I run a small press and a magazine
too, so I'm happy to talk about that kind of thing.
But I guess I'm going to talk a little bit more
from my perspective as a writer, which is--
I really like electronic texts and I really like print texts.
And I like designing both of them.
I like doing things in InDesign, and I like
doing things in Dreamweaver.
And a lot of what excites me, sort of as a writer,
and kind of like former hacker, is the possibility of I
see something, I kind of want to try it and see how it goes.
And so I was thinking I mean with my--
I mean, I'm also completely committed to both.
Print, electronic, they each have advantages,
they each have things that are great about them.
And finding ways of combining them
has been a really interesting process for me.
Because with my most recent book of essays,
it's actually as if there's words in there that have
a little dagger glyph on them.
They're kind of almost meant to be clickable.
And what that means is that, if you see the word, one of them
is like "ball" you can type that into the website for the book
and it opens up new content in one way or another.
And there's some sort of free content that's up there.
But not just as a way of like adding extras,
but my idea was I thought it would be nice to try to--
because I was writing a lot about this idea
of the self, which I think is inherently unstable thing,
though pretty much our whole civilization
is based on us believing that it's stable.
But maybe it's not, I mean, there's no way it is.
But we still have to believe in it, or also kind
it kind of can't work.
I thought I'd try to build these holes into the book that
would be inherently unstable, except that I could change
my mind about certain things.
Like, what do I think about this?
I kind of think one thing now, but I
can edit the webpage for this, and expand that in other ways,
and kind of grow it toward in different directions.
Obviously including with video, and audio, and stuff like that,
is as an added bonus of that.
I mean, it's a little clunky, but I'm pretty invested
in ways of trying to combine them, and make them work
together, and play off of each other,
instead of setting themselves up against each other,
and just saying that like, no, our e-book, no,
our letterpress, or whatever.
Both-- they're all great.
And I really echo that to me, the exciting thing
as a writer of this sort of terrifying kind of publishing,
where all this stuff is devolving from publishers
toward writers, who are now kind of
have to be our own agents if we had agents to begin with.
Half the time we might be self-publishing.
We might be in charge of--
we might get to tinker with book design,
even if we're on a press, a pretty good poetry press.
10 years ago, you wouldn't have you wouldn't
have to say in any of that.
Now you could actually do something with that
if you want to, because the press may not have a designer.
So the downside is that you have to.
The upside is, well you get you.
And there's opportunities for agency of artistic growth,
and control that I think are pretty exciting.
I guess that's kind of maybe a good place
to move into, if the whole panel is basically
about self-publishing.
And like you were just saying, the self
is inherently really unstable.
Therefore your publisher is unstable.
And what kind of position does that put you in?
If you're self-publishing, your editor,
and your agent, and your publisher,
are all just as unstable as you are.
And so you can publish things, like you said,
publish it online yourself on your own website,
and then change it every day if you want to.
And so that destabilizes what publishing means,
this came up in your talk.
And this is maybe practical, it's also philosophical,
but it's got a practical aspect to it in that,
like you said, if somebody posts a comment on Amazon,
and it's an extra-interesting poetic comment,
can you use that as a publishing credit for a grant or whatever
because it's published online?
Or it does it need to be on a blog publishing?
Is that publishing?
Have you been published then, or does it
need to be on a website?
Or does it need to not say blogspot.com at the end of it,
or like Trickhouse or something, Drunken Boat, one
of these things?
At what point do you become actually a published?
It doesn't matter in a large, philosophical sense.
And that's not a very playful thing
to spend too much time thinking about,
but when it comes to the practical aspects of publishing
something in print, does it mean that it's already
been published if it's somewhere on the internet,
and a print publication might not want to pick it up then,
these sorts of things?
Does anybody want to talk to that?
I'll sort of answer briefly.
I run an online magazine, Diagram,
and we don't republish stuff, I guess unless we really like it.
Or if we really feel--
we republished one of--
Ben Marcus actually did a diagram for this art show.
And it was just for this art show,
so it's pretty small-- wasn't distributed, we'll republish
that, because that seems OK.
But I mean, it is a consideration, people--
we have a review process.
We make people sign contracts.
And we do things like--
when I edited Blackboard Review, which is an old print magazine,
we have a very similar contract to that.
We take first North American serial rights,
which is kind of meaningless now in some ways.
And we'll try to--
if we're going to assess something that's, say,
on a blog--
my friend Paul Guest, he publishes a lot of his poems
in his blog.
He's a great poet.
But if we were to publish one of those poems,
we would want him to take it off the blog, or to have
or to have it in chunks because we
would want at least some kind of exclusive time with it.
And I recognize this may be a kind of like archaic model,
but I mean we also publish reprints of like etchings
from like 1846, various scientific things,
so we're kind of an old school look in that sense.
But to me, there are legal rights issues that
actually do come into play.
We don't care if it's on a personal website, I would say,
but if it becomes anything that's
being distributed widely, then that's a concern for us.
Not to say we would never do it, but we
would try to talk with-- we'd try to work with the writer
if we're super interested in it to see what we can do.
So is it kind of a case by case thing
in a sense it's amorphous, there's not like a line drawn?
We have a line, but it's not real hard, I guess.
I mean we're open to wiggling it in some cases
if we like the work enough.
But I mean, to us, there is-- if it's
published then it's published.
But you have a literary magazine,
no matter if it's a literary magazine that
is just uses Blogspot, or uses like Typepad,
or something like that.
Even if they call it a magazine or a journal,
I call that published.
There's no real way around that.
Although, I mean again, there's a, well--
you say like, publishing and say like an undergraduate student
journal limited to a college, I know
we have a Persona here at the I'm
at the University of Arizona.
If you publish a story in there, can you really
not send it to another?