a place if you don’t fit into those categories. Part of this is that small press publishing is generally unpaid or underpaid. To ask an already marginalized person to take on that type of unpaid labor is difficult, and it creates this cycle.
Image Credit: Ally Sobola My son wears the word “visible,” tattooed in Times Roman, on his left arm. The tattoo was a present from me for his 18th birthday. A…
Image Credit: Daiga Ellaby Before we met in person, we talked on the telephone, matching alto timbres warm in our ears. This was decades before you could spit in a…
It’s sort of a marriage of my beloved zine culture and the indie press world. Zines are a huge influence on my life, I thought I invented them when I put out my first “Question Authority” zine in high school. I am always inventing things that already exist.
Andrew Byrds: Right off the bat, with the title of the collection itself and with one of the first few poems, you say, “I don’t write about race. I write…
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.
glo is influenced by emo, cowboys, nature pix, racing, wrestling, critters, dirt, and water. aesthetically we are chaotic good. we want to bring really drippy/sensitive/empathic art to the world—we’re hyperpersonal.
Dear _______, I started reading forever ago. I’m not interested in the why, my longing for words almost aquatic—tangled in me like swamp root. Instead, I’m trying to write a…
By Logan February A name is something given, passed like a note that was never meant to be read because the receiver already knows what it says. But I…
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.
In the summer before my third year of graduate school I drive 767 miles from Wilmington, North Carolina to Northampton, Massachusetts to visit my friend J—. I leave at 4:45…
It’s one thing—an important, vital thing—to read stories from other lives and get to know them, and it’s another—also vital thing—to read stories about experiences and emotions and situations you or your friends have lived, to feel those things as deeply as it can be felt because you are linked to them.
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.