And that leads to the next topic.
I'd like to talk about borders, cultural borders,
political borders, linguistic borders, borders
and genre and form.
In some ways, it seems borders are less relevant
today than ever.
And in some ways, they're increasingly hardened.
And I'm just curious how important
are these concerns to you and in making your decisions
about what to publish.
Well for us, they are pretty important
still because we're doing print in this sort
of a different thing.
I mean, we have to get our books in bookstores,
and there are borders in bookstores
in that, there's poetry, there's memoir, there's fiction,
and so you have to publish in those areas.
And when we have a book that's a hybrid, like I just
worked on a lyric essay that's very much a memoir,
but it's very much poetry.
And marketing had a hard time.
Where's it going to go in the bookstore?
So there's these tangible things that we
have to consider in print publications
that I can imagine wouldn't be as much of a concern online.
So in print, yes, we are still driven
by those kinds of borders.
I mean, even though we're online,
I mean, we do read in genre and we
ask people to identify a genre.
We also have an unidentified genre
that they can choose if they don't want to make the call.
And if you choose a poetry, it goes to the poetry people.
And if you choose fiction, it goes to the fiction people.
And admittedly, pretty much all of our poetry people
also write fiction and some nonfiction.
And so I mean there's multiple expertise,
but there's still-- and though we
don't identify like, in diagram when we publish a work as
to what it is.
Because it always kind of bothers me when people do that,
and I don't know why.
I mean, it shouldn't be.
I mean, it's perfectly reasonable.
I mean, there are commercial reasons
why you want to identify in a genre, or in a sub-genre,
or self-identify a fly one flag or another.
So I do think that there are still practical decisions.
And I think if I may as a writer,
when I started first sending out nonfiction, at the time,
there were very few nonfiction editors
of literary and literary journals,
so I would send it to the literary journal,
and my nonfiction would just go to the editor.
And which meant it got read a lot faster,
it would get decided on by one person as opposed
to a panel of readers, who all had some ax to grind.
And I just found myself having like very good luck publishing
nonfiction, which probably maybe had something
to do with my nonfiction.
But also just the way that literary journals
were set up in the first place.
And then that's changed to some extent now,
but it's still an important decision,
and that lyric essay is a great example
of this, which lyric essay for those who don't know or you can
argue about it I suppose, is an essay with a piece of art
with the stuff of essay, sort of inquiry, fact, world,
research, but the operates with the logic of poetry,
association, linguistic moves, beauty.
And to some extent, like the idea of a lyric essay
is a brand that has allowed poets to now write something
besides poetry if they want to.
I mean, or you can self-identify as a poet,
but I think it's become, it's a very genius move.
Or in the world of academia in particular,
where if you want a teaching job,
you sort of have to teach two things.
Well now, you know, I teach poetry and the lyric essay,
and there's a difference between them.
Certainly, and it's the thing that does straddle this border
and makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even me.
I'm reading it, I'm like, well, what is it?
And it's not how it doesn't how does the thing act?
What does it do?
And you know, certainly I mean, like a poem
move can happen in a story, it can happen in an essay.
And I really try to keep open to that.
But then there are practical considerations
that it's hard to live in the sense of total suspension.
Well in my case, I have published just poetry,
so I don't publish fiction or non-fiction.
I think there have been a few occasions, in some cases, where
maybe it's blurred the boundary towards memoir or perhaps
in collaborations.
It's veered towards prose, but from the beginning,
I wanted to focus primarily on publishing poetry.
And that's because that's where my interest lies,
but it's also because in terms of publishing,
really poets are the beggers of the publishing world.
It's much easier to publish nonfiction and fiction
and some more serious venues.
There's still that situation that I
had a friend in graduate school, who started out as a poet,
and then she found herself drawn to nonfiction.
And she since won the National Book Award for her nonfiction,
so she's some very good non-fiction writer.
But she talked about how she does felt this kind of despair
as a poet in graduate school.
And then in writing nonfiction, she
felt that she could actually have readers
that she would have more opportunity for publication.
I mean, if you look at the publishing
world for young poets coming out of their MFA programs,
or just working on their own, the way they get published is
they enter all of these innumerable book price things,
pay their fees until they go broke for a couple
3, 4, sometimes years.
And it's very difficult to just find
the publisher who will just publish poetry for nothing.
In other words, without the fee, without the whole
price systems.
So for me from the beginning, it was
important to create this space for poetry.
It's all sort of this gratis space.
I wish I could pay the contributors.
But on the other hand, they never have to pay a fee
or I've never taken the advertising.
So and it's very much part of this gift economy in terms
of poetry, but it's also something
that I think poets need this kind of International Space.
I do know most of the poets that we've published have since
been published in print, so they've had success
on that vineyard later on.
But I just felt that it was important to create
this space for poets.
I'll say one more short thing about this idea.
I mean, sometimes the act of sort
of being a genre rebel or whatever you want to call it
can be a sort of story.
I think of Jenny Boulis, a friend of mine,
and a great poet and essayist.
And when her most recent book came out,
she got a write up in poets and writers of Publishers Weekly,
or something like this.
Like, I mean, they essentially placed a press release
because she is someone who is known
as defying genre expectations.
I mean, while that can be its own sort of useless
pose for many of us, it's also a way of you do stand out
sometimes by doing that.
Sometimes it's in a negative way,
sometimes it's in a positive way.
And her publisher, who also published my book, first book
of fiction, they use it as a kind of PR move
and it worked very well.
We have about 10 minutes.
Why don't--