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.
Editor’s note: This column is part of a series called Name Tags, about issues related to names and naming. You can find the original Call for Submissions here. Art by…
In general, we’re hoping the publishing world becomes less stuffy, more about sharing ideas and work and just having fun. Not everything has to be so “serious,” in that the institutionalized aspect of it is so off putting and snobbish and gatekeeping at times. Most of all, we want more experimentation all around.
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.