Index for Continuance Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Join us for a raw one as we respond in the moment to some real-time small press world-historical events (the end of SPD). With minimum filtration and maximum range, it’s an occasion to revisit one of our all-time favorite recurring topics in particular depth: Distribution. To us, distribution—the way a book gets from publisher to reader—exemplifies the whole matrix of logistics, politics, and aesthetics coupled with all the material considerations, problems, and choices that define the work of small press publishing. And it’s not just “small” presses that are affected by basic distro realities. These under-examined process nuts and business bolts dictate which books sit on shelves or don’t, what shows up in an e-commerce storefront or doesn’t, what a reader will find in a search or won’t, what can be cataloged and can’t; in other words, what literature gets to exist.

Come for a post-mortem on the dissolution of the US’s largest distributor of small press books, stay for a primer on small press distribution (the practice), admin, and biz essentials; a reading of what this moment means for literature and literary culture in the United States, and the role of small presses in the formation of national literature; SPD, Ingram, the Big Five, Follett; old friends, new enemies, revenge buys, reliable joys; archives, ecologies, recycling, red weddings, surgery theaters, slaughters, prizes, sales, scales, readers, breaks, poems.

If you’ve ever read a small press book, we love you.

We finally sit down with Caryl Pagel (director of the CSU Poetry Center) and talk about her other job as publisher of Rescue Press. Caryl sheds light on the idea of “generative publishing” and on her approach to editing as a dynamic, open-ended process, a site of relation and the possibilities of form. We hear about starting a press maybe because you have a coupon at Kinko’s, and the contributions of Rescue’s whole Midwestern team: Daniel Khalastchi, Sevy Perez, and Alyssa Perry, as well as IforC’s own Hilary Plum and “the other Zach” (Zach Savich). Along the way we explore how to be both professional and a person and how professionalism may need both at once.  

A few of the Rescue Press books mentioned: Marc Rahe’s The Smaller Half, Shane McCrae’s In Canaan, Anne Germanacos’s Tribute, Caren Beilin’s SPAIN, Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom. Also Zach Savich’s Events Film Cannot Withstand and Diving Makes the Water Deep. 

Caryl’s recent books are Free Clean Fill Dirt (poetry) and Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays). Read a great new essay on Lorine Niedecker and Lake Superior here.

In this ep we got to sit down with Ali Black, who inspires us (and many people) as a poet, writer, educator, and administrator from Cleveland. We talk to Ali about her new writing program for youth, “The Most Promising,” her 25 years of nonprofit work, taking young people seriously, the craft of organization, the role of honesty in collaboration, specifying community, the relationship between poetry and social media, and her deep love of Cleveland. Ali shares some great news about co-founding a new organization, reflects on her longtime collaboration with artist Donald Black, Jr., and talks about using her work to bring attention to her city. Along the way we also talk about reimagining the city on bikes in a poetry ride out, Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference, Russell Atkins’s World’d Too Much, China Miéville’s The City & The City, and Taylor Byas’s I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times.
Find Ali’s poetry collection If It Heals At All from Jacar Press here! And you’ll want to read her essays “Queen of All Spaces” and “Lessons Learned.”

Here we go with comics artists, educators, and publishers Daryl Seitchik and Dan Nott, founders and operators of Parsifal Press, a comic and graphic text imprint based in White River Junction, Vermont. Our discussion centers on independent comics publishing, where we examine its prevailing attitudes, aesthetics, and practicalities with curiosity about whether they differ from their counterparts in the world of text-based small press literary publication (spoiler: they do!). Dan and Daryl help us survey the scene of contemporary alternative comics/x alongside the rise of Big Five and mainstream interest in the so-called graphic novel. We interrogate ideas about literariness, self-publishing, and professionalization coupled to organizational breads and business butters like printing and distribution. This comparative approach proves highly illuminating, and enables us to think together about what writing is, what makes literature literary, and lessons we can all take from the time-honored traditions of transgression, foolishness, profit aversion, and DIY culture-making across genres and forms.

Some alphabet at the outset: artists’ books, The Center for Cartoon Studies, Dan’s Hidden Systems (Random House Graphic), Daryl’s Now and Other Dreams (Fieldmouse Press), Diamond Comics Distribution, Fantagraphics, Hilma Af Klimt, Kit Anderson’s Ignatz Award-nominated Weeds (Parsifal Press), Lynda Barry, Renee Gladman, zines.

We gotta say, this episode is really useful for anyone who wants to learn about publicity and marketing outside the Big Five (or even inside the Big Five for that matter). We talk to Jeremy Wang-Iverson of Vesto PR and Samara Rafert of the Ohio State University Press, who shed light on both the grunt work and the big uplifting moments of book publicity and marketing. We go pretty hard on metadata and keywords and we honor the extraordinary patience that publicity work demands. So much effort goes into any book ever getting “discovered,” and in this ep we’re glimpsing behind that curtain. Learn about “earned media,” blurbs, comps, the shrinking of book review venues that has changed everything, emailing (as always), the long burn of good writing, and how to publicize aesthetically, politically, formally, intellectually challenging work. This conversation includes lots of technical and industry insight, which means it’s also super relevant to the political work of publishing and how it makes culture and slips urgent ideas and art into big media settings. 

Some things that get mentioned: Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave, Hilary’s and Lucy Biederman’s thoughts on Elizabeth Koch (in Fence here and here), and articles on some problems with blurb culture in Esquire and The Atlantic.

In this episode we talk with Janaka Stucky and Carrie Olivia Adams: poets, editors, and founders of Black Ocean, an independent publisher based in Boston and Chicago. We inquire about the press’s early success and how they manage to keep such lasting power under the tenuous conditions of the indie book market, sustaining multi-title relationships with authors and making moves that include a recent merger with fellow small press Not A Cult to form the publishing collaborative Chapter House. Janaka and Carrie help with language to articulate the values of their entrepreneurial, mission-driven organization as we gloss the nonprofit-industrial complex, distro headaches, and good old indie hustle. If you ever wondered how to start a small press and then keep it running for 18 good years, this one’s for you. Deadlines and a spiritual practice can help, but be warned: you have to blow up your life.

Some Black Ocean writers who come up in our conversation include Joe Hall, Hussain Ahmed, Anaïs Duplan, Zachary Schomburg, Elisa Gabbert, and you should probably just check out the whole catalog along with Janaka and Carrie’s own books published by Third Man and Tolsun most recently.