Scenes: Sunnyoutside: an interview with David McNamara

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Would you briefly describe sunnyoutside's history?

The press was launched while I was finishing my graduate certificate at Emerson College after a few years of doing journals and working toward books. Our first sale was, coincidentally, May 5, 2005, so that's our easily remembered start date. Our first paperback, So Much Is Burning by William Taylor Jr., was released almost a year later in April 2006 (our previous titles were all chapbooks and ephemera). Rusty Barnes's Breaking it Down was our first paperback of fiction, released November 2007. Micah Ling's Three Islands got us invited to our first awards dinner (she was a finalist for an Indiana Authors Award). And our first (and, so far, lone) nonfiction paperback, Curtis Smith's Witness, was released December 2010.

In August 2007, we left Somerville, Massachusetts and relocated to Buffalo, New York. Both Boston and Buffalo have great literary and printing communities, so we just traded one for another. The one advantage Buffalo does have, though, is the Western New York Book Arts Center, which we've collaborated and fallen in with. But we've been lucky to be surrounded by great communities in both cities.

How would you characterize the writing you publish?

The texts I'm attracted to are smart and vivacious. The writing tends to also be a lot like myself— curious and emotional and flawed—but in a humanist sense, because the work we publish is also very crafted and coddled. We are outside the mainstream by the mere fact that we've published most literary forms other than the novel— forms the larger publishers mostly shy away from. But outside of having confidence that we can adequately support and promote a book, I don't have any biases—if I like it and it's a good fit, I have no problem working with a manuscript regardless of its genre.

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

Our audience is intelligent and curious readers who are interested in culturally relevant writing that is full of craft and heart. They care about work that has been nurtured by both the author and the editor and dressed in appropriate design and packaging. They care about the object and would rather read ink and toner on paper than pixels on a screen. I think our readers tend to care and have a general awareness of the world and our tiny place in it.

For the most part, we have reached our audience through trade fairs and reviews, and by working with highly motivated authors who are active in their literary and arts community (and often larger, less-defined communities), all of which have paid word-of-mouth dividends. We attend a handful of press fairs and conferences each year, always attending the closer ones and rotating the larger/farther events. And our authors, for the most part, are very active with conferences and readings themselves, and we've been lucky enough to reach a few very loyal readers who have taken it upon themselves to help us expand our audience.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

We're proud to be part of literary resurgence that seems to be powered by small and micro-presses. Within that context we are, in some small way, a part of a bridge between the small press and the fine press. In no way do I claim to print work worthy enough of being considered the latter, but there definitely is an emphasis on typography and traditional design, and every now and again, I ink up the press and get my hands dirty and run off a limited edition broadsheet or chapbook.

We're deliberately and stubbornly slow with some things, too. You won't find a sunnyoutside title in digital format, for example. Nor will we print a title on a print-on-demand press. Both of these will likely change some day, but not until the formats for the former allow for a more aesthetically pleasing product and the print quality for the latter...