In this ep Hilary talks to the writer and editor Youssef Rakha, whose novel The Dissenters is just out this spring from Graywolf. The Dissenters is Youssef’s first novel to be written in English—you may know his previous The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, translated by Paul Starkey (and which Hilary edited back in the day), and The Crocodiles, translated by Robin Moger. Shoutout to those two translators. And/or his long essay on Arab porn and his book-length essay on The Mummy. We talk about the beloved bilingual English/Arabic magazine The Sultan’s Seal—archived here—which Youssef founded and edited, and how literary work might create “less transactional communities.” We dive into the new novel and Youssef’s interest in the epistolary form and narrating nonlinearly as a means to better represent history. We talk about moving between languages, the freedom of writing a novel in English without paying attention to the industry in English, Youssef’s generational beginnings as a writer “in the twilight zone between state control and neoliberalism,” his first trip to the US, and addressing Westerners amid the genocide in Gaza. Among the writers mentioned are Arwa Salih, whose work The Stillborn is available in English, translated by Samah Selim. Finally and not finally, we consider what may be hopeful about despair.

Bonus: Here’s a lovely long essay on Youssef’s work in English by the writer Madeline Beach Carey, published in Full Stop. And a heads up: The Dissenters discusses suicide and so does this episode.

Join us for a cool milestone in our first-ever transatlantic episode. We interview Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, Glasgow-based post-internet poetics prophets and editors of the heroic UK online and IRL publisher SPAM Zine & Press. The origins of this convo are in ZP’s infatuation with UK pamphlet culture, where, one day, he noticed that the unit of literary-cultural production we usually refer to as a “chapbook” here in the US tends to get called something different among small press writers and publishers in the UK—not always “chapbook” but, perhaps more frequently, “pamphlet.” While the linguistic difference between “pamphlet” and “chapbook” may seem arbitrary—and maybe is in the end, but listen, some of us have an illness called Being a Poet—we can’t help noticing that along these terminological alignments there seem to also lie some real material, aesthetic, and political differences. Emotional ones, too.

For expert help straightening this all out, we consult Kirsty and Maria, who tell us about SPAM’s origins and aims as a whimsical yet rigorous transmedial platform for on/offline poetry and performance, criticism and collaboration, excitement and experimentation. Our conversation forefronts the work of editing as cultivating the social life of literature, while we gloss the symbiosis of publishing and programming, tripping over the classic DIY, nonprofit, and post-professional perils and possibilities. We also take this opportunity to think about whether the different infrastructures that support life in our countries lead to the production of different kinds of literature, if we can tell. Put another way, what do public transit and healthcare have to do with poems? Look, all we know is we could use a just little more of what they have over there, over here. And if the recent stateside boom of new presses and mags is any indicator, we’re well on our way, but it’s bound to be different. Watch this space.

A few more UK small press pamphlet purveyors we personally love, some of whom are mentioned in the ep, but some we forgot because we get nervous: Slub Press, Broken Sleep Books, If a Leaf Falls Press, VIBE. See also: Glaswegian proto-internet poet and Scotland’s first Makar, Edwin Morgan; SPAM’s Brilliant Vibrating Interface and just a few of our personal fave, SPAM, book-objects; Ludd Gang magazine and the Poets’ Hardship Fund; Glasgow cooperative bookmaking studio and independent bookseller Good Press; Mathias Svalina’s Dream Delivery Service. Oh dang, looks like we mixed up the decades of the Mimeo Revolution! Whoopsie.

In this ep we get into “arts administration”: how to do it well, why maybe it should be called something else, and what small presses can offer literary programs of all sizes. We talk with one of the best in the field, literary organizer Sony Ton-Aimé, currently executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures and formerly director of literary arts at the Chautauqua Institution. Sony talks about how programs like these reach and activate readers and shares his insight on how to build community practices and empowering conversations between readers and writers. How do you cultivate agency in your audience? How do you create meaningful events? What does it mean to be a good host? How can organizational and curatorial work help create openness, grace, and a readiness to learn and be challenged? We try to answer it all and see what small presses can teach us.

A couple books get mentioned along the way, including Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum and Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us. And we highly recommend checking out some of Sony’s recent work, for example “Awe Studies: Resisting Awe” and “A Killing Two Hundred Years in the Making: On Haiti and the Narrative of Empire.”

In this episode we talk with poets Noor Hindi and George Abraham about Heaven Looks Like Us, a new anthology of Palestinian poetry they co-edited, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2025. We discuss their process and priorities for this project, which began in 2020 and continues amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Noor and George share ways they’ve framed and responded to the challenges and opportunities of anthology editing, and how they’ve grappled with anthologizing’s pitfalls of reduction, representation, canonization, and exclusion. Instead Heaven Looks Like Us is offered as a fresh site of radical connection, newness, abundance, and Palestinian futurity. Under conditions of hyper-visibility, where we see atrocity unfold in real time, what is the role of the book as a technology for interacting, knowing, and imagining deeper? We talk about it, interrogating the roles of institutions and time and money, theorizing strategies for reclaiming those resources and building new structures, amid and through the work of editing. We try to understand what that work even is. Poetry expands the question.

This episode opens with George and Noor reading poems by Jen Siraganian, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (translated by Fady Joudah), and Mira Mattar. The anthology’s title comes from a poem by Fargo Tbakhi. In discussion we quote a poem by Micaela Kaibni Raen. Find George’s poetry collection Birthright here, and here’s Noor’s Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. George is executive editor of the journal Mizna. We also refer to RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers) and some previous anthologies including Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women, and Hayan Charara’s Inclined to Speak.

We sit down with Kate Kremer, playwright and publisher of 53rd State Press, which now also houses 3 Hole Press and Plays Inverse, making it an essential hub of independent and radical writing for performance today. We discuss how one challenge in publishing plays could be that “nobody likes to read plays,” how to think about the relationship between text and production, publishing unproduceable plays, inciting future possibilities for the impossible, and envisioning “the page as the arena in which this event is going to unfold.” We also consider the dangers of replying to email, how financial pressures on theaters affect aesthetics, learning to write grants, getting your time devoured, the aftermath of covid, and building bridges between the literary and theater worlds. Kate offers some pretty brilliant thoughts on how success might actually mean “managing a consistent relationship with failure.”

Also mentioned are the playwrights, writers, and publishers Karinne Keithley Syers, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, and Tyler Crumrine. Find more of Kate’s work here and check out this ep especially if you’re wondering how one single person could run an entire press and become her own intern.

Ever wonder what literary orgs have to do with the state? Nonprofits with the CIA? Your own poems with military operations on the other side of the planet? Of course you do. Luckily, so does Buffalo’s own poet laureate of waste collection and public transit Joe Hall, whose recent essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde” is a veritable syllabus on the ways arts and culture institutions serve the aims of American empire. In the essay, Joe offers an exhaustive analysis of PEN America’s response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, documents recent protest efforts such as boycotts of the PEN America Literary Awards and PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and conducts some nonprofit forensics and close-reading of PEN America’s messaging and leadership to connect their work to a broader project of American cultural imperialism. In our discussion, we reflect on the flattening effects of institutional language and the de-politicization of the arts, money and other forms of soft power, applications of the term “avant-garde,” how imperialism is a liberal concept too, and some of the ways writers can work to resist these historic political-aesthetic dynamics and collaborate with other workers to build a more liberated future.

Joe’s essay covers it all (ya gotta read those footnotes) but here are some more readings for your further reading, which specifically come up in this conversation: Ohio’s investments in Israel bonds; the killings of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer and journalist Ismail al-Ghoul; Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar’s expulsion from a PEN America event in early in 2024; Juliana Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram; PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel’s 2004 essay “Smart Power” in Foreign Affairs; Fargo Tbakhi’s “Notes On Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” at Protean Magazine.

Strap in as we spelunk some of “indie” publishing’s murkiest and most nutrient-rich depths. Zach talks with Ryan Skrabalak: poet, teacher, cheesemonger, Deadhead, cool punk, and founder of the lively and exciting Spiral Editions. Spiral is a publisher of (chap)books, cassettes, a newsletter, and other pleasure-inducing printed objects and ephemera. As such, we had natural occasion to apply our focus to literature’s corporeal commitments, interrogating the imports, joys, and challenges of creating insistently-palpable pulpable culture in an increasingly disposable digital age. We meditate on editing, curation, book production and book-as-object, tracing grooves across music and lit overlaps to elaborate on forever-ideas about DIY, self-publishing, ISBNs, professionalism, adjunctification, the non-profit-to-no-profit pipeline, fun, trust, difficulty, and other social, political, and aesthetic commitments of the press. This conversation centers the historical traditions and psycho-material realities of making books and culture as an autonomous enterprise. Just don’t say micro-press.

A lot of names come up in this hour-plus because (he’ll never cop to it but we’ll assert) Ryan’s a bit of a historian. So, in the spirit of this as well as that of the fast-and-loose editorial hand, we’ll leave you with a litany: Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer; The Poetry Project; Tuumba Press, Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”; Burning Deck, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop; Angel Hair; Mimeo, Letterpress, Stitches, Papers, Printers, Toner, Rubber bands; Artbooks; Phoebe Glick’s The Afters; The Aliens; Cedar Sigo, Carlos Lara, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Mohammed Zenia; Tori Kudo, Crazy Spirit; 1080 Press; Coffee Cup News.

Hilary talks to friend of the pod Lucy Biederman to get her updated thoughts on the presence of Koch money in literary publishing—specifically, how the independent press Catapult, which has also acquired the great indies Soft Skull and Counterpoint, belongs to co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Koch, who is the daughter of Charles Koch (truly not a “black sheep” of the Koch family, though you’ve probably heard her called that). This episode was recorded before SPD closed but we gotta say this discussion of funding and literary independence and obstinance—and what happens when economic forces sever networks of longstanding relationships—seems unfortunately relevant in that context. Along the way we talk about excess and shit, paychecks and evil, class and how to try to write it, vulnerability and mutuality, Phyllis Schlafly, Succession, The Office, and what we as writers owe each other.

The writer’s strike mentioned is of course the spring 2023 WGA strike for film & TV writers. The Thoreau quote Hilary fails to remember is: “Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life,” which she learned courtesy of Peter Molin.

Sign up for Lucy’s brilliant newsletter “The Boredom & the Horror & the Glory” here. And here’s her terrific book The Walmart Book of the Dead. 

And this ep needs a lot of links: Lucy & Hilary’s previous essays on Catapult and Elizabeth Koch are in Fence here and here. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is here, and here’s Christopher Leonard’s Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.The New York Times profile of Elizabeth Koch, her nonprofit Unlikely Collaborators, and the “Perception Box” may be enjoyed here. The Daily Beast’s follow-up reporting on Unlikely Collaborators and how it “received tens of millions from [Elizabeth Koch’s] family’s right-wing network last year and gave away less than $600,000” is here. We talk a bunch about a Guardianarticle on Chase Koch (son of Charles) and the venture “Stand Together Music.” Coverage of Catapult closing its classes and magazine appeared in Publishers Weeklyamong other places. Thanks to all these journalists.

To put the problems of Koch money in literary publishing in context, we think about the Sackler family, their involvement in the art world, and Nan Goldin’s beautiful acts of protest. We owe a big debt to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary on Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

Join us for a raw one as we respond in the moment to some real-time small press world-historical events (the end of SPD). With minimum filtration and maximum range, it’s an occasion to revisit one of our all-time favorite recurring topics in particular depth: Distribution. To us, distribution—the way a book gets from publisher to reader—exemplifies the whole matrix of logistics, politics, and aesthetics coupled with all the material considerations, problems, and choices that define the work of small press publishing. And it’s not just “small” presses that are affected by basic distro realities. These under-examined process nuts and business bolts dictate which books sit on shelves or don’t, what shows up in an e-commerce storefront or doesn’t, what a reader will find in a search or won’t, what can be cataloged and can’t; in other words, what literature gets to exist.

Come for a post-mortem on the dissolution of the US’s largest distributor of small press books, stay for a primer on small press distribution (the practice), admin, and biz essentials; a reading of what this moment means for literature and literary culture in the United States, and the role of small presses in the formation of national literature; SPD, Ingram, the Big Five, Follett; old friends, new enemies, revenge buys, reliable joys; archives, ecologies, recycling, red weddings, surgery theaters, slaughters, prizes, sales, scales, readers, breaks, poems.

If you’ve ever read a small press book, we love you.

We finally sit down with Caryl Pagel (director of the CSU Poetry Center) and talk about her other job as publisher of Rescue Press. Caryl sheds light on the idea of “generative publishing” and on her approach to editing as a dynamic, open-ended process, a site of relation and the possibilities of form. We hear about starting a press maybe because you have a coupon at Kinko’s, and the contributions of Rescue’s whole Midwestern team: Daniel Khalastchi, Sevy Perez, and Alyssa Perry, as well as IforC’s own Hilary Plum and “the other Zach” (Zach Savich). Along the way we explore how to be both professional and a person and how professionalism may need both at once.  

A few of the Rescue Press books mentioned: Marc Rahe’s The Smaller Half, Shane McCrae’s In Canaan, Anne Germanacos’s Tribute, Caren Beilin’s SPAIN, Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom. Also Zach Savich’s Events Film Cannot Withstand and Diving Makes the Water Deep. 

Caryl’s recent books are Free Clean Fill Dirt (poetry) and Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays). Read a great new essay on Lorine Niedecker and Lake Superior here.