small press

Image Credit: Gellinger at Pixabay   In Kirsten Imani Kasai’s eerily beautiful novel The House of Erzulie, a diary and a packet of letters are found under the floorboards of…

In the early months of 2017, we were discussing how often writers of formal or experimental poetry in Canada had to go through a man to publish a chapbook of experimental literature. We wanted to provide a space for writers to publish experimental, formal, political, feminist, or genre-blurring poetry that wasn’t governed by a dude.

I wanted to find an approach that would encourage writers to promote their work while also creating an urgency for the reader. The answer was Disappearing Chapbooks. Collections with a shelf-life of 72hrs.

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.

I’m striving to reach milestones in contemporary Black lesbian writing by helping Black lesbian writers navigate the world of publishing—which marginalizes our contributions and stories.

I just didn’t have that kind of patience or will to wait. I just wanted to do. That need for immediacy and something new is something that I really instilled into Maudlin House. I wanted to created something was fresh and real.

With no literary publishing experience to speak of—just a love of reading and writing poems—Founding Editor Sid Miller (and associates) released the first issue of Burnside Review in 2004 in Portland, Oregon. Legend has it it was laid out in Word. It was. Things got better.

We hope to continue publishing work that fuses, deconstructs, grafts, (re)imagines, connects, & disentangles the myths, customs, language, narratives, ideologies, apparatuses, & presuppositions of the contemporary milieu & moment. There’s so many incredible people making incredible art. We’re here to help bring it alive.

I think Poets & Writers summed our aesthetic up perfectly when they described WILDNESS as a journal “that embraces the mysteries of the self and the outside world.” Our tastes run along two parallel paths: the internal and external savagery and peace of the lived life. We love to experience the calm of a studied life, but also the rawness and pain of a truth expressed.

Website Submission Guidelines Interview with Kristy Bowen, Editor How did dancing girl press start? In 2001, I had started an online lit zine, wicked alice, which was publishing women-centered writing. A couple years…

I basically started Scrambler because I have always like to read and write. In college I was influenced and read a lot about the history of publishing and especially how independent publishers such as Sylvia Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti started out. After I graduated from college and all that history of publishing stuff had sunk in for a few years, I decided that I wanted to somehow publish and edit something and that something has become Scrambler Books.

Today begins the first of a series of “Best of 2015” lists curated by the entire CCM-Entropy community. We don’t mean these lists to be definitive, complete, or authoritative, we…

Summer lives on! Enjoy our newest list of presses, lit mags, fellowships, and residencies to submit to over the next couple months. As always, email Small Press Editor Dennis James Sweeney if…

We wanted to find out what people actually want to pay for a book of poems. If it’s a book by their favorite author, maybe they would pay $15-$20 for a paperback, plus shipping. If it’s a poet they’ve never heard of, we have a free PDF excerpt of the book they can download from the website. Maybe they like the poems from the sample and pay $10 for the book. Maybe they don’t have $10 to throw down, so they spend $5. Maybe they spend a penny and we lose a few bucks on that copy, but there it goes out into the world, sitting on someone’s coffee table. To me, that’s fine, I chalk it up as a marketing expense. If everyone paid a penny we’d lose a lot of money, sure, but not everyone is. Actually, we’re finding people pay along a wide spectrum. The average price being paid right now, with Noah Eli Gordon’s campaign, is about $13 a book, including shipping. Some people have paid $25 for the book, which is surprising and wonderful, and a great number have paid $18, which will be the cost once the promotion ends.