Scenes: Rose Metal Press: a discussion with Abigail Beckel & Kathleen Rooney

Page 29 March–April 2009 SCENES Would you briefly describe Rose Metal Press’s history? The two of us met while earning our respective master ’s degrees at Emerson College in Boston. Working together on the literary journal Redivider, we found that we had complementary skills and personalities, as well as an interest in starting a small press after we graduated. We finished the program in spring 2005 and founded Rose Metal Press in January 2006. We’ve published six books since then and have five more lined up through mid-2010, and are always on the lookout for our next project. How would you characterize the fiction you publish? If we had to use one word, that word would be “hybrid .” But we don’t just publish fiction. As many presses and literary journals say in their submission guidelines, the best way to find out what we are into is to take a look at what we’ve published so far. Since our mission is to provide a home for works that cross the boundaries of genre, much of what we publish takes on more than one form simultaneously. For example , Peter Jay Shippy’s How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (2007) could be described as a book-length narrative poem or a novella in verse, depending on how you choose to look at it. Our most recent release, Tinderbox Lawn (2008) by Carol Guess, is subtitled “prose poems,” but also operates as a fragmented novel. And though neither of us typically writes in the short short form, flash fiction has turned out to be our flagship hybrid genre. We run an annual short short chapbook competition, where we publish the winning manuscript as a limited edition chapbook with hand-letterpressed covers each summer. In the three years we’ve been running the contest, all three winners have been writers of fiction, but we are open to and impressed by submissions of chapbooks of nonfiction shorts as well. Because one of our goals is to create an outlet for work that doesn’t already have a wealth of opportunities for publication and because there is such a talented community of flash practitioners, we find flash an amazing untapped source of literary goodness. Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them? Though many chain bookstores and corporate publishers seem to think readers want their literature exclusively in neat little genre packages that don’t challenge them much, we’ve found exactly the opposite to be true: that when given the chance, readers really engage with and enjoy innovative work that blurs the line of what is traditionally accepted as fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. In his obituary of John Updike, Adam Gopnik describes the late writer as “someone who…has spent a good deal of his life liking things.” This, too, is a quality we count on in our audience. They are the kind of people who are receptive to discovering and then liking new forms, even if those forms are created differently than anything they’ve ever read before or are created by writers they have not yet heard of. In terms of how we reach that audience, we select authors who are not only brilliant in and of themselves, but who also share this liking-things mindset; they like to reach out to their communities, participate in readings and discussions, and go on the road a bit to promote their books. What is your role in the publishing scene? When we founded Rose Metal Press, we greatly admired the small presses we already knew of and supported the work they were publishing. Over the course of our existence, we have seen the independent press scene grow exponentially in numbers, creativity, and desire to promote what is beautiful, experimental, and risky, business models be damned. We are honored to be a part of that community and to gather with fellow publishers at readings and conference bookfairs. That said, we wanted to differentiate ourselves and to fill a niche that we felt was under-represented, hence our mission of getting books by hybrid authors into the hands of readers. What’s in the...