INDEX FOR CONTINUANCE
A Podcast By the CSU Poetry Center
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.”
Listen here and on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
To request a transcript of one of our episodes, please write to poetrycenter [at] csuohio [dot] edu.
Episodes
Episode 1: Matvei Yankelevich - “The New Obsolescence”
In our first episode, we talk to Matvei Yankelevich, poet, translator, critic, editor, and publisher. You may know him as a founding member of the editorial collective Ugly Duckling Presse, current publisher of Winter Editions, and editor at World Poetry Books. His recent work includes the chapbook Dead Winter from Fonograf Editions and the co-translation, with Eugene Ostashevsky, of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, from NYRB Books.
Our discussion explores Matvei’s four-part essay series, first published on Harriet in 2020: here’s part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. Along the way we discuss professionalization in the writing world, money and how small presses do and don’t get it, the struggles and beauties of collectivization, the autonomy of the small press vs. the compromises of capital, amateurism, middle age, antagonism in the market, moving forward with obsolescence.
Listen.
Episode 2: Danielle Dutton - “Women Talking About Women Publishing Women (Mostly)”
In this episode, Hilary talks to the writer Danielle Dutton, who is co-founder, editor, and designer of Dorothy, a publishing project. Subjects include feminist structures and practices in publishing, the patriarchies of the aughts, social media, new books by Amina Cain and Giada Scodallero, the meanings of “small,” success and going on, moving the books out of your basement.
In the conversation we celebrate Danielle’s early books Attempts at a Life and SPRAWL—find all her work here, and you’ll want to read this recent story.
(We mention a profile of the writer Nell Zink that appeared in the New Yorker, and its manner of describing small presses. The profile in question is this one, but actually the New Yorker used this same move twice.)
Listen.
Episode 3: Matt Weinkam & Michelle Smith - “How to Bring It All Together”
In this episode, we talk to writers, teachers, and organizers Matt Weinkam (Executive Director) and Michelle Smith (Programming Associate) of Literary Cleveland, a (you guessed it) literary arts nonprofit here in (yep) Cleveland. We really get in there on jobs, work, what counts as “being a writer,” the necessity of cultivating multifarious skills as an artist, the erosion of the middle in arts labor economies, and paths outside the academy; email, 990s, nonprofit nuts and bolts; activist principles and good old “boring awful capitalist economics.” We also touch on the idea that New York is not the world and explore ways to think about region in the work of fostering local literary community and creating opportunities in Cleveland, a city with a troubled racial and economic history in the Rust Belt, or the Midwest, or both, depending who you talk to.
Some things you should probably look into that come up in our conversation: Literary Cleveland’s course offerings, residencies, and opportunities for writers; Quartez Harris’s We Made it to School Alive; Stephanie Ginese’s Unto Dogs; Kevin Latimer and Grieveland; Belt Publishing; Gordon Square Review; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the Great Lakes African American Writers Conference, and Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference.
Listen.
Episode 4: Peter Dimock, Eugene Lim, & Ian Dreiblatt - “Hope Is a Word I’d Replace with Collaboration”
In this episode, we talk to the writers, editors, publishers, translators, publicists, librarians, & brilliant commentators Peter Dimock, Eugene Lim, and Ian Dreiblatt. We explore the future of the book, the form of the novel, the political potency of experimental writing and publishing, the monetization of attention, and how to value reading over books, reading beyond the commodification of content. We consider the book as testament to the principle that “everyone is valuable and everyone needs to talk to everybody else.” Along the way we find ourselves discussing apocalypse, the potential unrecognizability of the future, the coercion of optimism, the vitality and productivity of despair, and “joy in the triage.”
You’ll want to find these: Peter Dimock’s most recent book Daybook from Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson (Deep Vellum); Eugene Lim’s Search History (Coffee House Press); Ian Dreiblatt’s forget thee (Ugly Duckling Presse).
This one was recorded—and is best heard—in the dark.
Listen.
Episode 5: Rebecca Wolff - “Weird and Cool”
Join us for an hour-plus with Rebecca Wolff, founder and long-time editor of Fence the journal as well as Fence Books (disclosure: Hilary is a Fence author, we’ll get into it). We talk about the promise and problems of the ‘90s, “indie” structures and dreams, and the elusive concepts of “weird” and “cool.” Also discussed: professionalization, idiosyncrasy, money, obstinacy, being a “public art person,” writing emails, collaboration, and not being a brand (but what if that’s your brand).
We talk about how Fence has recently transitioned to new leadership under Emily Wallis Hughes, Jason Zuzga, and other great editors—congrats! Sharing our excitement for the next stage of Fence. We also briefly touch on Rebecca’s time in local government in Hudson, NY.
Find Rebecca’s new book of poems Slight Return over at Wave. And recently out from Fence Books: Harmony Holiday’s Maafa & Kenneth Reveiz’s Mopes.
Special Bonus: Here’s a recording of Mark Leidner reading the poem “What’s Cool Changes” from his collection Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me, published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012, which came to mind while we were recording the intro to this episode.
Episode 6: Sarah Rose Etter - “How to Run a Reading Series (& Why)”
This ep is for anyone who ever wondered how to host a good reading or read from their own work because there is just not a lot of info out there. Join us for a fast-paced conversation with the writer and cultural worker Sarah Rose Etter, who may or may not be the best reading series host of all time (we say yes but she’s modest). We use the beloved series TireFire in Philadelphia as a case study to consider what it’s like to host a reading series, give some good advice and tips for those interested to start one, and talk about what makes for a great reading. Shout out, too, to the other luminaries of TireFire: Christian TeBordo, Annie Liontas, Jaime Fountaine, and Mike Ingram. Our discussion explores volunteerism, a taxonomy of contemporary literary readings, we talk money, how to build and connect with your audience, and how for better or worse “no one else is going to show up and sell your book for you.”
Check out Sarah’s new novel Ripe! And her 2019 The Book of X is out from the great Two Dollar Radio.
And if you’re in northeast Ohio, join us at the Lighthouse reading series in the fall and spring.
Listen.
Episode 7: Suzanne DeGaetano - “Small Presses Are the Lifeblood of the Indie Bookstore”
We spend this episode with the inimitable Suzanne DeGaetano of Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry, the beloved indie bookstore in Cleveland Heights (and popping up all over the city) that just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Suzanne shares invaluable insights into the workings of an independent bookstore; welcoming people and sustaining community; paying the bills; changes in the industry over the past 40 years; the role of events, social media, wholesalers like Ingram, and neon signs; the longstanding relationship between food service and literary work; and more. This is a Cleveland-forward episode so get ready.
You’ll hear us mention some other great indies in Northeast Ohio, like: Loganberry Books, Visible Voice, and Elizabeth’s. And we’ll talk a bit about changes at Small Press Distribution (SPD), the stubborn persistence of print books, Bookshop.org, and our feelings about the phrase “slim volume.” Oh, and Espresso Book Machines do exist, despite Hilary’s choice of verb tenses.
It’s summer, so in this month’s eps you’ll also literally hear Cleveland—birds, wind, traffic, whatever—because it was hot and the windows were open. This podcast is an immersive experience.
Listen.
Episode 8: Joseph Earl Thomas - “Multiplayer Experiences”
Time to chat with Joseph Earl Thomas, a writer from Frankford. Joseph is the author of the memoir Sink, the Director of Programs at Blue Stoop, an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and the current Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing here at the Poetry Center (among other things). Our conversation centers those other things as we find ourselves dancing once again with the specter of professionalism, considering the mechanics of balancing professional, personal, and creative life, and questioning their divisions. We also talk about publishing with a Big Five imprint, the similarities between small press and “nerd” cultures, and spend some time thinking about regionalism, specificity, and literary economics.
It’s jobs, other jobs, other other jobs, homesteading, role modeling, video games, subculture, juggalos (Zach’s fault), MFAs, PhDs, and childcare. Not sponsored by the Atlanta Bread Company, Home Depot, or GameStop.
More birds and cars in the background but what are we supposed to do, edit the world?
Listen.
Episode 9: Joyelle McSweeney & Johannes Göransson - “Keeping Things Lit”
Join us for an inspiring session with Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson, editors and founders of Action Books—as well as poets, translators, and critics who have given us books like Toxicon & Arachne and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (McSweeney), Summer and Transgressive Circulation (Göransson). We talk about the storm-born origins of Action Books, its thinking of the avant-garde, poetry that “goes all the way,” the transgressiveness and provocations of small-press lit, definitely not publishing “the finest,” modernist dynamos, the volatile space of translation and how it serves as a model for collaboration. We all think together about being publishers based in the Rust Belt/in red states, and we celebrate some vital weirdness and iconic weirdos.
Writers whose names came up include Aase Berg, Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, Raúl Zurita, Blaise Cendrars, and Lara Glenum, among others—find their work at Action & beyond.
Listen.
Episode 10: Janaka Stucky & Carrie Olivia Adams - “Hunger for Awe”
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.
Listen.
Episode 11: Jeremy Wang-Iverson & Samara Rafert - “Publicity, Marketing, & Reminding Them We’re Here”
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.
Listen.
Episode 12: Daryl Seitchik & Dan Nott - “How to Be a Little More Punk About This Sh*t”
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.
Listen.
Episode 13: Ali Black - “The Black Experience from a Cleveland Lens”
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.”
Listen.
Episode 14: Caryl Pagel - “The Text is the Site of That Relationship”
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.
Listen.
Episode 15: “What Brains Eat: On Small Press Distribution”
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.
