Interview with Jay Ruzesky
When did you start publishing? Why did you start publishing?
John Harley and I founded the press in October 1993 in the Charles Dickens pub in Victoria. I think we were drinking Kilkenny, a lovely Irish beer.
We started the press because we wanted to have some fun and to learn more about making books.
I think that Outlaw Editions was also a response to the technology that was available at the time which made, and continues to make it so much easier to make fine little books without putting out a whole lot of money. We both kicked in $50 at first and now try to make enough money from one project to pay for the next.
I think about our, you know, forefathers I guess--nichol, bissett, and everybody at Coach House in the 60s. They were cranking their chapbooks out on
Gestetners. Printing and photocopy technoilogy is so much more advanced now. I have 3000 fonts in my computer and can do almost all of the work myself.
We also saw a need for chapbooks. With government cutbacks and other economic pressures through the 80s--pressures which continue today--the "small" presses were publishing books that the "big" publishers would have done a few years before and it was harder and harder to get anything published, especially if you were a young writer just starting out. There were also more and more writers. A
veritable blossoming which is great except that it puts more pressure on the publishers.
More than that though, we were thinking about people who were writing interesting things that weren't big enough for a 54 page book. So we started making chapbooks with the idea that we wanted things that were particularly suited to the length of a chapbook (12 to 40 pages). We didn't really want a section of a poetry manuscript or a short story that would end up in a book of stories.
Briefly describe the type of work you publish.
We publish chapbooks that need to be chapbooks. Our first book was Marlene Cookshaw's Coupling which is a 20 page collection of 2 page stories and it's all the fiction she's written so it feels like a very complete little book in itself. Same thing with Derk Wynand's Airborne which is a long poem that might have been hard to balance in one of his poetry collections that have been published since. We also have a short novel by Michael Kenyon called Twig. It's only 26 pages long but it has the breadth and scope of a novel.
Do you accept unsolicited submissions? How do you decide what to publish?
We're not opposed to unsolicited work but we're very particular about what we do and we want to make sure that we're learning while we're making books so it's rare that we publish unsolicited material. I'm more interested in short essays or memoirs or other things but anything that makes sense as a whole and complete short manuscript would get serious consideration.
We're actually rethinking the press right now because we want to take on something where we'll learn more again. Maybe we'll make a CD or go more digital like the Danforth Review.
How many chapbooks have you published? (both number of books & volume of
books)
15 plus a broadsheet of a Michael Ondaatje poem. We usually print between 100 and 300 copies.
Any advice for people thinking of starting a small press?
Just encouragement. Even if you need to start a press to publish your own writing. There's a long and venerable history of self- publishing in Canada and as long as what's driving it is a belief in your work rather than a need from your ego, you'll do alright.
Additional comments?
Good luck with TDR. I've checked in before and like what you're doing.
|
Outlaw Editions
