Guest Post: Joanne Merriam (Upper Rubber Boot Books)
on Publishing & Building Community
A writer’s day-to-day work often happens in isolation, but bringing a story, an essay, or a book to print and to the shelves of readers often takes many hands and hearts. There are several routes to publishing, from the Big Five to self-publishing.
Today’s guest post is by Joanne Merriam, who steps into the spotlight and looks back on her journey to becoming Publisher at her Independent Press, Upper Rubber Boot Books (@upperrubberboot). And she shares news of their big Kickstarter campaign to bring more women’s voices to readers.
My journey into publishing started with poet Molly Peacock, who had immigrated to Canada from the United States and who told me to start something to get people to come to me, when I commented on how difficult I was finding it to build a community, having immigrated in the other direction.
No, it started the previous year, when I started a Twitter zine, Seven by Twenty, which ended up helping me build an audience for the publishing company I was still on the fence about starting.
Or maybe it started a few months earlier, with an 18-hour drive from Concord, NH to Nashville, TN. My husband drove the moving van, and I drove our car, and had very little to think about. I was a writer with a single book and a few dozen magazine publications, and I wanted to grow to do the next thing, whatever that might be. I thought about publishing a magazine or books, or starting a review site, or some kind of online community.
Or it started earlier than that, with five years at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. We had only two staff, so I did whatever the Executive Director didn’t do, which was mostly running the office and some of the programming, keeping the volunteers organized, and answering questions from the general public about writing and publishing. I didn’t want to accidentally slander some real publishing company, so in my examples I often mentioned Upper Rubber Boot Books, a joky made-up small press named after a Nova Scotian expression for an insignificant, out of the way location, like America’s Podunk (Maritimers often name places Upper and Lower Whatsit, you see, instead of North Whatsit and South Whatsit, so Upper Rubber Boot would be even more remote than some place that had the misfortune of being named Rubber Boot). Naturally, when I started my own company, the name leapt to mind.
The history of URB is a history of building community. The work of producing the books we all enjoy requires so many more hands and minds than the author’s, from editors to proofreaders to graphic designers to printers, and that community is then supplemented by the hard work of distributors, the insight of reviewers, the energy of readers… and on it goes.
My first title was 140 And Counting, a best-of anthology for Seven by Twenty, which was funded by a Kickstarter campaign which also paid for our first 100 ISBNs. My next big title was Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose for the End of Days, also Kickstarted, which was co-edited by Alexander Lumans and Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, and which put URB on the map since it contained authors like Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates. Andrew then approached me to do a series of poetry chapbooks, which has built our community of writers and readers in a different direction.
Other Kickstarters included an immigrant science fiction anthology, How to Live on Other Planets, and a solarpunk anthology, Sunvault.
We’ve also released, without apparent external support, the dark feminist fiction anthology Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good, the adventure sci-fi anthology The Museum of All Things Awesome and that Go Boom, and a few single-author books like Argentine writer Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría’s Memory. I say “apparent” support because in fact all of our books receive amazing boosts, verbal and fiscal, from a wide community of readers, whose generosity continues to humble me, but whose support is largely invisible outside their own friends and family.
People have provided proofreading and cover art for free, and have promoted our work simply out of love for literature, which allows us to keep going. I’ve tried to pay that back by starting Small Press Week, which falls on the week of American Thanksgiving (2018 will be our third year – look for #spweek18!), and a monthly #SolarpunkChat which we co-founded with Reckoning Press.
Now we’re turning Choose Wisely into a series, with two new anthologies: Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good and Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good. Broad Knowledge―for which Christi hosted the cover reveal!―features a handful of reprints (by Nisi Shawl, Angela Slatter, Sonya Taaffe, and L. Timmel Duchamp) and original stories by Charlotte Ashley, Vida Cruz, Premee Mohamed, Rebecca Jones-Howe and 28 other non-binary, female, and genderqueer writers, all revolving around knowledge: what women know, and how knowledge changes their choices. Sharp & Sugar Tooth, edited by Octavia Cade (who wrote Food and Horror: Essays on Ravenous Souls, Toothsome Monsters, and Vicious Cravings), explores the dark side of food and consumption, and features stories by Catherynne M. Valente, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Chikodili Emelumadu, H. Pueyo, and 18 others.
I hope you’ll check out our Kickstarter and donate to pre-order (or even get a custom cover designed for you with your own artwork or photograph)!
URB’s Publisher is Joanne Merriam, a Nova Scotian poet and short story writer living in Nashville. She is the author of The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005; URB, 2011).
*Photo of many hands above via MilitaryHealth on VisualHunt.com/ CC BY
#PenToPaper: In the Distance
Last week I posted on writing prompts and putting pen to paper. Practice what you preach, they say. The Prompt: in the distance.
A swallow returns to its nesting place, a salmon returns to the mouth of the river, and she returns the same through waves of memory, back to the beginning. There is a place: a rooftop at midnight, an open window. She will take a blanket, step over the sash, her bare feet on shingles still warm from the heat of the day. She will say, Room for two, and he will follow, though the blanket is for her alone. She will take in the scent of wet grass, the glow of a crescent moon, the silhouette of trees marking a break in the horizon. She will breathe in the burn of his cigarette smoke as if it is the oxygen she needs and wonder at the comfort of him there. She will study the shape of her feet, the wear in his shoes. They will talk as strangers do, about nothing, about anything, until the mosquitoes drive them back inside. She will say something forgettable, but he will laugh true. Thank you for the smoke, he will tell her, then he will look her in the eye, keep a polite distance, smile. And leave. He will not ask for anything more. At this, she will be surprised and relieved. She will fall asleep to a sense of quiet she has not known for a long time. In the morning she will shed old skin; in a year she will move out, move on. But she will not forget: the open window, the silhouette, that simple moment in the distance when the tide shifted.