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THE INDEPENDENT BOOK SHELF: New Writing and New Voices in Independent Publishing

Meghan Daum's MisspentYouth essays published by Open City Books; Literary magazines are publishing books; Jerome Gold chronicles the world of indie presses.

by Susan Denning

Meghan Daum once let herself get pretty emotionally involved with someone she had met through the Internet; later, she wrote an essay about it. She also wrote an essay about the alternative lifestyle of flight attendants and the even more alternative lifestyle of the "polyamorous," people who choose to live and be sexually involved with more than one person at a time. She wrote essays about her fear of carpets, her love of stuffed animals, and how a modern day publishing job in New York City doesn't have much in common with a publishing job that Mary McCarthy might have had in the 1950's.

These essays, much to my delight and the delight of many others, were published earlier this year by Open City Books in the collection My Misspent Youth. Open City Books started out as a publisher of a magazine by the same name. Like FENCE and MCSWEENEY'S, they have recently started publishing books as well.

In the introduction to her book, Daum writes that her pieces are "about the fictional narratives that overpower the actual events, the cartoon personae that elbow the live figure out of the frame. They are about the romantic notions that screw up real life while we're not looking".

I asked Meghan how she went about finding a publisher for her book, and she replied, "Open City actually approached me with the idea." She went on to say, "I'd known Tom Beller and some of the other editors for several years. And, as a huge advocate of the essay form, I'd been wanting to publish a collection. But some people in publishing, especially those who are extremely concerned about marketing and don't want to take risks on projects that don't look like they have blockbuster potential, are somewhat allergic to the word "essay." I felt like Open City really understood both the form and content of the pieces and could help me create a book that reached the proper audience. And I was right. The book has done remarkably well--has been reviewed widely, was recently Amazon's independent press book of the month, and even went to number five on the LA Times bestseller list. The people at Open City have a tremendous amount of energy, imagination, and willingness to take risks. I can't say enough about how pleased I am with them."

Meghan says she likes the essay form because, "of all the literary genres I find that essay allows for the most freedom, the most room for humor, reportage, memoir, social critique, irony, and even emotional resonance. They're a wonderful tool for talking about things in the world that might be too obscured in fiction or too dry in straight reporting."

When I asked Meghan what was the most unexpected thing that happened along the way to publishing My Misspent Youth, she replied, "I've been around book and magazine publishing for the last ten years or so, so nothing really happened that wasn't expected. I guess I'm surprised that a small, original paperback published by a small publisher could do as well as it has."

Jerome Gold has followed up his first volume of Publishing Lives with a second, Obscure In the Shade of Giants: Publishing Lives Volume II. His first book contained interviews with publishers in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. For his new book, published by Black Heron Press in Seattle, he chose to interview a novelist and poet, a sales representative, a wholesaler, a book store owner and a distributor, as well as twenty-six independent publishers from all over the United States, including people from Milkweed Editions, New Rivers Press, and Greywolf Press.

In the introduction to this volume Gold writes, "I have also tried to elicit some of the ways by which a book may be prevented from reaching its public. It may be the most wonderful book, but it may not be published because the author gets discouraged after a number of rejections, or because he or she cannot find the right publisher for it, or because there is no publisher for it... Or, with a great deal of luck, and an author who promotes himself or herself shamelessly, and a publisher who is passionate about his or her work, it may thrive." Gold encourages those he interviews to tell their stories of how they got started in the world of publishing and why they decided to stay; their reasons are deeply personal, and in some cases, political as well.

This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the motivations, trials and tribulations of yet another alternative lifestyle, the life of the independent publisher in an increasingly corporate world.

Snail's Pace Press' most recent book is Fishbone by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, the winner of the Snail's Pace Press Poetry Prize. The poems in this book are fresh, lively and full of startling imagery and a wry sense of humor; in "Lewis and Clark Disagree", she surmises that perhaps they fought

Because the Nez Perce
gave one and not the other a necklace
of purple quartz. Because osage oranges
gave Merriweather hives.

Snail's Pace Press is a not for profit literary press out of upstate New York that converted from a literary review to a press two years ago, and as editor Ken Denberg says, "We're learning. We've just Selected the fourth book in our list, and have four more books planned: a gardening anthology, a collection of short stories, a selected poems of Harry Staley and a full-length collection of poems by a New England poet".

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Susan Denning edits the online magazine CAFFEINE DESTINY (www.caffeinedestiny.com) from her home in Portland, Oregon. Her book reviews and poetry have appeared in publications like THE OREGONIAN, EUGENE WEEKLY, LITERAL LATTE, SEATTLE REVIEW, FIREWEED and elsewhere. She can be contacted by e-mail at editor@caffeinedestiny.com.

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