Publish and Perish
Publishing in embrace of decay and a changing world.
I was happy to have published last week the first in a series of essays about the “publishing ecosystem” and its current state of disrepair over at The Seventh Wave. “Who is home in publishing?” will be a three-part series collecting thoughts and conversations from my experiences as a publisher (note: no resolutions). Some of these will sound like echoes from past editions of Sex Weather Climate Death, but others are slow blooming realizations that have unfolded over these last five years of running a journal with a planned expiration date, one invested in the narrative possibilities trans lives bring to our changing nature-culture. One of those possibilities, I think, has to do with how we organize and share our work.
smoke and mold has a new website now, having officially divested from Wix, Israel’s most valuable company and a vocal supporter and beneficiary of Israeli apartheid. I’ll be building out our back issues throughout the summer, but issue 10 is live and ready for you to read. If you have any questions about leaving Wix and want some support, please reach out—I’m happy to advise and cheerlead where I can.
Someone asked me the other day if my role in smoke and mold has elevated my literary profile these last few years. I find this hard to believe; I’m perennially suspicious of cis white men starting presses and journals when they can’t get published anywhere else, and although I never publish my own work on the journal, I live in fear of becoming that archetype. But I think the most honest answer is, maybe? I’ve always been uncomfortable in the spotlight. Although I started the journal by myself, it’s been several years since it was just me behind the scenes, and we now boast a deep roster of multifaceted editors and readers. Still, I know I remain the primary spokesperson for the magazine, and I’m trying to be better at inhabiting that role. I write the books I write because no one else is; I start journals because nothing else is out there like it; I host workshops and open mics despite dreading the microphone because no one else is holding a trans-only mic (in this town). But when you do things because no one else is, it becomes easy to hide behind the mask of unwillingness, of self-sacrifice. I spent a lot of my twenties and so far a good chunk of my thirties doubting. I don’t really think it’s realistic nor desirable to banish doubt entirely, but I turn 35 later this summer and I’d like to try living with a little more conviction.
Claiming the title of “publisher” rather than “founding editor” has helped; I’ve never enjoyed the patriotic adjacency of the latter to the founding fathers. “Founder” implies a fealty to an original vision, and I’m not here for originalism. I think all good publications should grow and change and eventually die. But if not a founder, what am I? Editor feels inadequate; managing editor still implies hierarchy; I considered something esoteric like spore or mycelial net, but ultimately publisher best encapsulates what I do. I literally make our issues public to the world, I press the Publish button on our website builder (a much less glamorous action than publishers of magazines past), but I also attempt to make a public, to not just find but to sculpt an audience for the strange and freaky writers we publish.
So, here’s a little excerpt from “Who is home in publishing?” in the hopes that you’ll read the whole thing:
When a person or a creature dies, when it is suddenly no longer there, new understanding is possible. The great promise of our life is death, and the negation of being is nonbeing, which is still something we can be. Think about a whale fall, when the carcass of a great cetacean drops to the ocean floor where it serves as a crucial source of nourishment for sea creatures of all shapes and sizes. Without that nutrient cycling, life in the ocean would be impoverished.
It’s become commonplace to hear the phrase “publishing ecosystem,” but it’s been a long time since any sort of nutrient cycling has taken place in publishing. In an ecosystem, you do not have profit and nonprofit players; in fact, the very idea of profit is foreign to an ecosystem, which is a system of relationships powered by nutrient cycles and energy flows. The whale digests the krill, which consumed the plankton which consumed the light; the whale’s fallen body delivers energy and food to the seafloor, that hidden place where life on this planet began in darkness.
In the absence of death, there are certain qualities of humanity which we would be quick to shed. Without an end date in sight, the stakes are just different. The notion that every interaction matters, that each relationship has precious nonmonetary value, that there is something to be gained from an exchange even if there isn’t a profitable book on the line — a friend, a story, the voice of a political prisoner heard. The possibility of not existing is one of the things that makes us thoughtfully consider our actions and what we’ll do with this life, how we will treat others. In this sense, the ghost of our own death haunts us in life.
When a company exists in perpetuity, the nonbeing promise of its being is denied. It will never become a ghost. While the people who occupy positions of power in publishing do expire, the corporation does not; it shambles on, granted increasingly person-like rights by business-friendly courts and acquiring competitors
Upcoming
I’ve opened up a new chimeric writing workshop for registration. This is in the vein of the class I taught earlier this year by the same name, but with more emphasis on sharing our work and exploring impossible forms. Sliding scale, every other Thursday on Zoom starting September 5. More info here.
This coming Thursday, July 11 at 6pm PST I hope you’ll join me and my most recent cohort of students in celebrating their completion of the Multiverse workshop. Tay Lane, Griffy LaPlante, Li Patron, and Eastan Powers will each read from their work-in-progress, and then chat about how the multiverse continues to show up in their creative process, among other things. These readings are always a good time! Zoom link is here.