Index for Continuance

Index for Continuance
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Index for Continuance is a podcast about small press publishing, politics, & practice. Hosted by Hilary Plum & Zach Peckham. Index for Continuance celebrates the book as a technology for collaboration, hope, and radical engagement. We host conversations with editors, writers, publishers, critics, booksellers, and organizers involved in independent, small press, DIY, and community literary work. We hope to build an archive of grassroots knowledge that serves the future of publishing. Join us to share old and new ways to make small, free culture in a big-tech, climate-destabilized world. Thanks to Silk Duck for the use of our theme song, “Frustration.”

  1. 1d ago

    Episode 30: Danny Caine - “Fight the Real Enemy: On Data Centers and Book Bans”

    We talk with writer, bookseller, podcaster, and activist Danny Caine about data centers, book bans, and the recent local and national waves of organizing against them. Danny is a pal from Cleveland (now based in Columbus) and steadfast friend of the show, whose writing on Amazon and bookselling in the age of the algo has long figured into our syllabi and conversations, so it’s about time. Occasioned by his recent podcast series The Data Centers Are Coming, hosted through the Institute for Self-Reliance, and his latest work of nonfiction How to Defend Books and Why, just released in June 2026 from Microcosm Publishing, we cover the ways these issues and resistances to them are fundamentally, ideologically entwined via the dubious value and obvious cost of GenAI, declining literacy and surging bookbans, mounting anti-humanism and assaults on academic freedom.  To borrow a rhetorical device: How big money and big tech undermine democracy and what we can do about it; How to build a broad coalition, or How to talk to your neighbors, or How to go to the bar; How anti-intellectualism and enshittification enable the rise of fascism; How to fight the real enemy (s/o Sinead); How not to engage with nihilist political opps; How small press publishing matters; How bookstores matter; How libraries matter; How to embrace difficulty; How to be cool. And why. We talk about book ban attacks on the graphic novel Mausby Art Spiegelman. In episode 18, Joe Hall thoroughly documents the problems of PEN America's response to the Gaza genocide, if you'd like to follow up on this episode's discussion. Hall also has a new essay on that here. More here on South Florida State College professor Vinita Prabhakar getting fired for teaching an Ottessa Moshfegh story. We mention Muhlenberg College's firing of tenured professor Maura Finkelstein—more here from The Intercept. Finally, this episode is brought to you by the Social Room (who have not given us money but without whom we’d be spiritually destitute), a bar in Cleveland where we hope you are now. You could pick up Danny’s latest chapbook Jewish American Dream and read it there. Maybe you’ll make a friend.

  2. Aug 10

    Episode 29: Nick Sturm - “Small Press Histories, or The Productivity of Friction”

    We’re joined by the literary scholar, educator, and poet Nick Sturm for a pretty incredible conversation on small press historiography, alternative/oppositional publishing practices, and the radical potential of small press pedagogy. Nick guides us through periods of post-World War II small press history, from the New York School to Newt Gingrich and beyond, getting into the heterogeneity of “small press,” its institutions and anti-institutionalisms, its professionalization wars, its ongoing productive frictions, what we can learn from the past, and what work happens beyond the horizon of the canonical. We talk about success vs. legibility, growing larger vs. staying smaller for longer, the difference between “do it yourself” and “do it now.” We think about what it could mean to embrace an “organizational fervor” and to un-invisibilize administrative work. Many things get mentioned including Annulet magazine (check out episode 25 for our interview with Alicia Wright), the New Orleans Poetry Festival, and George’s, which is a bar in Iowa City where we hope you are right now. Look out for Nick’s book Publishing the New York School: Small Press Communities and American Poetry, forthcoming in 2027 from Columbia University Press. The mysterious book Nick and Zach talk about without ever naming is Green Isle in the Sea: An Informal History of the Alternative Press, 1960–85, ed. Diane Kruchkow and Curt Johnson.

  3. Jul 9

    Episode 28: Live From Cleveland with Two Dollar Radio

    On September 12, 2025 we sat down with Eric Obenauf, founder and Editorial Director of Columbus-based indie press (and bookstore and vegan café and bar) Two Dollar Radio to talk about publishing. Recorded live at the Cleveland Public Library during Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference, our conversation spanned the history and guiding spirit of the beloved Ohio imprint, their steadfast commitment to Midwesternness, their new relationship with Seven Stories, and how they keep surviving. We talked acquisitions, distro deals, and the longstanding relationship between literary production and foodservice, with all our usual curiosity about the time, space, money, and energy involved in sustainably publishing books and also running a business with your closest friends and family for twenty years. Then we lost the recording. Or thought we did. Until a couple of weeks ago when we found the file just sitting in a weird part of our shared drive. Obviously we are professionals and know what we are doing. So here it is. Cellar-aged. Our first and only live episode. Thanks to Danny Caine for setting up this conversation.

  4. Jul 3

    Episode 27: The Epstein Episode

    What kind of poetry did Jeffrey Epstein support? In this ep (we’re back!) we explore Elisa New’s Poetry in America, a PBS TV series (2018–2025) and suite of educational programs that received funding and other support from Jeffrey Epstein. New, a scholar of American literature, is married to Larry Summers and exchanged a number of emails with Epstein that you can find over at jmail.world. We dive into this dark material and think through literature’s role in Epstein’s circles—literature used as currency, luxury, alibi, and pre-AI AI. We get into the problems of higher ed and the problems of arts funding, poetry, and feminized labor. For your sake we did the hard work of watching this pretty hard-to-watch show and we came out with some thoughts about canonicity, power, possession, and poetry in its elite and populist modes. Thanks to a bunch of sources including Julie K. Brown’s reporting in the Miami Herald and her highly recommended book Perversion of Justice; Drop Site News; the Harvard Crimson (here and here). The email you hear at the opening can be found here. Oh and one point we’re talking about an episode on Emily Dickinson—this actually features Marie Howe not Susan Howe. A few more sources to credit: Susan D’Agostino, “Leon Botstein’s Immoral Accounting,” Chronicle of Higher Ed, June 5, 2026. https://www.chronicle.com/article/leon-botsteins-amoral-accounting The Jewish Currents podcast “On the Nose” episode featuring Ryan Grim and Noah Kulwin, Nov. 28 2025, https://jewishcurrents.org/on-jeffrey-epstein Jenifer B. McKim, “PBS Cuts Ties with TV Program amid Probe of Harvard Host and Jeffrey Epstein,” GBH News, Dec. 10, 2025. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-12-10/pbs-cuts-ties-with-tv-program-amid-probe-of-harvard-host-and-jeffrey-epstein Tricia L. Nadolny and Deirdre Fernandes, “After Epstein Revelations, Arizona State University Parts Ways with Elisa New, Harvard Professor and Larry Summers’ Wife,” Boston Globe, Dec. 18, 2025, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/18/metro/epstein-summers-harvard-asu-poetry/

  5. 09/22/2025

    Episode 26: Roy Scranton - “Publishing at the End of the World (No New Kaiju)”

    Join us for a heartening discussion of Where It’s All Going and Why There’s Not A Lot of Good Reason to Believe It’s Going to Turn Out Well. Sounds like another publishing conversation, right? Close, but this one’s about the actual end of the world. Which is also publishing, turns out. Our guest is friend of the pod and beloved apocalypse harbinger Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative, whose writing you may have encountered in the novels War Porn and I Heart Oklahoma!, such nonfiction books as Learning to Die In The Anthropocene and We’re Doomed, Now What?, and various journals and magazines. This ep is occasioned by Roy’s latest book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, just out in August 2025 from Stanford University Press, which we find to be a true fount of 21st-century publishing inspo. In the book, Roy takes our magical thinking about ecological collapse and what we think we can do about it to task, questioning progress narratives and arguing for realistic responses in the tradition of Ethical Pessimism. Ethical? Pessimism? Sounds like small press publishing to us! Why make books? Why make books at the end of the world? Along the way: suffering, time, attention, hope, nihilism, antagonism, the Serenity Prayer, Mary Shelley’s dad, AI, parasites, trolls, Michael Mann, Joseph Tainter, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books (s/o ep. 9), Matvei Yankelevich (s/o ep. 1), Charles Bukowski and Modest Mouse, crises in our national political discourse and in higher ed, publishing's carbon footprints, three adults trying to figure out what a Wojak is, and other stuff that’s decidedly not for everyone. Buckle up, doomers.

  6. 09/08/2025

    Episode 25: Alicia Wright - “The Ecstatic State of Making the Point”

    Join us as we talk to literary hero and former camp counselor Alicia Wright, editor of the magazine Annulet and Annulet Editions, and author of the just-released poetry collection You’re Called by the Same Sound, out on Third Hand Books. Annulet is a vital site for new poetry, poetics, and criticism that’s structured to be inclusive, public-facing, and non-hierarchical. In this conversation we discuss the book review as a public utility, nourishing and supporting the wildness of the mind, the value of rigor and how to cultivate it outside institutional structures, valuing your time and work, telling the difference between work and fun. Alicia illuminates the editorial ethos that informs Annulet, reflects on the quiet and independent work of editing, and on forms of dialogue and particularity. Also we try to figure out which sports metaphors could actually help us. Thanks as well to the intrepid contributing editors of Annulet. Works/writers/situations mentioned include The Explicator (dad of “the annulet”), Denver Quarterly,the Language poets, Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville, Mahmoud Darwish, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, the rise of AI, and how reviews should resist being data. Check out Annulet’s Critical Circle Workshop here and the Linkages Lectures here.

  7. 07/25/2025

    Episode 24: Callie Garnett - “There’s a Cheerleader Inside of Me”

    We spend a killer ep. 24 with Callie Garnett, poet and editorial director of fiction and memoir at Bloomsbury Publishing. (FYI Callie acquired and edited Hilary’s 2025 novel State Champ.) Callie pulls back the curtain on acquisitions at a thriving mid-sized independent, sharing some actual sales points, talking comps and their pitfalls, how publishing is a business of consensus and “getting people onboard,” pitch meetings and “speak[ing] the language of the money people,” and what it’s like answering 300 emails a day. Tons of inside knowledge gets generously shared and we also dive deep on reading itself and the modes in which we are, aren’t, should, and maybe shouldn’t be doing it. We talk sales tracks and “frontloading” in fiction, grad school vs. everything else, publishing as political work, poetry in the attention economy, and the slow collapse of the institutions of the humanities. A lot gets mentioned including the great books Outlawed by Anna North, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin (published by Dorothy, check out Index for Continuance ep. 2), and A Field of Telephones by Zach Savich (published by 53rd State Press, see ep. 19). Pick up Callie’s collection Wings in Time here. The Song Cave is edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Hilary gets mad again about how few of you have read Christian TeBordo’s Toughlahoma but hey it’s never too late.

  8. 06/19/2025

    Episode 23: Youssef Rakha - “Genre, Freedom, and Political Despair”

    In this ep Hilary talks to the writer and editor Youssef Rakha, whose novel The Dissenters is just out this spring from Graywolf. The Dissenters is Youssef’s first novel to be written in English—you may know his previous The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, translated by Paul Starkey (and which Hilary edited back in the day), and The Crocodiles, translated by Robin Moger. Shoutout to those two translators. And/or his long essay on Arab porn and his book-length essay on The Mummy. We talk about the beloved bilingual English/Arabic magazine The Sultan’s Seal—archived here—which Youssef founded and edited, and how literary work might create “less transactional communities.” We dive into the new novel and Youssef’s interest in the epistolary form and narrating nonlinearly as a means to better represent history. We talk about moving between languages, the freedom of writing a novel in English without paying attention to the industry in English, Youssef’s generational beginnings as a writer “in the twilight zone between state control and neoliberalism,” his first trip to the US, and addressing Westerners amid the genocide in Gaza. Among the writers mentioned are Arwa Salih, whose work The Stillborn is available in English, translated by Samah Selim. Finally and not finally, we consider what may be hopeful about despair. Bonus: Here’s a lovely long essay on Youssef’s work in English by the writer Madeline Beach Carey, published in Full Stop. And a heads up: The Dissenters discusses suicide and so does this episode.

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About

Index for Continuance is a podcast about small press publishing, politics, & practice. Hosted by Hilary Plum & Zach Peckham. Index for Continuance celebrates the book as a technology for collaboration, hope, and radical engagement. We host conversations with editors, writers, publishers, critics, booksellers, and organizers involved in independent, small press, DIY, and community literary work. We hope to build an archive of grassroots knowledge that serves the future of publishing. Join us to share old and new ways to make small, free culture in a big-tech, climate-destabilized world. Thanks to Silk Duck for the use of our theme song, “Frustration.”

Information

  • Creator
    Index for Continuance
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    30
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Index for Continuance
  • Show Website
    Index for Continuance

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