Scenes: Madhat Press: an interview with Marc Vincenz

Could you briefly describe your press’s history?

The late Carol Novack and I conceived MadHat Press in 2010 as a print offshoot of the online journal Mad Hatters’ Review (which had been going for nearly 8 years prior). The first title we signed was by the poet, novelist and anthropologist Hugh Fox, a few months before his passing. Unfortunately neither Hugh nor Carol ever got to see any MadHat books in print. In a bizarre and tragic turn of events, Carol also died suddenly shortly after Christmas in Hendersonville, North Carolina. In the beginning, we were unsure whether we could continue.

Some months later, the shockwave subsided. At the time, I was living in Iceland, and it seemed a daunting task to work from the other side of the Atlantic with our authors and our press based in the US. As it turned out, working virtually, with fellow editors across the globe, Iceland proved to be an ideal starting point: it slipped right into the time-zone between Europe and the US, but more importantly, those sprawling lunar landscapes gave us a non-gravitational view on literature, an alien eye. Without that wavering somewhere on the unknown horizon, I doubt MadHat Press would have come into being.

Hugh’s poetry collection, Primate Fox, and the two chapbooks from MadHat’s first and only chapbook competition (selected by the ever-effervescent CA Conrad) were released in early 2012. Since then, MadHat Press has published over forty titles, the latest of which is poet and economist Kevin Gallagher’s LOOM (2016)—which tells the incredible story in verse of the men who built American capitalism and ended American slavery. Fanny Howe was particularly taken with LOOM, calling it a collection that “…puts the focus back on the white male where the distortion of vision begins…”.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Carol’s personal vision was wild, whacky, experimental, eclectic, and collaborative. We have done our best to continue her tradition, publishing work that stretches imaginative and structural boundaries. Although we began predominately as a poetry press, we have since expanded into fiction and, more recently, criticism. This fall, in fact, we will be releasing two books of essays on contemporary poetics by the critic-poets Robert Archambeau and Mark Scroggins.

Generally speaking, we lean toward passionate, lyrical and explosive work, well-crafted and somewhat cerebral; work like the prodigal Brian Swann’s recently released collection of prosody, Dogs on the Roof (2016); or Tess Gallagher’s rollicking collaboration with Japanese-American poet Larry Matsuda, Boogie-Woogie Crisscross (2016), released by our collaborative imprint Plume Editions (a joint venture with Danny Lawless’s Plume poetry journal). Our first translation, a novel by Georgian author David Dephy, All the World’s Secrets, is currently being translated by the London-based poet and Georgian-language scholar, Adham Smart. We also publish anthologies: Plume’s annual anthology since 2013, the best of 10 years of The Salt River Review and Porch Journal, and Ginosko Journal’s print anthologies. Next year we will be publishing an earth-shattering Latin-American anthology on Resistance and Revolution in translation and the soon-to-be-released and long-awaited Fulcrum 8.

Some forthcoming single-author titles include a chapbook entitled Our Lady of the Orgasm by Nin Andrews under our Plume Editions imprint; Michael Anania’s newest full-length poetry collection; Allison Hedge Coke’s amazing performance piece Burn, with illustrations by Chickasaw artist Dustin Mater; a mind-boggling short story collection by Tim Fitts; and an anthology of essays on Linda Hull (with an introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, including work by Jean Valentine, Mark Jarman, Mark Doty and Patricia Spears Jones) edited by the late Diann Blakely.

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

Good question: we’re still in the process of trying to figure that out ourselves. Traditionally our audience was the readers of Mad Hatters’ Review— folks interested in the experimental, the surreal, and the avant-garde. Since then we have expanded dramatically, building (I hope) a small underground of readers and reviewers. We understand, as a...