Index for Continuance

Index for Continuance

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. ٢٥ يوليو

    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.

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  2. ١٩ يونيو

    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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  3. ٢٣ مارس

    Episode 22: Kirsty Dunlop & Maria Sledmere - “Small Presses Are Infrastructure”

    Join us for a cool milestone in our first-ever transatlantic episode. We interview Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, Glasgow-based post-internet poetics prophets and editors of the heroic UK online and IRL publisher SPAM Zine & Press. The origins of this convo are in ZP’s infatuation with UK pamphlet culture, where, one day, he noticed that the unit of literary-cultural production we usually refer to as a “chapbook” here in the US tends to get called something different among small press writers and publishers in the UK—not always “chapbook” but, perhaps more frequently, “pamphlet.” While the linguistic difference between “pamphlet” and “chapbook” may seem arbitrary—and maybe is in the end, but listen, some of us have an illness called Being a Poet—we can’t help noticing that along these terminological alignments there seem to also lie some real material, aesthetic, and political differences. Emotional ones, too. For expert help straightening this all out, we consult Kirsty and Maria, who tell us about SPAM’s origins and aims as a whimsical yet rigorous transmedial platform for on/offline poetry and performance, criticism and collaboration, excitement and experimentation. Our conversation forefronts the work of editing as cultivating the social life of literature, while we gloss the symbiosis of publishing and programming, tripping over the classic DIY, nonprofit, and post-professional perils and possibilities. We also take this opportunity to think about whether the different infrastructures that support life in our countries lead to the production of different kinds of literature, if we can tell. Put another way, what do public transit and healthcare have to do with poems? Look, all we know is we could use a just little more of what they have over there, over here. And if the recent stateside boom of new presses and mags is any indicator, we’re well on our way, but it’s bound to be different. Watch this space. A few more UK small press pamphlet purveyors we personally love, some of whom are mentioned in the ep, but some we forgot because we get nervous: Slub Press, Broken Sleep Books, If a Leaf Falls Press, VIBE. See also: Glaswegian proto-internet poet and Scotland’s first Makar, Edwin Morgan; SPAM’s Brilliant Vibrating Interface and just a few of our personal fave, SPAM, book-objects; Ludd Gang magazine and the Poets’ Hardship Fund; Glasgow cooperative bookmaking studio and independent bookseller Good Press; Mathias Svalina’s Dream Delivery Service. Oh dang, looks like we mixed up the decades of the Mimeo Revolution! Whoopsie.

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  4. ١٤‏/١١‏/٢٠٢٤

    Episode 20: Noor Hindi & George Abraham - “Structures for Abundance”

    In this episode we talk with poets Noor Hindi and George Abraham about Heaven Looks Like Us, a new anthology of Palestinian poetry they co-edited, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2025. We discuss their process and priorities for this project, which began in 2020 and continues amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Noor and George share ways they’ve framed and responded to the challenges and opportunities of anthology editing, and how they’ve grappled with anthologizing’s pitfalls of reduction, representation, canonization, and exclusion. Instead Heaven Looks Like Us is offered as a fresh site of radical connection, newness, abundance, and Palestinian futurity. Under conditions of hyper-visibility, where we see atrocity unfold in real time, what is the role of the book as a technology for interacting, knowing, and imagining deeper? We talk about it, interrogating the roles of institutions and time and money, theorizing strategies for reclaiming those resources and building new structures, amid and through the work of editing. We try to understand what that work even is. Poetry expands the question. This episode opens with George and Noor reading poems by Jen Siraganian, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (translated by Fady Joudah), and Mira Mattar. The anthology’s title comes from a poem by Fargo Tbakhi. In discussion we quote a poem by Micaela Kaibni Raen. Find George’s poetry collection Birthright here, and here’s Noor’s Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. George is executive editor of the journal Mizna. We also refer to RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers) and some previous anthologies including Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women, and Hayan Charara’s Inclined to Speak.

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  5. ١٦‏/٠٩‏/٢٠٢٤

    Episode 18: Joe Hall - “Imperialism for Writers, or Empire in the Avant-Garde”

    Ever wonder what literary orgs have to do with the state? Nonprofits with the CIA? Your own poems with military operations on the other side of the planet? Of course you do. Luckily, so does Buffalo’s own poet laureate of waste collection and public transit Joe Hall, whose recent essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde” is a veritable syllabus on the ways arts and culture institutions serve the aims of American empire. In the essay, Joe offers an exhaustive analysis of PEN America’s response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, documents recent protest efforts such as boycotts of the PEN America Literary Awards and PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and conducts some nonprofit forensics and close-reading of PEN America’s messaging and leadership to connect their work to a broader project of American cultural imperialism. In our discussion, we reflect on the flattening effects of institutional language and the de-politicization of the arts, money and other forms of soft power, applications of the term “avant-garde,” how imperialism is a liberal concept too, and some of the ways writers can work to resist these historic political-aesthetic dynamics and collaborate with other workers to build a more liberated future. Joe’s essay covers it all (ya gotta read those footnotes) but here are some more readings for your further reading, which specifically come up in this conversation: Ohio’s investments in Israel bonds; the killings of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer and journalist Ismail al-Ghoul; Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar’s expulsion from a PEN America event in early in 2024; Juliana Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram; PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel’s 2004 essay “Smart Power” in Foreign Affairs; Fargo Tbakhi’s “Notes On Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” at Protean Magazine.

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حول

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.”

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