Scenes: Mud Luscious Press: an interview with J. A. Tyler

Would you briefly describe Mud Luscious Press's history?

Mud Luscious Press started in 2007 as an online quarterly, grew into limited-edition handmade mini-chapbooks in the winter of 2008 with works from Shane Jones, Michael Martone, David Ohle, Brian Evenson, and scores of others, began producing its novel(la) series in late 2009 with Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart, started the Stamp Stories project in 2010 with our new associate editor Andrew Borgstrom, and birthed the Nephew imprint series in 2011 with its first title: Darby Larson's The Iguana Complex. Nearly every aspect of Mud Luscious Press is taken care of from my laptop or my kitchen table, and every penny earned has been dropped back into future projects or new titles. To date, we have published fifteen online issues, sixty chapbooks, one anthology, one Nephew title, and five novel(la)s, with future contracts already in place for an additional eight chapbooks, three anthologies, six novel(al)s, and three Nephew titles to be launched between now and 2013. Mud Luscious Press is an ever-growing indie press, though "indie" to us means small but not micro, independent but not separate from the whole, in our own limbed vein but pumping still towards the same beautifully massive lit-heart.

How would you characterize the fiction you publish?

This is difficult. For instance: Mathias Svalina's forthcoming Mud Luscious Press novel(la) I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur is a collection of failed businesses, and a poetic undertaking of clever ventures, and a prose piece about the demise of purpose and the loss of use. Svalina's book is not a poem or a narrative or a collection, and this is what we love about it. Our works are first and foremost, raw and aggressive and naked. We publish books with undeniable narrative threads but the most minimal exposition, books of poetic want wrapped in prose coats, books that spill language experiments on canvases of literary prowess. We want wreckage, breakage, an opening-up or a blooming. We want books that envelope us. Our online quarterly is packed with the most wrought short works we can find, our Nephew imprint is built on books with organic structures and dirty undercarriages, and our novel(la)s are a tad more lyrical in their sensibilities while still seeping the same aggressive words. Like Svalina's forthcoming novel(la) that strays close to poetry and prose and a collection but never allows labeling, Mud Luscious Press, in all its forms, is characterized by an inability to be pinned-down.

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

Our audience is probably young, though not entirely, probably writerly, though not to a fault, and probably lovers of poetry, though not exclusively. Our single hope is that we have built an audience that is unafraid of words, a growing audience that wants to be challenged, to be goaded, to be pushed inside of and around our books. To reach them, we Facebook, we blog, we tweet, we attend AWP, we attend &NOW, we give away books, we host deals on our titles, we provide righteously priced subscriptions, we send our authors on reading tours, and we circulate bookmarks and stickers and Stamp Stories. We do a million and one things to build this audience, but in the end, we publish books that are quakes of sentences, that must be read, that seek readers with their words, and this is, underneath it all, how we reach.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

Mud Luscious Press takes risks on books. We accept the broken-down words not as failures in language but as new ways to create literature; we invite their unexpected bodies into our fold. We delight in ruin. Mud Luscious Press is a shelter for a poetry that is not poetry, for a prose that is not prose, for those readers who want something else entirely and those writers who write it, both seeking that moment where they realize that words can always do other things altogether. We are not the underdog...