queer

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.

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.

[art by Kristen Stone] Hello! My Name Is Maybe Henry Milks, aka/fka Megan Milks, for now. I am pleased to introduce you to Name Tags, a new column devoted to…

So, poets who decide to go with Glass aren’t going to see their books on Amazon or in SPD. But they will have an editor who has selected their book because he loves it and thinks people need to read it. So, they will have a publisher that will champion their work for as long as it takes to get their book in people’s hands. And they will have an editor who will do everything possible to create a book that they are in love with. And they will never have to send a penny to me (the poets selected for the Glass Chapbook Series get, in return for letting me publish their work, fifteen complimentary copies plus a copy of the other chapbooks published in their year. They can purchase additional copies at cost but they are not required to purchase any). This is the basic agreement I make with my authors: Glass isn’t big and fancy but Glass will put in 1,000,000% in order to make your book a success.

Especially in a country run by Donald Trump’s administration, I think poetry and art are more important now than ever. Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that artists need money to survive and to continue creating art. I hope that Ghost City can help poets do that.

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.

We have everything from political memoirs (on both sides of the spectrum) to a former spy memoir to queer fiction to a book on Studio 54 to a photo book of Washington DC’s famed punk club, The Safari Club. We’re always hoping to publish interesting books on sex work (preferably by sex workers), music, interesting fiction, and memoir. I always look for books by authors that reflect the city of Los Angeles. Writers of color, queer writers, writers that get overshadowed by the New York publishing scene. As much as we’re a publishing house that publishes writers from all over the country (and other countries), we definitely try to make sure we’re representing LA, since that’s our home.

I had been researching Black lesbian writers for a few years, and I came to realize that the challenges that the women faced in regards to publishing still existed (lack of diversity in publishing; the [false] notion that lesbian literature was now “mainstream;” lack of access to agents, editors, and other publishing professionals; and more than anything, the notion that our stories were somehow unworthy or had no literary merit). I decided right then that I could do something about that.