Umberto Eco, from his collection of essays, On Literature (English translation
published in 2004):
I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they
told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that
no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today?
My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will
read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the
desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive,
and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even
on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense.
One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only
for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic.
Even from a rigorously secular point of view.
Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future
reader (334).
***
I didn’t use Eco's quote to debate or analyze its contents; I
used it because I think it speaks to the tremendous importance of those who bring books to life: publishers.
Presses are one of the most essential part of the writing
community. And because “small presses” typically strive to publish work “beyond
mainstream literature,” small press publishing houses are vital to poets,
translators and writers of experimental fiction. Today I am featuring an
interview between Rusty Morrison, co-founder of Omnidawn Publishing, and
Gillian Hamel, senior poetry editor for Omnidawn and managing editor for the
press’ online imprint, OmniVerse. In
2001, Rusty founded Omnidawn Publishing with her husband, Ken Keegan. Today
Omnidawn is one of the most well respected, highly regarded small presses in
North America. Omnidawn, with tremendous help from Gillian Hamel, has also renovated
the press’ old blog into the zine OmniVerse,
which has become one of the best contemporary online resources for interviews,
new creative work and essays. Omnidawn Publishing’s website lists approximately
50 full-length poetry titles (many of which have won prestigious awards and prizes),
and OmniVerse now credits over 100
contributors; a stunning achievement, especially when one considers Omnidawn’s short
12 years of existence and its small masthead of staff members. Interestingly, both
Rusty and Gillian combined two of my questions: 1.) What’s the most difficult
part of working in this industry, and 2.) What’s the most rewarding part of
working in this industry? Says something, doesn’t it?
Eco: “One writes only for a reader.”
Me: “One writes (or reads [or lives]) only to experience the
thrill of fascination.”
In any case, these are two women who deserve a lot of praise.
Sarah Suzor: How did
you meet? And how long have you known each other?
Rusty Morrison: Gillian
is a friend of Sara Mumolo, who works for Omnidawn. Sara told us that she knew
a poet who would be a perfect addition to our staff. Gillian has exceeded every
expectation that I had; she’s become such an integral part of our team, I can’t
imagine Omnidawn without her.
Gillian Hamel: I
came to Rusty and Omnidawn through the wonderful, nebulous network of the MFA
program at St. Mary’s College in the fall of 2009. My friend Sara Mumolo, who
went through the MFA a year ahead of me, had been in Rusty’s workshop at SMC
and was interning at Omnidawn. She got me some review copies of Omnidawn’s
books for our MFA’s literary journal, MARY:
A Journal of New Writing, and I was so impressed by their exquisite design,
literary sophistication, and all-around excellence that I asked her about
interning there as well. She was happy to set me up with Rusty, and I couldn’t
be more grateful to her for being another pillar of influence in my involvement
with poetry.
SS: What about your
career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?
GH: In a way,
everything – Omnidawn opened up so many different avenues to me of exploration
and innovation in understanding poetry, making books, and talking to other
poets. I doubt I would have taken such initiative to design and manage an
online journal, or to start my own chapbook imprint. There are so many other
important people I would never have met. Most importantly, however, to the
question of ‘career’ within this question, I might not have ever learned to
take myself seriously as a poet and a functional participant in the project of
poetry – which is to say, I would not have learned not only to trust my
abilities in those areas, but also to understand when my limitations aren’t as
serious as they seem.
RM: I did a
second-take when I saw the word “career” in your question. I understand why you’ve
used it, since you are asking about my work as Omnidawn’s co-publisher and
poetry senior editor. And, certainly, in that context, I want to talk about the
ways that Gillian Hamel’s presence continually renews and enlivens my approach
to what Omnidawn can do and can become. I also sense that your question is
broad enough to allow me to share the ways that my relationship to Gillian has
enlivened my own writing, since I do see myself as being a poet as much as I
see myself as a publisher. These two kinds of work fill the space that should
mean “career” to me. The dictionary defines “career” as “an occupation
undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities
for progress.” Poetry and presswork certainly have taken over all “significant”
time in my life, but I wonder if one can speak of “progress” when discussing a
creative project—be it a press or the poems I write. How does an artist gauge
“progress”?
One of the most valuable aspects of my relationship with
Gillian is that her vitality—her continually fresh approach to aesthetics—opens
me to my own beginner’s mind. I can trust that she shares my way of seeing
“progress” as including regress and digress, and even a salting of anti-gress,
which can lead to new ingress. These aren’t typical words for articulating
“career” path success, but they are essential words for constantly
re-envisioning what a press can do, and what a poem can do.
SS: Rusty, why did
you start the online magazine, OmniVerse?
RM: There
wouldn’t be an online magazine called OmniVerse,
if it weren’t for Gillian. Ken and I had wanted to create a magazine that would
be a place to foster conversations about literature and the arts (a place where
we could publish work that had nothing to do with Omnidawn), but it wasn’t
until Gillian envisioned the form that we actually ventured into this.
SS: Gillian, how did
you get the position of Managing Editor for OmniVerse?
GH: We’d had a
slowly dilapidating blog, in its heyday a lively hub of news and discussion of
all things Omnidawn and the broad poetic community, curated expertly by the
inimitable Craig Santos Perez. As he began to limit his involvement in this
project and focus more on his teaching career, Rusty generously offered me the
position of the blog’s senior editor. However, my inability to navigate the
format so capably combined with our rising presence on other social media
outlets eventually rendered the blog much less relevant than it had been. The
space in social media to focus on Omnidawn was well-established, and so we
wanted to cultivate something for the work beyond Omnidawn’s immediate reach of
publication. With Rusty’s support, I decided the best thing to do was serve
another facet of Omnidawn’s involvement in the poetic community and, somewhat
selfishly, fulfill a longtime dream of mine of founding and editing a literary
journal. In my opinion, there will never be enough places to showcase the
diversity of new work, criticism, and engagement in our art form, and I’m glad
that Rusty and Ken agreed there was a place at Omnidawn for me to indulge this
passion with one more outlet.
SS: What’s the most
difficult part of working in this industry? What’s the most rewarding part of
working in this industry?
RM: My husband
Ken Keegan and I began Omnidawn in 2001 because we believe that small,
independent presses are essential: they disseminate fresh, lively, culturally
pertinent and provocative literature. A society needs many small presses so that widely diverse ideas and points-of-view
are easily accessible to everyone. As Italo Calvino tells us, “… the function
of literature is communication between things that are different simply because
they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between
them, following the true bent of written language."
Ken had wanted to begin a press for years, but we never felt
we were secure enough financially to do this, and we never felt that we had
enough time. But, in 2001, we realized that there is never enough time or money
to begin a project like this—we realized that if we waited any longer, then
we’d never do it. So, we plunged in, aware of the precarious nature of publishing.
We have no regrets; we are excited about every new book, every new project. But
it is an excitement tinged by our awareness of the precariousness and
challenges of small press life. I suppose that our awareness of the risk helps
us to savor every moment, every pleasure.
I share this history because I think it’s the best answer
for both parts of your question. I am constantly rewarded by the opportunity to
be in conversation with writers whose voices are resonant and relevant to the
changing moment in which I live. What’s most difficult is that the work of
running a press doesn’t end at 5pm, and the week doesn’t end on Friday
afternoon. We remain thrilled by the challenges, and always a bit overwhelmed
by the possibilities.
GH: I decided to
conflate these two questions because – and perhaps this is going to sound a
little cheesy – the ways in which the work of poetry challenges, frustrates,
and exhilarates me are pretty much inextricable. The limitations of things like
money and physical space and time are obviously stifling and need no further
examination, but the fact of their inevitability makes the result of your work
a victory that is both indulgently contrarian and deeply valuable. It seems
facile to make these kinds of statements, but I think it’s sort of pointless to
argue against them, especially where poetry is concerned. We all know we’re
working in such a fraught, marginalized space, and we carry on in spite of that
and because of that and with the sort of forbidden knowledge that it’s actually
what makes us thrive. In a way, I kind of love that things like e-readers are
becoming so ubiquitous because it’s begun to validate the craft of what I do –
as the imperative for the cheap and utilitarian in printed books disappears, we
have more room to explore the medium, to discover the interplay between printed
and digital materials, to return the art to the form and let the poetry breathe
in the space that’s been created.
SS: Rusty, what is
most valuable about working with Gillian?
RM: Partly, I’ve
answered this in my reply to your first question. But I’ll give you an example
of my pleasure in working with Gillian: When we were about to begin the poetry
collaboration that you asked us to create for you, Gillian quickly offered to
write the first installment. She has a limberness of mind that seems ever-ready
to engage, to participate, to expand a predicament into ‘play’, as well as to
propose in that play a process. As I read her deft, airily engaging first
installment of our collaboration, I could see that she’d created a form which
would let us respond to each other while also exploring our own preoccupations.
She used the concept of ‘collaboration’ as subject matter, but kept that use
light enough so that we could speak to it in our own manner, from our own
‘mannered’ presentation of agency, from our own speaking mannequin.
SS: Gillian, what’s
your favorite memory of Rusty?
GH: Recently, I’d
been having some anxieties about my own writing process, and I was having
anxieties about coming to Rusty with those anxieties. I think I try a little
too hard, in the service of my ‘career’ (whatever that might be), to maintain a
veneer of professionalism, especially where our Omnidawn relationship is
concerned, and I owe a lot to Rusty for putting a little pressure on my need to
stifle what was always going to be a very organic exchange of creative as well
as professional influence. On top of my own communication issues, both of us
are so busy with our publishing work and with my side jobs that it was
difficult to find a time for us to sit down over lunch or coffee and figure out
what my problem was – in the end, at Rusty’s behest, we ended up sitting in her
car outside my office and talking things out, and I think it was one of the
most honest and transformative conversations we’ve had, and a huge relief of
anxiety for both of our writing processes. I don’t think I would have ever thought
of such an imperfect setting for such an important conversation, protective as
I am about having some beautiful, well-lit, quiet space to be with poetry. It’s
back to that issue of the frustrations of time and obligation forcing you to do
something that is actually a more perfect form of the thing you were trying to
do than you could imagine, and it’s something that I probably would never have
learned to embrace without Rusty’s influence.
SS: Gillian, if Rusty
had an all expenses paid vacation, where do you think she’d go?
GH: Rusty and Ken
take on such a burden of work that I’d love to see them do something totally
escapist and indulgent like spend a month in Italy or something, but I know
that in particular what Rusty would really want is to just sit down somewhere
quiet and spend time reading and writing.
SS: Rusty, if you had
an all expenses paid vacation, where would you go?
RM: I will take
“all expenses paid” as meaning that I would be given some stipend that would
allow me a couple weeks off! I’d just hunker down with all my favorite books
and my laptop and write.
SS: Gillian, why do
you think it’s important to cultivate these working relationships?
GH: I’m a staunch
believer that no one should work alone or really do anything alone. It’s
thrilling (particularly in a romantic, American way) to imagine yourself
freewheeling away at some enterprise by yourself, but it’s too easy to proceed
in a vacuum and never understand the context of what you’re doing. It is
necessary to have someone around you reminding you that an outside world
exists. The sharp differences between individuals are of course just as
necessary, but they create these permeable spheres of influence and generative
discomfort that is both vital to and even sort of a macrocosm (or microcosm, or
even just a parallel form? They’re so evenly weighted and relational) of the
work of poetry. Working with Rusty has tempered a lot of my anxieties and
encouraged me to forge ahead with many things I would have previously avoided,
not the least of which includes accepting what my perfectionistic brain would
ordinarily think of as failure (and I don’t just mean accepting failures as
they occur, but also the even more important distinction that the possibility
of failure is not always something even worth considering).
SS: Where do you see
Omnidawn/OmniVerse in ten years?
RM: Ten years!
Sometimes I wonder if I can see ahead ten minutes! Of course, we have goals for
Omnidawn, and we work to achieve them. But we keep an open mind regarding how
the press might respond to the changing face of small press publishing. I am
not someone who makes future predictions. I do keep a constantly renewing wish
list—and I let those wishes spiral outward from all the compass points of our
current activities. Much of that wish-list is in pencil. But inked into my
hopes for the future are the names of the people who make up Omnidawn’s staff.
We have regular meetings where we talk long about our own creative work and the
creative work that the press can achieve. I envision that intellectual
environment as remaining the core of what Omnidawn becomes.
GH: As a clearly
classifiable ‘young person,’ I have difficulty imagining the future in ways
that aren’t wild and implausible. However, one of the things I can imagine in a
way that’s plausibly unpredictable is the evolution of the culture and
composition of Omnidawn – not just in the possibility of growth and new staff,
but in the evolution of dynamics among our existing staff members and how we
are all constantly transforming the way we work together. I’m sure I’ve used
the terms ‘exploration’ and ‘innovation’ many other times in this interview,
but these are essential qualities to the mettle of Omnidawn that are embodied
in our staff in a way I’ve never seen in people before, and the natural
eruption of ideas for new and better additions to the work of publishing and of
poetry is a thrill to watch at every meeting. As I’m sure Ken and Rusty will be
too humble to tell you, Omnidawn has really carved an indelible foothold in the
community and work of poetry in its first ten years, and I’m sure that in the
next ten years it will not only endure but continue to cultivate an even
stronger, deeper, evolving presence in its changing landscape.
SS: Gillian, what’s
the most inspirational aspect of working with Rusty?
GH: I’d say one
of the most vital and encouraging things I’ve learned from Rusty is the nature
of limitation – when it is insurmountable and necessary, when it is imagined or
absent, and when it doesn’t matter at all.
To read Rusty and Gillian's collaboration click this link:
Download Gillian.rusty.collab.final
http://www.omnidawn.com
Here’s a link to Omnidawn Publishing’s website.
http://omniverse.us Here’s
a link to Omniverse