When did you start publishing? Why did you start publishing?

Greenboathouse Books happened for a number of reasons. In the summer of 1999 I was taking some time off from academia and relaxing at the boathouse (located down the beach from my family's summer place on Okanagan Lake). During that visit I started talking to John Lent about the two of us doing a reading at Headbones Gallery in Vernon, run by local artist Julie Oakes. John suggested a few other local writers and Julie mentioned that she could probably get Sharon Thesen (an old friend of hers) to come up, and the next thing we new, the Greenboathouse Reading Series had begun to develop. The next challenge reared its head in the form of our first chapbook, The Greenboathouse Reader: An Anthology of Okanagan Writing, collecting work by most of the poets that read during the first series.

Since then, each year we have continued with the series, and each year we have produced between 2 and 4 new chapbooks, usually released/launched during the summer event in Vernon. The editorial, design and production processes have continued to develop over the past three years, first with the introduction of our assistant editor, Noah Buchan, and this fall the editorial team will grow again with the addition of Aaron Peck, a poet from Kelowna.

In terms of design, I have been fortunate this year, while finishing up an MA at the University of Alberta, to land a position working in the Bruce Peel Special Collections division of the UofA library. This project essentially entails creating a bibliographic inventory of Bruce Peel's holdings of the Black Sparrow Press archive, which includes all materials surrounding the first 100 publications by Black Sparrow Press, a cutting edge publisher of fine hand-made poetry books in the mid to late 60s. 

Exposure to this material has supplied me with inspiration up the wazzoo, and we're eager as hell to release our next three titles in the spring of 2002, which will incorporate many of the ideas and lessons I've absorbed through this work at UofA.

Briefly describe the type of work you publish.

Although we started out focusing on Western Canadian writing - more because of our location in BC than anything else - we are primarily interested in writing that is formally innovative, and writers who are concerned and intrigued by contemporary writing and the theory surrounding it - i.e. we are interested in writers who read.

Each project is a collaborative process involving the writer, the editors, and a visual artist, in which the physical design and production of the book is considered with as much attention to detail as the material within it. To paraphrase Frederic Jameson, there is not only the content of a work to consider, but also the content of its form, and we believe that design and layout are integral components of form.

Our chapbooks are hand-made and therefore print runs are relatively small (usually 100 copies) as what we want to create is not a mass-produced document, but an aesthetically interesting and attractive chapbook showcasing innovative and important writing from across Canada.

Do you accept unsolicited submissions? How do you decide what to publish?

[For full submission details, please see the submissions page of our website.]

Yes, we do accept unsolicited submissions, both towards future chapbook projects and for our on-line poetry page, but our page-count is quite specific, so I would encourage writers interested in submitting to take a look at our submission guidelines, which can be found on our website. In terms of our editorial process, chapbook submissions are distributed amongst our three editors (Jason Dewinetz, Noah Buchan and Aaron Peck), and if all three editors agree on a given manuscript, it's in. This, of course, depends on workload. 

At the moment, for instance, we have three titles already planned for the spring, with three more potential projects for shortly thereafter, so when things get this backed-up, I tend to encourage submitting writers to try sending their stuff elsewhere rather than have it sit back-logged with us for so long. 6 months to a year may not be long for many larger presses, but because we are a very small press, we'd rather not keep people waiting that long.

How many chapbooks have you published? (both number of books & volume of books)

Since our first chapbook in 1999, we have produced 7 more, ranging from poetry to short fiction to drama. In addition to The Greenboathouse Reader in 1999, we also put out a short collection of poems by local writer Karen Six (Into the Blue) as well as a long poem chapbook by founding editor Jason Dewinetz (Gericault's Severed Limbs Paintings). In terms of numbers, the Reader went out of print last year after a run of 350 copies, and the other two mentioned above will be re-issued in the spring of 2002 after selling runs of 200 each.

In 2000, we put out the winning entry to our 1999 chapbook contest (judges: Judy McInnes Jr. and Suzanne Buffam), Anthony Schrag's Moving Pictures, as well as John Lent's first collection of poems in 16 years, Black Horses Cobalt Suns. Late in 2000, we also latched onto Sean Dixon's play Aerwacol, which Noah and I were lucky enough to see while in Victoria. Sean's play toured with three very successful runs in Victoria, Vancouver and Toronto, and the play has been one of our best sellers, with just over 150 copies sold in the first 6 months of it's release.

This spring, just in time for this year's reading series, we produced two new titles: Harold Rhenisch's On the Couch of Dr. Daydream (a rather twisted sequence of adaptations of Shakespeare's sonnets) and Sara Cassidy's much-anticipated Sardines, a collection of post-card short stories. Both of these projects were produced in limited release runs of 50, each copy signed and numbered by the author, and both runs have only a few copies still available.

In the spring of 2002, in addition to three new titles by Aaron Peck, Laisha Rosnau, and Stephen Bett, we will be re-issuing all of our titles in a new format inspired by the Black Sparrow Press publications of the mid-60s. These new editions will be limited to 150 numbered copies each, and once they're gone, they're gone. We're also hoping to have all the copies signed, but we'll wait and see about that for the moment.

Any advice for people thinking of starting a small press?

Don't quit your day-job. But seriously, don't quit your day job; although sometimes you'll want to because very quickly a small-press seems to turn into a very large list of tasks and projects. My best advice would be to plan ahead. Way ahead. Before you even think about printing anything, get your ISBN prefix arranged, contact CIP and familiarize yourself with that process. Then put together a practice press-kit, in which you plot out what you hope to accomplish, who your market is, how to get their attention. 

Get a web-site put together BEFORE you have any books to sell. The internet is the perfect tool for small presses because it's so accessible and relatively cheap (domains are, what, about 50 bucks now?). Get on Google and search everything even close to what you'll be doing. Go to other small press sites (like ours) and see what they're doing, what their mandates are, their submissions policies. Steal ideas left-right-and-center. 

Get to know the people running other presses and ask (tactfully) for advice. And get on their links pages. Search engines are a joke; exposure through linked literary sites is THE route to go. Then get your own site up. Plan your projects giving yourself lots of time to work on each. Enjoy yourself. Try to remember that you got into this because you love books, good books, good writing. 

Only do projects you can be proud of. If you got into this simply to make money (hold on, I can't stop laughing), get out now. There isn't any. Just do it because it needs to be done. Because there are too many good writers out there who aren't getting read.

Additional comments?

Nope, I think that's plenty... Thanks for doing this,  it's a topic that can use all the coverage it can get. Hope there's a few things here you can use. 

Jason Dewinetz holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Victoria and is finally finishing his MA at the University of Alberta. He is the author of two long poem chapbooks, Gericault's Severed Limbs Paintings (Greenboathouse Books), and The Gift of a Good Knife (Outlaw Editions), whose writing has appeared recently or is forthcoming in journals across Canada including Grain, Prairie Fire, PRISM International, The Pottersfield Portfolio and Descant. His first book-length collection of poetry, Moving to the clear, will be published by NeWest Press in 2002.