Stephanie Anderson is the editor of the new book Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, 1953-1989. Her other books include All This Thinking. She is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at Duke Kunshan University in China.
Q: What inspired you to edit Women in Independent Publishing?
A: The immediate impetus is that I was interviewing the poet and editor Alice Notley about her mimeograph magazine CHICAGO, and she told me that no one had ever asked her about her editing work before.
As someone who had recently started a small chapbook press and knew what a profound effect the press was having on my own creative and critical work, it surprised me that this labor could be overlooked.
Stitching chapbooks at the kitchen table with friends, going to book fairs and talking to people who loved the feel of the books – these activities were making writing simultaneously more precious and more ephemeral to me.
I started looking at books of interviews with and scholarship about independent publishing, and noticed that women were underrepresented, often fairly dramatically. At the same time, the idea of the project was seeded and supported by my conversations with poets, publishers, and – crucially – librarians.
I began a series of interviews that were published in various journals and magazines, but I always hoped that a book would be the final result. I kept imagining future students coming across these stories in a book.
Q: Why did you focus on the years 1953-1989?
A: I wanted to start in the 1950s because that decade laid the groundwork for the “Mimeograph Revolution,” an umbrella term for the proliferation of DIY and small press publications that accelerated from the 1960s through the ’80s.
Though many of the Mimeograph Revolution’s publications were in fact done with a mimeograph, the midcentury’s changing print technologies also made other forms of production, like letterpress, more accessible.
There’s a fair amount of scholarship about women editors of modernist little magazines, so I wanted to focus on capturing the more recent stories while the women who participated in these scenes could still tell them.
I became particularly interested in Daisy Aldan (1918–2001), who edited Folder and Folder Editions, and who seemed to bridge the earlier modernist moment and the later Mimeograph Revolution one; I discuss her in the book’s introduction.
So the book begins with 1953, the year she founded Folder, and ends in 1989, because in the 1990s personal computing further changed independent publishing scenes.
Q: The author Terence Diggory said of the book, “Book artists will find in this work fascinating details about the publishing process, but every reader will be moved by the personal energy that drove these women to become publishers and the powerful network of friends and community that they helped to create.” What do you think of that description, and how would you describe these women’s legacy today?
A: I really appreciate Diggory’s attention to both the “energy” of the individual publisher and how that energy sustains a larger community.
In the introduction to the book I describe this phenomenon in terms of how women and nonbinary editors talk about being both at the beginning of something and as part of larger lineages – or, to use your word, longer legacies. I think it’s precisely that productive intersection – innovation as historical – that keeps reinvigorating artistic scenes more generally.
Furthermore, the book approached these networks first from a particular genre, poetry, and is somewhat necessarily circumscribed for that reason, but in a few interviews you can see other ways independent publishing creates community.
For instance, Renee Tajima-Peña’s work with Bridge and the Asian American political and cultural movement became part of her career in filmmaking.
So today, I would describe these legacies – plural, so as not to collapse different moments and communities – as showing that independent and DIY publishing matters for cultural production more broadly.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers find some new models for their own forms of making and community-building, which is especially important at this historical moment. And I hope they are excited to look back, as well, and read some of the independently published books that are mentioned in the interviews.
Finally, I hope readers have curiosity about the modes of publication the book mentions, “rediscovering” them and creating crossover opportunities between analog and digital media.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m editing a selection of the poet Larry Eigner’s letters with some other scholars and writers, which is such exciting work – letters were incredibly important to Eigner’s poetics, and we have a vast and deep archive from which to choose.
I’m also finishing up a scholarly monograph about the calendar date in poems, and a creative prose manuscript about writing and self-reinvention.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There are some book events – in New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco – in April. More info at https://octoberinapril.com/events.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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