Part Three: Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

 

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part Three

Click here for Part One or Part Two

HTML Giant posited that a certain small press was turning into a vanity project. I'd like to talk about what a "vanity press" is and is not, and how we value and de-value editorial models. Thoughts: Lots of literary heroes funded or helped fund their works into print, e.g., Gertrude Stein. Can we talk about the widespread stigma on this? What feeds the notion of 'merit' that one might value in having a manuscript selected by a third party? What do we think of the notion that writing be judged 'purely' on the work itself? 

SMS: A vanity press publishes whatever it gets.  The author pays, and the publisher prints.  This is not what BlazeVox was doing.  I have had a couple authors contribute toward their Tinfish books, once they were accepted for publication—I did not demand it, but I did not refuse their offers.  I have put in some of my resources toward marketing my own books for other presses.  Now that I'm feeling very self-conscious about this, I think that Tinfish's policy of not paying anyone, from author to designer to editor, makes us a cooperative.  Those authors whose books sell well end up helping to fund the books that don't sell well.  I'm comfortable with this, as I am with asking designers to volunteer their time and work.  But I can see the point of view that says designers and authors should be paid, or even that the publisher should take some of the money.  I have a day job; other publishers do not. 

I don't think writing should be judged only for itself.  I publish books that I think are in conversation with each other and with the larger world (whether or not that world reads them) on issues from poetic form, language use, cultural politics, and much else.  I publish books that I think will work in my classroom, books from Hawai`i or with something to offer us here.  I strongly believe that publishers should be making an argument with the work they publish.  That de-emphasizes the single volume, and ups the ante on the catalogue as the art/cultural form.  I blogged about this question here:  http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2009/03/reading-small-press-as-argument-not.html 

I believe in merit; I believe that when I publish a book of poems, that they are good poems.  But what means at least as much is the way in which that book fits into a conversation or series of conversations.

 MW:  Susan’s description of the historical definition of vanity press seems correct to me. But it’s also interesting who, in our current cultural context, can be accused of being a vanity press. The concept of the “vanity press” (and the way in which the term can be used in an unfounded hostile attack) really becomes, in this context, a press that cannot keep silent about its finances because it is weak enough to have financial needs and so can be coerced into making financial confessions because it needs help. And that’s what we’ve seen recently: a significant number of small presses defending their practice by confessing, while more powerful institutions confess nothing. 

So why should it be small presses confessing when, for instance, not a single MFA program has had to confess that it never teaches its students anything about the financial realities of contemporary publishing? No matter the reason that those programs don’t: the individuals involved in those programs may not know or care, or don’t realize it’s their job, in part, to be providing that information. But that’s another discussion: my point is that it’s not so easy to coerce them into confession. 

None of this is to say that publishers shouldn’t be honest with their authors. It is, instead, to say that the very fact that it’s small press publishers who can be coerced into confession is a result of a system of exchange in which the more power and money you have, the less you have to tell anybody anything about it.

What can we do about it being so hard to publish books (books that everyone loves and needs)? Can we imagine more sustainable models?

SMS: We do what we can.  There is no model that works perfectly, whether it's based on contests or donations or author assistance or collectives (which also fund books that sell and books that do not).  We need more reviewers, more readings, more virtual connections.  And we need to destigmatize (again) the kind of work that offered us models in the first place, the cheap and dirty mimeograph or xerox.  It's the work that counts, ultimately.  I'd rather use the language of “getting the work out” and “sharing work” and “building community” than of “marketing” and “selling,” but in some sense I feel uncomfortable with--even as I troll university websites late at night looking for professors who might like Tinfish's work--they may boil down to the same thing.

MW:   I think it’s not that bad an era to be a small press publisher or to be running a literary magazine. Sure, putting out books is time-consuming and somewhat costly, but there do seem to be many ways of doing such things, more than before, and not all of them are tremendously expensive. The growing number of print-on-demand options and online literary journals of significant quality shows that people on the lower end of the financial power scale can continue to do a lot for literature. In fact I’m tempted to say that the small press world does more than ever to help worthwhile writing reach anybody who’s willing to look for it.

 SMS:  After re-reading this conversation, Mark, I'm fascinated by how many times you used the verb “to confess.”  Small-press publishers “confessing” their finances, MFA programs not “confessing.”  Why this theologically loaded word?

MW: I used it because I believe that the recent controversy about small press practices has been mired, from the first, in a discourse of accusation, guilt, sin, confession and (I suppose) possible redemption. Not that it was about religion, or that many of the people involved are invested in religious belief (although some may be), but since the issue is one of belief as much as practicality, a drama of belief has been being staged. It has been many years since I wrote my essay “On Genre As Conversion Experience,” which talked about the ways contemporary writerly discussions of genre remain more invested in the dynamics of religious discourse than many writers realize, as opposed to the supposedly religion-free discourse of community or intellectual field etc. And I think that’s often still what we have. Of course, having said that, it might seem that I would be suggesting that we rid ourselves of that anti-rational and anti-community claptrap and start getting our materialist business together more straightforwardly, but actually I think that the idea that we could do such a thing often just becomes a liberal fantasy that people should all be able to talk to each other despite our lack of shared values. Which brings me back to where I came in to this conversation, so let me just end by saying that there are few things I myself love more than a friendly, energetic exchange of ideas.

CM: I agree. Thank you both for your generous thoughts and for your tremendous contributions to poetry.

Part Two: Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part Two

(Part One can be found here).

There has been some debate around the expectation that small presses should abide by rules and guidelines versus small-press publishing being fueled by a gift economy and donations. What kinds of transparency does a publisher owe to their readers and authors in terms of submission guidelines and publishing expectations? 

SMS: I think we're caught between two models right now.  The old model was self-publishing and micro-press publishing.  That's where Tinfish started, publishing chaps of 100 copies and a very short run journal that was xeroxed.  But we rather quickly became a “real publisher,” meaning that our books cost more to produce and came out in larger runs.  The production values went way up.  So there was more need for resources.  It's very easy to get big fast, because there are so many worthy manuscripts floating around out there.  And I have no objection to presses that publish a lot—Salt and BlazeVox come to mind.  That doesn't mean they aren't publishing good books or that they don't care about what happens to their product.  They are working with possibility, which is a finer thing than prose . . . While I would never publish as many books as they do, I applaud them for their efforts.  And, if a publisher tries to live off of his or her work, why not?  It may seem “suicidal,” as someone wrote on an fb page, but so much more gratifying than many other jobs with steady incomes.

If a press asks for money from its authors, something I have no problem with, I do think they should be up front about it.  Otherwise, I don't think authors need to know the details, except perhaps to realize that the work of publishing involves a lot of resources by someone(s) else—editing, designing, printing, distributing, marketing, and so on.  Some of the nastiness of the recent discussions revolved around a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and resources involved.  My students sometimes tell me that they are going to make money with their poems.  One class accused me of not taking them seriously when I laughed at this notion.  We need to disabuse others of the notion that seriousness = money-making, while letting them know that it takes money to put out a product.  Our most recent Tinfish book cost us over $2,000 to print (600 copies) and I bought advertising cards and sent out review copies.  The book could have been less gorgeous, but we made our choices—it could also have been more gorgeous and a lot more expensive to make.

It's also a good idea, as Craig Santos Perez and others argue, for authors to work harder to promote their own work, and work that they think is important.  The problem there is that the fine line between disseminating important information and sounding like someone selling refrigerators (though my local Sears salesman was a former student!), is easily crossed.  Keep the emphasis on the work, is my advice.  Then make sure people know about it.

CM: Thank you for breaking that down.

MW:   The question of the transparency that publishers owe to readers and authors is an important one, and I like Susan’s answer. But is there any reason that the focus of transparency, even in this conversation, should be on publishers alone? Should there be transparency (and is there any?) in Creative Writing MFA programs? What about in education institutions more broadly? Or in the work of political organizations and corporations? The fact is, in all those larger social institutions, there’s little and sometimes no transparency. That lack of transparency serves the interests of those with most access to money and most power.

In the case that led to this discussion, a lot of the expressed frustration with small press publishers, and the expressed frustration about that frustration, comes from a context of massive lack of transparency and honesty in multiple institutions, and not just in relationship to literature. And while many small press publishers, Tinfish and Bloof and others, have been lately explaining and confessing the details of their practices, corporations fuel their power over public life by deploying much larger resources under legal cover and never have to mention it.

CM: Mark, you offer good points in helping us to get out of a myopic framework. At the same time, we don’t interact with small-press publishers on the same terms of MFA programs or corporations. I believe this merits a distinct (and useful) thread. The question I asked around transparency was specifically between a writer who might become a press author and the press. This is a different dimension than those in the relationships you bring up, e.g., I may get my MFA certificate based on the criteria spelled out in the application process, but the meaning of the MFA may not match the implied promise of the degree.

That said, I think one of the best parts of operating in the small-press publishing world is that a sketchy or shady corporate framework is not the standard. There are several people working hard to demand that corporations be more transparent, and I don’t think there’s anyone arguing that there should be low-transparency on any corporate or institutional agreements, so I don’t think it’s true that we’re asking more of publishers more than we are of more powerful institutions, even though the fact that we are often more successful in having reciprocal conversations with publishers makes it seem as though they are subject to more critical scrutiny.

MW: I appreciate you trying to focus the discussion more specifically. Your points have also helped locate for me one of the things I find myself concerned about in this conversation. We’ve put the focus on what writers might ask of and need from publishers, but I’m not sure we can ask that question fairly without also asking what publishers might ask of or need from writers. I think part of the reason that there was recent controversy was an assumption by too many writers that publishers are more or less just a writer service industry, doing the janitorial work of creating a nice clean place for writers to put themselves center stage. I’m not saying anybody thinks this consciously, but that’s often in effect what happens. It’s too easy for writers to think of small press publishers just as people serving to advance a writer’s career, instead of as people who are often writers themselves and who are also working collaboratively to put forward the interests of an interconnected group of people.

SMS: So the new model is “real publishing.”  And there's a need for it, because MFA grads and others need jobs.  To get a job teaching you need to have published.  And you need “real” books, not chaps, journal publications.  No quarrel there.  The quarrel comes in when the relationship between author and publisher becomes one of producer and—how to put this?--hired but unpaid help.  This model is much less personal, much more capitalistic, and much less equitable.  Another danger with this second model is that it makes publishing less a visionary enterprise than a business.  (Not that businesses can't be visionary, but I would rather use another metaphor for small press publishing, something that describes an enterprise between business and gift economy.)  Tinfish Press has been lucky that our vision has—in some instances, if not in many others—proved marketable, especially for classroom use.  “Experimental poetry from the Pacific” has been rare, until recently.  We helped create a market for it, and the texts with which to teach it.  Several of our books have sold in the thousands.  They help to pay for those that sell in the hundreds, or in the tens.

The discussion reminds me, in odd and mostly unparallel ways, of conversations in the adoption world.  We're talking about a practice (adoption, small press publishing) that has a value (spiritual, familial, aesthetic) apart from the monetary, but which inevitably enters the marketplace.  Then the question becomes, to what extent does our pure ethics inevitably get muddied by realities?  And how can we act ethically, even after acknowledging our lack of purity?

CM: Susan, you ask a complex question and I appreciate the depth of it. To begin, I believe we can act ethically by making a conscious effort to communicate constructively and with respect for each other. If you think someone is naive, maybe try to remember when you were naive and be a friend, be a neighbor -- if not to an individual, at least to the art. 

If your goal is truly to have another poet shut up and sit down, I want to ask about the violence of that reaction. 

Mark, I am glad you bring up that publishers might ask things of authors; it may be the question at the crux of this upset. I, personally, believe completely in cooperation. But, I continue to feel that disclosing the terms of cooperation after a manuscript has been accepted is not a good model, and I don't believe that mode is likely to yield positive relationships. Maybe I am proposing an undue burden on the publisher to have figured out what is needed from authors -- I do appreciate that a lot of publishing labor is already invisible and thankless -- but there is right now an opportunity for presses to consider publishing terms, and if they are stated up front then we might avoid vitriolic controversy.

(End of Part Two)


Third and final part coming next week.

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation (Part One)

 

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part One

Following a recent controversy in the small-press publishing community, I reached out to Mark Wallace and asked if we might have a broad discussion on the issues and hand towards potentially avoiding an ugly repeat. I knew Mark and I did not totally agree, which is why I reached out to him. We also looped in Susan M. Schultz, editor and publisher of Tinfish since 1995. -- Carol Mirakove

Susan M. Schultz: Thanks for asking me to speak to the issue.  I blogged about the particular controversy when it first hit the airwaves, here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-blazevox-and-other-publishing.html. I read blog and facebook posts by Johannes Gorensson, Craig Santos Perez, Amy King, Reb Livingston, Matvei Yankelevich, Shanna Compton, and probably others, as well as many of the threads written about the controversy.  But of course there's much more to it than whether or not one press asks its authors for contributions toward the publication of their books.

CM: Absolutely, but a point of clarification was not whether or not a press asks authors for contributions but how and when.

How do we distinguish critical discussion from destructive attacks? Name-calling seems to always reflect far more poorly on the insulter than the target. Why does this happen in our community? How can we criticize practices constructively, without personal wars being waged?

SMS: I've worked in an English department for over 20 years now, and if I knew the answer to that question, I'd be a lot happier there.  We could create a forum to discuss these issues and put out a list of rules and regulations, beginning from “no name calling” and continuing with “keep it civil,” but I don't know that that works either.  Such discussions happen rather organically (good to remember that many poisons are also organic).  Part of the problem is that, name-calling aside, we all take our own and others' practices very personally, indeed. 

CM: You make excellent points -- we certainly don't want to regulate speech. But, it seems to me that we take some others' practices very seriously, notably others we know, and other others' practices and positions are met with hostility.

SMS: Even apart from overtly personal attacks, every conversation about contests, prizes, subscriptions, funding drives, how many books we publish in a year, and so on, is implicitly personal.  One of the uncomfortable values of this discussion is getting out in the open just how vested we are in some practices, and how hostile we are to others.  I'd rather see us moralize less and encourage each other more.  Or make the rhetorical point that we do not like certain practices, but do not condemn others for using them.  Tinfish does not have contests, for example, because I find them an odd mix of revenue enhancement and the promise of cultural capital, but I know full well why many presses run them.  Cash flow. 

Mark Wallace: Distinguishing critical discussion from destructive attacks seems easy enough. The focus should remain on the ideas in question, not the personalities or behavior of the people expressing the ideas. It’s a matter of tone too. Hostility or dismissiveness, even when focused on an idea, quickly moves into the personal, since the more one’s tone highlights emotion, the more people become emotional in response to it.

Still, to say that it’s easy enough, in general, to distinguish between the two, doesn’t change the fact that in practice, there are many murky situations in which the boundaries get blurry, especially since, as Susan says, people take their ideas seriously. We can’t help but have an emotional relation to them.

The Enlightenment, of course, invented most of our contemporary ideas about the value of dispassionate, rational discussion. But the very belief in it brought in whole new waves of irrationality, not just in all the ways that people continued not to behave rationally, but also in the ways that many notions of Enlightenment rationality were nothing more than new ways of being irrational.

I’ve always appreciated what Dostoevsky said relative to the Enlightenment (if you’ll excuse but also note the way it’s gendered): “Men are so necessarily mad that imagining them sane must be another form of madness.”

I’m not sure much can be done to change the nature of public discussion. People come from so many backgrounds and ways of understanding words that standards for discussion vary from context to context. Professional and intellectual and literary discourses do have defined social standards, no matter how fuzzily followed, but it shouldn’t be surprising that not everyone has absorbed or respects them.

Public language has always involved murderous hostility. Right now, we’re in a moment when the unfounded hostile accusation has tremendous power in U.S. politics and culture, as just one for instance (I don’t say “more power than ever” because I don’t think that’s true). Hostile lies and accusations, if there’s enough power behind them, can force individuals and groups to spend most of their time defending themselves regarding things they didn’t even do, and explaining and even confessing the things they actually do. In fact, this current discussion of publisher’s financial practices is happening mainly because of the power of such accusations.

I don’t believe, by the way, that there’s any such thing as “our community” of writers. Sure, those of us who have been writers for a long time are likely to have some (many, in my case) trusted, respected, and  loved comrades, but even the small world of experimental/alternative etc etc etc poetry and poetics features a constantly changing list of active participants. Look at the names of who is publishing in any literary magazine that you like now as compared to 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, and you’ll see how fast the participants change. None of us know more than a portion of those people, and it’s an open question about how well we get along even with those we do know. Certainly our feelings of community towards and with others are real, but I don’t think that there’s any stable entity there that belongs to any of us. Community is established through ongoing interaction and is always fragile. It can’t be relied on too much.

That said, I do think individuals and groups can and do influence the nature of public conversation in limited contexts. I’ve long been interested in fostering friendly but open intellectual discussion among the people around me, and I think I do it well, and I’m hardly the only one who does it. Still, hostile or irrelevant commentary can’t be avoided entirely even in the best conditions.

CM: Mark, you foster open discussion exceptionally well, which is one of the reasons I approached you about having a discussion amidst a very heated debate.

You reveal that the two of us have defined community differently, and while multiple definitions are “correct,” you explain that community is established through ongoing interaction where I imply earlier that it is defined by a common interest, in this case an interest in small-press poetry.

However community is defined, my concern with the hostility of late is this: the way we treat individuals in our microcosms, especially in the microcosms we choose (e.g., small-press poetry), informs the way we act in the world at large. If we aspire to a global respect and peace then we have a golden opportunity to hone those practices amongst our friends, and friends of friends, and strangers who share interests in things about which we are most ardent.

SMS (interrupting): I'd suggest that we stop trying to define what community is, and simply act as if we are members of a community.  Enact community rather than sit back and try to figure out who's in and who's out.

MW: With apologies for being contrary and insistent, Susan, I don’t quite agree with that approach. I think we often need to act as if the people we’re dealing with in the world of poetry are strangers—which, much of the time, they are, at least to some degree. I think we need more awareness of the fact that other people, even if they’re poets, don’t share our values or assumptions. Precisely one of the reasons that this issue became controversial recently was that a lot of people discovered that they didn’t understand each other, which came to them as a surprise because they had assumed a lot of mutual agreement. Many people involved assumed that they knew what a poetry press was… except, as it turned out, they didn’t share the same assumptions at all.

Our responses to people in the world of poetry would probably change if we went in with the recognition that community can’t be taken for granted or assumed. Like any relationship, it has to be worked out. Speaking just for myself maybe, even with my close friends I’ve often become most frustrated when I assume, in advance and unintentionally, that because they’re my friends, we agree about things and understand each other. As it turns out, we often don’t.

I would have no problem with calling such interactions instances of community, I suppose, if we described “community” as a group of individuals interacting because of a shared interest even when they might not have much otherwise in common.

(End of Part One)