Scenes: Emergency Press: an interview with Bryan Tomasovich

Would you briefly describe Emergency Press's history?

Emergency Press started with several years worth of making esoteric books of poetry. Where just about every good independent press running today that I know of started. And we made very smart books that include Scott Zieher's Virga (2005) and Impatience (2009), Jayson Iwen's Six Trips in Two Directions (2006), and The Border Will Be Soon (2006) by Chad Faries. These are books with amazing ideas and language, and then a few more ideas. Books that you don't keep on your bookshelves 'cause you keep loaning them out to those in the next, younger generations.

I took over as managing editor in 2008. I have a background in poetry. A PhD in it. And I get these books, how they are above life. That's why we still make and promote these kinds of books—we're starting to put together two amazing books of poetry now, one by Ewa Chrusciel and the other by Lucy Ives. Now we also produce books with amazing literary merit, and they have commercial viability as well. They are fiction and nonfiction. Novels, short stories, and memoirs (people still eat them up). And there's nothing like a hybrid of genres—that's why we run an annual contest at Emergency focused on the hybrids.

How would you characterize the fiction you publish?

The books are risky. Not only the fiction, but the books that tell true stories. Gina Frangello's collection of stories, just released in June, Slut Lullabies is a serious, sexy study of what it means to be alive as a woman today. Tom Hansen's American Junkie (2010), a memoir, is ostensibly an account of growing up in the punk and grunge scene in Seattle—as a musician and heroin dealer—yet it also is a warning about what happens if you play by the rules and wait too long for things to happen. And Gina's novel due out next year, London Calling, is gripping—a very smart study of what is labeled normal and dangerous, healthy and destructive, all with a brand of narration that makes the reading nerve-racking (in a good way). I mean to say that these are books that are too rarely made. Each is a succinct study of a smart topic, or set of issues, yet they provide plenty of entertainment. And that's a mix one does not often see—it's usually either highly academic experimental prose or cliché, dumbed-down garbage. Emergency books get attention from everything from literary magazines to glossies. And that's the point, really, to join high art and low art until the blend finally pleases us. Then when the books get a certain amount of praise, etc., we stay with them after the fireworks die down. Our authors have careers, not books.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

People in airports who hate vampire stories. Smart, conscientious people who have a set of sensibilities that means they don't settle for the derogatory or derivative. Yet they don't want a tome of theory— or The Economist—in their hands constantly. We reach them by word of mouth, usually through social media. Also, the trailers we do for every book are products of their own. Our authors are highly innovative and entertaining people. When you hear them, or read them, in an interview, you can immediately detect that they are extraordinarily sensitive to what makes people tick, yet they are not arrogant about it. And people are usually attracted to these kind of writers. This year, every Emergency author is getting a feature on a site like The Nervous Breakdown, for instance, and we put in the kind of hard work that makes us lucky to get a spot there.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

We want to be sure to introduce new writers like a guy out of Seattle, Aaron Dietz, and his book, Super, due out this fall. It's a novel that presses boundaries of what storytelling is, where the subject is...