April Ossmann FARMINGTON, ME April Ossmann dispatches from her offices at Alice James Books, a collectively run poetry press founded in 1973. Friday: 05.26.06 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Directing Alice James Books is a dream job: I get paid to read, edit, and argue about poetry. And having worked for a more traditional independent press, I was particularly attracted by AJB’s cooperative, power-to-the-poets (knowledge-is-power) and feminist/diversity model. Poetry and social justice in one—how cool is that?

As a poet, I like that we give our authors real input in cover art and design choices, and as a publisher, I think it works as a positive force in the success of the book (and ultimately, the author’s career). An author happy with the book design is generally an author who participates more energetically in the publicity and marketing process, and we ask for a lot of participation. The unusual level of participation in editing, design, marketing and publicity is part of what makes being published by AJB different, part of how we empower our poets in the publishing process. That combined with the fact that our cooperative poets make business decisions on behalf of the press and choose manuscripts for publication, gives our authors unusual insight into the publication process.

I am also a fan of our acquisition-by-consensus model. I think it makes for very fair book contests, exciting and challenging aesthetic arguments, and consistently good and diverse editorial choices. Contest winners (and solicited authors) are decided by a consensus of an 8 – 10 rotating-member editorial board, so all of the finalists are read carefully by all of us, and discussed both at the screening and at the finalist meeting. That’s a lot of personal attention.

It works like this: We hold our screenings in central New England as a convenience to board members and for maximum screener pools. For our regional contest (the Kinereth Gensler Award), we generally have three to eight screeners (generally published poets and/or MFA candidates) in addition to our board members, and up to twenty for our national contest (the Beatrice Hawley Award). Every manuscript is read by a minimum of two people, one of whom must be a board member.

If a manuscript gets two “nos,” it is eliminated, but any combination of “yeses,” “nos” and “maybes” continues to be read until we are clear whether or not it is a semi-finalist or better (two board “yeses” make a manuscript a finalist). After all the manuscripts are read, our screeners depart, and the board members winnow the semi-finalists down to a smaller pool of finalists. Then the office staff photocopies and ships all the finalist manuscripts to the board members, and we spend a few weeks reading them carefully before meeting to discuss which should be published. That meeting generally lasts between six and eight hours, and generates the marvelous aesthetic discussion (and close consideration of contemporary poetry) I referred to earlier.

My pleasure in that is surpassed only by my enjoyment of working with our authors to edit their books, and by the way I feel when new books arrive from the printer and I hold a new title in my hands for the first time.

I’ll elaborate tomorrow on our feminist/diversity model, and talk later in the week about how being a publisher has affected my own writing (and reading) process, but I’d like to end today by inviting questions from readers about Alice James Books, about writing, being published, etc. I’m at your service!

I promised yesterday to talk in more detail about Alice James Books’ feminist/diversity commitment. Many people know that the press had a feminist mission from the beginning, but not that the commitment to publish women was never exclusive. The commitment to diversity has always been about providing opportunity for poets marginalized for gender and other reasons, such as sexual orientation, ethnicity, poetic style, “emerging” status as a poet, etc.

My understanding of the history—which largely resides in the collective memories of former collective members—is that despite discussions in the early years about whether to publish exclusively women, members read for quality, not gender, but advertised themselves as a feminist press. Two of the seven founding-member poets were men, and the press has continued to publish male poets throughout its history.

When I began my tenure at AJB six years ago, the ratio of female to male submissions (and titles published) was about two-thirds to one-third. Now, it’s closing in on 50-50, which I believe reflects the growing visibility of the press and growing awareness on the part of male poets that we don’t exclusively publish women.

I also suspect that it reflects a shift in opportunities in the larger literary marketplace: when the press was formed in 1973 there were far fewer opportunities for female poets to be published. I won’t say that things are gender-equal now, but they’re certainly closer, and male poets have to compete with female ones in a way they didn’t before, which perhaps has made it less unlikely that they would send a manuscript to a feminist press.

In talking about the diversity of our “list,” I’d like mention that we have made a firm commitment to continue publishing emerging well as established poets (generally at least half our titles are “first books”), and to publishing as broad a range of poetic styles as possible. We also do targeted advertising to reach poets from a range of ethnic backgrounds. I hope that poets of all stripes will think of AJB and the press with the big welcome mat outside the door.

My favorite task as a publisher-poet is editing our books. Editing is really a kind of Ur-reading for me, a process where I am both reader and writer, and I love it for what it teaches me about both. In the past when I hadn’t been writing new poems, I thought I’d be embarrassingly rusty when I wrote again, but I’ve been surprised to learn that I’m most often not. I finally realized why. It’s because good editing, for me, is writing: to get far enough into another poet’s sensibility and technique to effectively suggest edits is to operate from the same creative impulse as I do when writing new work.

The wide range of poetic styles we publish, from Liz Waldner to Frank Gaspar to Anne Marie Macari to Donald Revell to Lesle Lewis to Brian Turner, et al, has meant that in some sense I have had to teach myself to write like all of these authors. My goal is always to try to edit poets the way they would edit themselves if they could see their work more objectively, and this means finding a way to fall in love with each author’s work, if I’m not in love already. Sometimes it means overcoming my own resistance, sometimes my affinities.

On a technical level, I am less able to allow myself to excuse or ignore weaknesses in my own work, because I’ve so often criticized the same weaknesses in others. I have also learned that despite being an editor, I continue to benefit from having editors. Perhaps it’s possible to get outside one’s own head, but I can’t claim to have done it.

On a more spiritual level, I’ve learned to appreciate not just poetry, but poets I might not have befriended otherwise. Learning to appreciate a sensibility seemingly alien to my own has taught me an old lesson: that no one is as alien as I might think at first. It’s also made me both more sure of who I am as a poet and more willing to experiment. It gives me regular glimpses of who I might be, or am…as Lynda Hull wrote in “The Window”: “If each of us / contains, within, humankind’s totality, each possibility / then I have been so fractured, so multiple & dazzling / stepping towards myself . . .” a regular reminder for me to “dwell in possibility” (Dickinson).

Yesterday I talked about how the editing process affects my evolution as a writer. Today I’d like to begin by describing our editing process at Alice James Books, and end with some details about cooperative membership.

At the first stage of editing, a new author (whether or not a cooperative member*) is assigned a volunteer “buddy” from our cooperative board (someone who has already published at least one book) who makes editorial suggestions, including those given by members at the meeting where we choose which manuscripts to publish. The new author makes revisions as s/he sees fit, and then I offer suggestions for editing the revised manuscript and the author again revises according to her/his preferences. When the two of us agree that the book is finished, it is copy-edited and transmitted to the designer.

This editing process evolved based on a cooperative model of publishing which involved a lot of support from fellow members, and as far as I know, grew to include the director’s input after the press began hiring full-time directors. Although AJB is now more of a hybrid than a true cooperative as it has a four-person paid staff, I’m glad we’ve kept this aspect of communal support. I think it makes for more polished books and helps engender the unusual sense of community AJB authors seem to feel.

The other reason for that sense of community (aside from the many friendships forged) is the very real ownership our cooperative members have of the press. While they are fully active members, our cooperative member authors literally own the press, and work with the director to make business decisions and plan growth, as well as making consensus decisions to choose which manuscripts to publish.

A final word about that consensus process: it means that 8-10 board members must agree to agree on each manuscript offered publication, a nearly always challenging assignment, given the wide range of tastes among members. It’s also rewarding. I have begun meetings favoring one manuscript over another and been persuaded otherwise, and I know others have had similar experiences. It is what I like most about the consensus decision-making: having the range of poetry I can appreciate widened—and being challenged to communicate specifically why I find a particular poetry worthy.

*Note: winners of our regional Kinereth Gensler Award become cooperative members with a work commitment to the press, but our national Beatrice Hawley Award does not carry a cooperative commitment.

For my final installment, I’d like to talk about another aspect of the way AJB operates that is different from most small presses. It doesn’t have to do with the fact that we’re a cooperative, but in the sense that our mission has always included an educational component by educating its poets as publishers, it might be considered an outgrowth of that philosophy (and also of the goal to empower authors and to create a community).

Nearly twelve years ago, Alice James Books moved from Cambridge and affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington, and it has been a fruitful relationship for both. In exchange for housing and other support, AJB trains 12-14 interns per year, drawn mostly from the University’s BFA in Creative Writing Program. Though many (if not most) publishers offer internships, few that I’m aware of have a program of such size and scope. Because the press is small, we all work in what would be different departments at a larger publishing house, and that includes our interns.

They perform essential work for us, and are just as likely to design an ad, catalog or newsletter, as they are to handle administrative tasks, interview a poet or put together a press kit or press release. In addition, all interns are offered the opportunity to design and produce a chapbook of their own work at the semester’s end. We require interns to compile a semester-end portfolio of their work, and they receive course credit and a pass-fail grade. UMF’s program is unusual and in my opinion, visionary, in requiring a publishing internship for all its degree candidates (there are a number of other internship opportunities available on campus and locally, including with Beloit Poetry Journal).

For those students seeking a writing-related career other than teaching, we offer a quality work experience; and for all our student authors (as for our cooperative members), we offer valuable insight into what remains a mystery to many writers: how submissions are processed and editorial decisions made, and how a manuscript becomes a book. I remember what it felt like to have my nose pressed against the glass between me and the publishing world, and I am happy to be able to invite like souls into the community.