Women Publishers' Roundtable: Final Installment

Welcome back to the Women Publishers' Roundtable at Delirious Hem!  Here you'll find the most recent interview question that was sent to these small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question #8: What's next for your press? What can readers look forward to?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  We’ve just lined up all of our 2013titles and we have a whole slate of new and returning poets in the upcoming series, including second dgp books by Emilie Lindemann, Sarah Sloat, BrandiHoman, Trina Burke, Leah Browning, Eva Schlesinger, Lisa Cole, Carol Berg, Erika Lutzner, and Erin Bertram.  There a couple of more anthology-like book arts projects in the works, as well as some broadsides, mini-chaps, zines, and other freebies I’ve been pondering. All good and exciting things.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  For readers, we’ve got a lovely and dynamic new book coming back from the printers this month: Cynthia Arrieu-King’s MANIFEST, a Gatewood Prize winning book that was chosen by Harryette Mullen. Our 2013Gatewood Prize will open on March 1 and we’re thrilled to have the amazing and talented Eileen Myles as this year’s judge. We have a new title from Stefania Heim forthcoming next winter. We’ll be debuting a new website this year, as well, which will include some exciting new content and poetry. Internally, we’re working on a lot of improvements to enhance our book promotions and marketing. It’s a really exciting time for us!

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  This year Birds of Lace is publishing chapbooks from twelve writers! It is a little overwhelming but also very thrilling, because the chapbooks are stellar and it’s the most ambitious BoL has been to date. Recently released were Carina Finn’s My Life is a Movie, Megan Milks’ Twins and Seth Oelbaum’s macey [triolets]. Coming up we have chapbooks from Maia Elgin, Jeanine Deibel, Carrie Hunter, Jiyoon Lee, Samantha Cohen, JD Scott, Anne Marie Rooney, AndreaQuinlan (also published by dancing girl), and Kari Larsen (another dgp alum!). The awesome zine project It’s Complicated, edited by Judy Berman and Niina Pollari, collaborated with BoL for its first chapbook in a series which is very exciting. Later this year BoL will put out its first call for full-length books to be published perfect-bound. I’d like to plan more readings/events but this may not happen for some time.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press):  We’re super excited, after a hiatus in production, to be publishing a few great works by Tiffany M. De Vos, Joseph Quintela, Kiely Sweatt, Mary Lou Buschi and Kristina Marie Darling. Plus we’re starting our Review, which will publish a few poems each week. We’ve also been hosting a Parlor each month, which is kicking back up in March in NYC. The Parlor is mixed-media and very bohemian. We’ll have poetry, burlesque, dance, music, art, and whatever weirdness we see fit. It’s a place for people to talk, meet artists, and share their work with one another. We aim to promote Patasola poets as well as emerging/established poets. We’ve had big success with the past few months, and we’re excited to continue.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith and T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publication):  Oh, man. We have so many projects! Besides our journals, the Best of the NetAnthology, and upcoming e-chapbook contest, Sundress is publishing collections by Donna Vorreyer, David Cazden, and Virginia Smith, e-chaps by Christine Jessica Margaret Reilly, Emilia Phillips, and Emily Janowick, and two anthologies—one of contemporary Quaker poetry, and a multigenre one exploring women and place. Flaming Giblet is putting the finishing touches on The Butterfly Lady, its first novel in five years, and is already looking at three more manuscripts. And, of course, there’s our biggest project: the Sundress Academy of the Arts at Firefly Farms. Whew! It’s all very exciting stuff.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  We just released our first title, F IN by Carol Guess, and two more are on the way:  Eva Heisler's Drawing Water and Kristy Bowen's the shared properties of water and stars.  I'm very excited to start sending out review copies and organizing events for these amazing authors.  Soon we'll begin selecting manuscript for the 2014 series.  Stay tuned!

This is the final installment of the feature, but I hope you'll continue to watch these excellent small presses.  Thank you to everyone who participating in the Women Publishers' Roundtable!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Seventh Installment

Welcome to the Women Publishers' Roundtable at Delirious Hem!  Here you'll find the latest interview question that was sent to these small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question 7: What advice do you have for women who are in the process of starting a press, or hope to start one in the future?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  I think starting small is key. We’ve grown a lot in the past 9 years, but in the beginning, it was important to keep things manageable (both time-wise and financially). Writers and other creative types are often overstretched as it is between day jobs and teaching gigs and being students themselves. Starting small lets you see what works and then you can build from there. I’ve gone from putting out 4 or 5 books / year and investing a couple hours a week to putting out nearly a book a week (sometimes more) and spending about 6 hours per day working on press stuff.) It can be a small thing or a big thing, but you have to get started and build on momentum. It’ll be whatever you make it.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  Think ahead. Do you see yourself still doing this in five years? In ten years? What is your vision for the eventual outcome of the endeavor? Set the scale of what you’re starting to your level of commitment. No one is entirely altruistic; we all get involved in publishing to serve ourselves in some way. But I think when we’re talking about publishing full-length collections, we have to consider the future of the press, because book publication does affect peoples’ lives. It’s a requirement for tenure, and those who are kind enough to entrust you with their work should be assured that your press isn’t going to collapse a year later when they’re in front of the tenure board. There are lots of other ways not tied to academia in which book publication affects peoples’ lives. If you don’t see yourself doing this for a long time or finding the smart people you’ll need to keep it going for the long haul, I’d say you should do something smaller in scale. If you wanna go big, go big, but make sure you’ve got the infrastructure to support that goal.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  Start wherever you can. If you have access to the internet make a literary journal on tumblr or blogspot or wordpress. Talk to your friends and their friends and publish writing you love and are challenged by; a chain of people and events will always lead you to more work you love, especially if you’re conducting communications through the internet. Photocopy poems and staple them together, do research to find out which copyshop in your town is cheapest, or if you can photocopy somewhere for free. Hustle (in the friendly way) your friends and loved ones and fascinating/talented acquaintances. Read lots of literary journals/go to readings and find out whose writing you love; if they are alive get into contact with them and publish them. Read reviews of books and chapbooks and purchase them so you can support a press in action and get a feel for what’s being published/what still needs to be published. Be an unabashed fangirl: Rebecca Brown sent me new work for the third issue of Finery, a handmade zine, and she is a totally legit, serious writer of some of my favorite books ever; I just asked her to contribute after a reading and she totally did. Dancing Girl Press and Switchback (obviously, because I love both presses and have admired/read their books for years) gave great advice. Start small and see what happens. Email people who’ve started presses you love and ask how they did it. Be brave and excited and creative in your definition of publishing.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press):  Start small, as Kristy said. Even I got over my head. Know what you want, and if you’re unsure, just read everything you can get your hands on. Get a group of supporters together, even if it’s a poet-friend who can donate an hour of time, when you need it. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Go to literary readings, encourage people, support people, be thankful, be humble. Build a social media presence, take part in it. Don’t give up. Apologize if you’ve made mistakes. Know that you will make mistakes and you will grow. Be unabashedly proud of everything you do. Know that you can only do so much, but what you do is to be done with love and time and attention. Remember your mission. Grow with it, and change it when it needs to change. Remember what inspired you in the first place when you’re tired. Remember it’s all for love and the promotion of something way bigger than yourself. Literature and people’s lives.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications):  Be fearless.   Solicit people you love despite how famous or unfamous they are.  Don't stress about image too much.  If you publish good shit, people will come back.  Don't ever be intimidated.  Don't ever let people you don't know make you doubt your decisions. Be respectful but speak your mind.  Have fun with it.

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): Other thoughts? Well, it’s important to not be afraid to make mistakes along the way, but don’t let them pile up. Deal with them. Work with your authors; maintain an open line of communication. Network. Seriously, if you like what another press, author, artist, etc. is doing, get in touch and make those connections. As you grow, be idealistic but realistic. Dream big, but do what it takes to realize those big dreams. Otherwise, you’ll just disappoint yourself.

By the way, I want to point out that I wish I had had even half of this advice early on.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  Start by supporting other people.  Volunteer as an assistant editor or a reader, review books, guest edit magazines.  This will help you learn the publishing landscape before you dive into starting a press of your own.  You'll also learn practical skills that you'll need later on down the road, like copyediting, how to use Wordpress and Blogger, etc.  Perhaps more importantly, supporting others will help you build relationships with people in the literary community.  These more experienced writers and editors can give you advice, support, and resources when it comes time to start your own press. 

Be sure to stop by for the last installment of the Women Publishers' Roundtable, which will include a discussion of future projects from these excellent presses!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Sixth Installment

Hello and welcome to the Women Publishers' Roundtable!  Here you'll find the last interview question that was circulated among these small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy! 


Interview Question 6: Who do you envision as the audience for your press? For a feminist/woman-centered press more generally?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  I once had someone argue that women-centered presses were a bad idea, that they segregated women’s writing off into a separate sphere (presumably a sphere of interest only to women, which is completely inaccurate.) While I won’t even go into his ridiculous assumption that somehow male=universal and female=other, I did begin thinking about what dancing girl as a feminist press actually does and why it does what it does. If women continue to be published at a far less statistical advantage than the work of men, obviously there is a gap in the conversation of American poetry, a gap that I hope the titles we release work toward filling.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  We spend a lot of time talking about our audience. Who are they? We’re always a little baffled by it, and that’s something we’re hoping to keep better track of in the coming years. But just from our un-scientific observations, we have a pretty diverse readership. For one (to piggyback on what Kristy said), our readers aren’t just women. They also aren’t just poets. This I think goes back to what we’re trying to accomplish with our mission. We know that the audience for our books will always overlap with the submissions pool, but by making closely edited and beautifully designed books that touch a range of aesthetics and experiences, we enable ourselves to reach a broader audience.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  I am unabashedly most interested in providing literature for women and queers, in their vast expanses. What that means to me is that I’d like to lessen the loneliness and strengthen the nature of relationships within my community, connect people. A confused hot/loveline. I also think that most humans are freaks who feel like freaks, sometimes secretly and sometimes not, and it’s nice to read something gross and funny and smart and feel hope, excitement about being alive at the same time that such great writing and art is being produced and shared. I hope Birds of Lace has an audience that would delight and surprise me. What I want from a feminist press is a diverse range of writers/experiences and lives being written about in ways that are complex and sometimes confusing but always sprout a new carrion-eating/producing creature in your brain.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press): We seem to have a very diverse range of readers—poets, writers, friends, males, females, people of all sexual backgrounds, academics, working folk, and we’re very happy about it all. We want our work to appeal to everyone, recognizing that some work is very specific and may appeal to certain kinds of people. We just want to include everyone in the conversation. We just don’t want to publish safe work. We want to our work to be able to speak to people because it’s bold and daring, and has the power to infiltrate any one’s mind who is open to it. Anyone is welcome to love us, join us, submit to us.

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): Obviously, as both Kristy and Whitney have pointed out, our audience is strongly made up of the kinds of people who would submit to and publish with our press, but that isn’t the end all and be all of our audience. I think as we’ve grown, we’ve reached out to a lot of different people who appreciate not just good writing by women, but good writing in general. One of our biggest growth areas has been among young writers, those who are perhaps not well published but invested in knowing what’s “out there” and becoming a part of that plurality of voices. I think they are a strong subset of the feminist/women-centered press’s audience(s) because they are the most likely to take the lessons at the heart of such presses and apply them in a larger capacity—reviewing, promoting, and celebrating books by women without that “female=other” construction in their minds.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications):  I used to think I knew exactly what our readership was like at Sundress, but in the last five years, it's so hard to tell.  Our projects are so diverse that's I think it's hard to pin us down.  Certainly we're not as experimental (as a whole) as T.A. is at Flaming Giblet, but we're open to pretty much all types of writing as long as it resonates on some emotional level.  Thirteen years later, I'm still not a fan of clever for clever's sake.

That being said, I think a lot of people make assumptions about us because of our name; Sundress definitely has a gendered assumption to it.  But the more people become familiar with the Bestof the Net or our journals (which include magazines devoted to sports poetry and trailer park philosophy), the less I think they consider us a “women's press,” which is too bad.  Because we're a pretty fucking badass press, run by a lot of badass women.  (And Nick McRae.  Hi, Nick!) 

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  One of the questions that comes up most frequently when I'm talking with someone about the press is, "Why don't you publish men?"  I find that our decision to publish exclusively female writers gives the impression that our audience is only women, and that men aren't welcome.  This is completely untrue.  Noctuary Press strives to create dialogue about the gender politics inherent in our definitions of genre, and this is an issue that concerns everybody in the literary community.  It's strange to me that the question of audience never really comes up with literary genres that are predominantly male, or, this question is never phrased in terms of gender.  Kristy's absolutely right that many people have created a dichotomy in their minds, where male = universal, female = other.  Because the press strives to interrogate this kind of thinking, and the ways that it manifests in our treatment of genre, I hope that we'll cultivate an increasingly diverse audience.   I say this because I believe that everyone benefits from greater diversity and inclusion in the publishing world, not just women or other underrepresented social groups.

Please stop by for the next installment, which will include the editors' advice for women hoping to start small presses!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Fifth Installment

Welcome back to Delirious Hem's Women Publishers' Roundtable.  Here you'll find the latest interview question that was circulated to this group of small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question 5: Given the increasing availability of resources for small publishers, do you feel that book publishing has been largely democratized? Based on your experience as a woman publisher, what work has yet to be done?

Kristy Bowen (Editor, Dancing Girl Press):  I always like to try to imagine doing what I do 25 years go (or at least pre-internet days) and I’m not sure it would be possible. Not only would it be logistically different to physically produce & distribute books, it would also be really difficult to connect with an audience, or to even FIND an audience, all of which has been remedied by online communities of various sorts—list servs, blogs, social media platforms, etc. Since women still encounter the sort of roadblocks that shouldn’t exist, I imagine 25 years ago those sort of things would be even more difficult in a more limited channel of dissemination.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Editor, Switchback Books):  I wouldn’t say it’s democratized. You still have to acknowledge the tremendous privilege it is to say, I’m going to start this thing, I’m going to take another person’s creative work and manifest it in some consumable way and they will trust me to do this. Not that many people are given the educational and socio-economic conditions from which to boldly declare that. To say, I have free time during which I can work for no pay. That’s the reality of small press publishing. Even publishing online isn’t free (the investment in time and access to/understanding of technologies has a price), and we need to be aware of that in the ways we perceive the economics of publishing. As far as what work is yet to be done? Woof. This is a question I don’t feel at all qualified to answer.

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Gina Abelkop (Editor, Birds of Lace Press):  Democratized to a degree. It does cost money and access to resources to print literature, as Switchback books states above. That said, there are so many exciting things happening in independent publications and literature. I see many excellent projects gaining funding via Kickstarter or benefit events. I certainly don’t think publishing has ever been as democratized as it is now. What work is to be done? Oh, so much. There is much work to be done for the inclusion, respect and representations of women, people of color, queers, genius freaks taking the time to think/write through, around and outside of the questions of being human , and so many more- not that all those populations can be conflated in terms of privilege or lack thereof, but that these voices have been and continue to be relegated to the margins and to literary ghettos.. There is a world of work to be done that extends beyond issues such as the afore mentioned but these are the issues that concern me, and the project of BoL, most.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Editor, Patasola Press):  I don’t think it’s largely democratized at all. I think one does have to have to spare time (or make it). It does take some financing. Paying for conferences like AWP gets super pricy, and only some people can afford that. It also takes the ability to thread an audience and build a network, and it takes some cultured credibility to be trusted. It’s difficult. It’s not easy for women, these days, I think. I get the question: “why are you a feminist press? why do you focus on women?” and sometimes, the question comes with, “so why won’t you publish men?” I don’t think that we have to be “othered” because we have that focus. That’s a problem. I do publish men, but I also see the necessity to promote women full-force. Having to answer those questions shows there is a problem. However, with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and countless other resources, I think there’s a grand playing field. It’s just time to level it out.

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T.A. Noonan (Editor, Sundress Publications): Democratized? I wouldn’t say that. I agree with Kristy that we couldn’t even come close to doing what we do without the technology available to us now. But, as Whitney points out, there is a tremendous amount of privilege necessary to run a press. To manifest the work in some kind of consumable form, publishers need to be able to read the work, appreciate it, work with the author and establish trust, edit the text, design the book, find the appropriate audience, market to that audience, and a bunch of other things that aren’t coming to mind. This takes resources—not necessarily monetary, but resources nonetheless.

It is easier than it used to be, though. And I think that because we create these networks, we have the ability to disseminate crucial works more freely, which in turn, helps create larger networks of readers, authors, collaborators, and supporters who are willing to take risks.

Here’s an observation, though: the fact that we have to ask what still needs to be done is a testament that there is so much more to do. I also don’t really feel qualified to answer the question in any kind of complete and cogent way, but I have some ideas about what I think should happen in my ideal universe. I’d love to see more publishers focusing exclusively on female and female-identified writers. The technology needs to be even more accessible in terms of cost, purpose, and ease of use. I wish the writing and publishing community would look more to the DIY and crafting community for inspiration; the ways in which they promote and distribute their work and the strength of their networking is simply astonishing.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Editor, Sundress Publications): I would say that in terms of means of production, certainly.  With POD, online publishing, or blogging, there are ways to publish both online and IRL for ultimately free.

However, that doesn't mean that the playing field is even.  There's still the time you need to be able to invest to read submissions, promote books/issues, solicit authors, so on.  You also need the skill to be able to code and design.  You need the right friends who are willing to promote.  There's always a hierarchy of taste, prestige, connections, etc.  I'm privileged enough to have a job that allows me the time to be able to do all of the things that Sundress does—book and e-chap publishing, the Best of the Net anthology, contests, print anthologies, lit journals, AWP readings, etc etc—and I'm blessed to have an amazing staff of volunteers and interns who give their time to do it with me for some free booze from time to time.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Editor, Noctuary Press):  I agree that the means of production are certainly more accessible than they were, say, twenty-five years ago.  In my opinion, much of the work that has yet to be done pertains to the way that we (as readers, as artists, and as a culture) assign value to literary texts.  Sure, texts can be easily produced and disseminated to readers.  But the way most people define "legitimacy" is very old-fashioned.  I don't think we can claim that publishing has been democratized until texts that are published and disseminated by alternative means are considered just as legitimate, worthwhile, and valuable as other literary texts. 

Please stop by for Part Six of the Women Publishers' Roundtable, which will include a discussion of marketing, promoting, and building an audience for a woman-centered press!

Women Publishers' Roundtable: Fourth Installment

Wecome to Part Four of the Women Publishers' Roundtable!  Here you'll find the last interview question sent to this group of small press editors, as well as the conversation that followed.  Enjoy!

Interview Question 4: Why did you choose to disseminate these texts in the way that you did? In other words, why a chapbook and not a perfect-bound book, and vice versa? Why did some of you turn away from the book/chapbook format altogether?

Kristy Bowen (Dancing Girl Press):  The decision to do chapbooks came from equal parts economics and my own love of papery things. Perfect bound books were too expensive to produce, and yet, having been publishing wicked alice electronically, I had this yearning for something physical, something tangible Since I was funding the whole venture out of pocket, it was a relatively inexpensive, low-risk , project to launch—needing little more than a booklet stapler, card stock, a printer, and some late night assembly marathons. There was also this flurry of chapbook publishing going on at the time (circa 2004) with a number of publishers appearing on my radar that were publishing chapbooks (sometimes exclusively, sometimes in tandem with other media (Effing, Horseless, NMP, BigGame Books, Ugly Duckling, Noemi, all sorts of author-issued chapbooks). It seemed like a great time to dive in.

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S. Whitney Holmes (Switchback Books):  I can’t speak for the Founding Editors as to why they chose to make perfect-bound books, but I can say that I think it’s heavily tied to our mission. Implicit in the idea of promoting the work of women poets as a way of making up for what other presses aren’t doing is the idea that we should respond by doing what we wish they were doing—and that’s publishing and promoting full-length collections of poetry by women. While we do aim to make beautiful books (and succeed), the book-as-art-object is less important to our mission than the book as a professionally-produced-and-promoted object. We love chapbooks (and we did do a limitededition collection of four chapbooks by Monica de la Torre), but perfect binding is part of the package we’re trying to offer to women poets.

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Gina Abelkop (Birds of Lace Press):  DIY publishing is cheap and fun. I made zines in high school and the cut-and-paste, photocopied style seemed accessible to me in that it seemed do-able without much know-how. In the late 90s/early 2000s I came across Roxanne Carter’s Persephassa press. She was printing people’s work at home, binding the chapbooks/books/journals herself, selling them online. It hadn’t really occurred to me that such a thing was possible, that you could just distribute work you loved like that. Making chapbooks is fun and creative and I like using my hands do it. I buy paper from Mr. French (which I also came into contact with via Persephassa) for the covers and usually do the design myself, though sometimes I get to work with very brilliant artists like Rhanimals and Susanna Troxler, who both did illustrations for Carrie Murphy’s chapbook, Meet the Lavenders. Jeanine Deibel, who we’re publishing in March, designed her own cover. I absolutely want to do perfect-bound books as well, because they’re a different kind of beautiful and can be distributed in larger numbers, and I believe in the physical preservation and documentation of art by people who aren’t usually canonized. Anna Joy Springer’s The Birdwisher was our first (and so far only) perfect-bound book but eventually I’d like to do something like two fancy (gold foil, french flaps, etc), vastly proliferated perfect-bound books and 3-5 handmade chapbook titles a year. Until I have the monetary resources to do so I will very happily provide limited edition chapbooks, because they’re cheap to produce/purchase, the entrance of their words into the public realm is vital, and they are beautiful objects.

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Lisa Marie Basile (Patasola Press):  We’re totally volunteer-run with almost no budget, so we opt for an on-demand model. We buy ISBNs and use an on-demand model to print the books. We’re open to both chapbook and book formats, and we usually go perfect-bound for all projects. We may, in the future, go with saddle stitch, and we’re happy to explore that in time. Nothing is closed to us. One day we hope to print a book with gold-plated pages. Oh, and maybe a pop-out. And tiny books. We are concerned with our books being available as an always-available item with an ISBN, and we think that is important for authors to have, but that doesn’t mean that a chapbook without isn’t valuable. The chapbook, which exists as a sort of temporary beauty many times, is still gorgeous to us, of course!

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T.A. Noonan (Sundress Publications): Sundress does or has done a little bit of everything: chapbooks, limited edition art-object chapbooks, e-chaps, perfect-bound books. I think the only thing we haven’t really done yet is an e-book. There are some limitations there, especially for more experimental and/or visually engaged texts, but we’re working on that.

Lately, we’ve been doing a lot more in the way of perfect-bound books because there is that sense of “the book as a professionally-produced-and-promoted object,” and for a lot of writers, it’s a crucial part of representing their work as something to be taken seriously. Despite this, we have a huge investment in online publishing (hence our continued interest in e-chaps), and I personally must profess a serious love of the “book-as-art-object.” So, I think it depends on what we personally and collectively want to accomplish with our authors and as a press.

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Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications): What she said. Personally, there's a part of me that would like to see everything we publish be online.  That's where the readers are, and ultimately what we want for our press is to get our writers' work in front of as many eyes as possible.  It's not that I believe print is dead, nor do I wish it so.  I just have numbers—which show that our free e-chapbooks receive hundreds of downloads a month, something any print press would love to say about their more tangible publications.  That being said, the books are awfully pretty.

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Kristina Marie Darling (Noctuary Press):  When I first started Noctuary Press, I was determined to create perfect-bound books with ISBN numbers.  This is still an important part of the press's mission.  This is mostly because the book as a cultural object embodies the idea of "legitimacy" for many writers.  And so much of the time, women's writing that takes place at the peripheries of existing genre categories is perceived as "illegitimate."  This is often because the channels of distribution presuppose that writing will fall into legible, and often very limiting, genre categories.  The text that can't be disseminated becomes the illegitimate text.  I wanted to offer a place where women's writing that challenges genre categories can be perceived as legitimate.  I also wanted to offer a channel of distribution, allowing this work to be disseminated to an appreciative audience 

Please stop by for the fifth installment, which will include a discussion of technology and the small press!