The new book "Women in Independent Publishing"

For University Press Week, an interview with author Stephanie Anderson

It’s University Press Week, and to mark the occasion I’m pleased to host a guest post from Elise McHugh of the University of New Mexico Press. She’s in conversation with Stephanie Anderson, editor of New Mexico’s new book Women in Independent Publishing.

It seems appropriate to celebrate University Press Week with a book about publishing, and I’m glad that Elise and Stephanie were willing to share their conversation. Here they are.

How did the concept for this book develop, and when did you start this journey?

The book began to develop as a result of several acts of generosity. In 2010, when I was a graduate student, I was invited by Special Collections Librarian (and small-press publisher) David Pavelich to participate in a “Chicago Poetry Symposium.” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about, and David pointed me toward CHICAGO, a 1972 to 1974 mimeograph magazine that the poet Alice Notley edited from Chicago and the United Kingdom. While I was researching the paper, Notley agreed to be interviewed over email. And then, at the symposium itself, it became clear to me and everyone in the audience that the most compelling parts of my paper were quotes from Notley’s interview.

In the interview, she expressed frustration that she hadn’t previously been asked about her editing work. And why hadn’t she? Another symposium participant, Nancy Kuhl, a curator at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, suggested that I do a series of interviews with women involved in small-press publishing. I loved the idea of talking to some of my heroes and using conversations to capture history, so I began.

Why is this book important now? What gives it its urgency?

Part of the urgency comes from the need to document these stories while the primary participants can still tell us about it in their own voices. Part of the urgency comes from the fact that though scholarship about this era in publication and literary studies is growing, women have been underrepresented in it, particularly in volumes of interviews.

But this book is also important right now because of this historical moment, when the rights and autonomy of women and queer people are being eroded. The book provides many models of community formation. These stories illuminate how deeply writing—often seen as a solitary act—is entwined with editing and publishing, which are oriented toward readers and community.

A book such as this one can never be exhaustive, and people are going to point out women who were left out. How did you go about choosing who to interview? Is there anyone you weren’t able to interview but wish you had been able to include?

Because the book began from a specific nexus—women involved in small-press poetry publishing during the “mimeograph revolution,” roughly considered to be from the 1950s to the 1980s—and then expanded outward, it is more weighted toward independent poetry and literary publishing. If I were to do it again now, I would design it a bit differently. That being said, I’m excited about the differing career trajectories of some of the women and nonbinary editors in the book. There are editor-publishers who are very well-known in independent publishing as well as some whose presses only published a few books or others who went on to pursue very different careers. Making books and magazines leaves lasting traces in a life.

Several potential interviewees passed away before I could interview them, and some included in the book passed before the book’s publication. For instance, I wish I had been able to interview Janice Mirikitani to talk about how her work in independent publishing intersected with her management of Glide Memorial Church. She agreed to an interview, but illness prevented us from completing it. Chance also played a role in the interviewee list; I had long correspondences with some editor-publishers that never crystallized into final interviews, and I often felt like a bit of a gadfly, pursuing a few interviewees for years before we were finally able to make an interview format work.

In discussions with my students about how the book can’t be exhaustive and how it could be most useful as a research tool for them, we decided to include short encyclopedia-style entries about additional editor-publishers in a resources section.

What do you hope will result from people reading this book?

More books! I hope people are inspired to contribute to the DIY ethos that manifests in different ways throughout the book. Books—from the handmade single copy to the PDF distributed online—are still, I believe, one of our best technologies for connecting with each other and sharing what we make out of words, thoughts, and stories. Maybe you’re a student and this book inspires you to pursue oral histories; or maybe it inspires you to start your own magazine; or maybe it makes you curious about working for a press and publishing underrepresented voices. Many of the interviews stress the importance of making, whatever form it takes.

Who is your dream audience for this book? That is, beyond those you know will read it, who do you hope will read it?

When I interviewed Alice Notley, I was doing so as a budding scholar, and I hope that scholars who work on this period or on these writers/publishers will find the book very rich in the particulars. In the middle of the project, as I ran my own chapbook press, I thought a lot about documenting these stories for other independent editor-publishers, and I am indebted to online conversations started by Shanna Compton and others that also expressed a desire for these histories. By the end of the project, I was focused on students; in rich dialogue with my own students, we often talked about a student in the library who might peruse the book looking for a spark of inspiration for research or in their creative lives. The students showed me ideas in the book that I would not have seen on my own, and they did one of the interviews and asked questions I would never have thought of. So my dream audience is the one that keeps the book moving and growing beyond its current and, as we’ve established, non-exhaustive manifestation.

What is next for you? Do you plan on additional research in this vein, or are you moving into a new area?

I’m finishing “Dating the Poem,” a scholarly monograph that also focuses on textual circulation, as well as a hybrid poetry-prose book tentatively titled “Calendar House.” Both of these projects are very indebted to what I learned about textual circulation from Women in Independent Publishing and could not exist without the interviews.

Stephanie Anderson (photo by Richard Davis).

Stephanie Anderson is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at Duke Kunshan University in China. She is the author of three books of poetry and several chapbooks, most recently Bearings, and the coeditor of All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge (UNM Press).