Scenes: Forest Avenue Press: An Interview with Laura Stanfill

Could you briefly describe your press’s history?

We are a grassroots, independent press, founded in 2012 in Portland, Oregon, to encourage and amplify Northwest authors, particularly debut novelists. In 2014, we opened to national submissions for the first time after earning distribution with Legato Publishers Group, which has now merged with Publishers Group West. The PGW sales team embraced our mission and aesthetic from our very first sales conference, which has allowed us to grow our national platform, our fan base, and our authors’ profiles.

From its inception, Forest Avenue Press has been a vocal advocate of independent bookstores and bringing authors and readers together in their communities. Sharing space with thinkers, with observers, with activists and wordsmiths and artists, is essential, even more so in these political times. We need to connect in person. We need to listen to each other. We need to rage together; we need to grieve together.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Our titles are surprising, unpredictable, and often feature a wondrous or magical approach to storytelling; “literary fiction on a joyride” is our current tagline. We look for a specific blend of gorgeous language and plot. We are committed to making space for underrepresented authors, not just in our catalog but in terms of who we amplify and the industry doors we try to hold open.

Many of our titles are genre-bending with some magical or fairytale qualities. The Hour of Daydreams by Renee Macalino Rutledge, which we published in March 2017, reimagines a Filipino folk tale and is a finalist for the Institute for Immigration Research’s New American Voices Award. It also won a gold medal in the Foreword INDIES contest in the multicultural category.

We also have a strong sense of responsibility to work with debut authors, guiding them through the process of moving a first book into the world. It takes a lot of courage to move from creating art in private to holding the mic and telling your story in public. It feels really essential to usher those words into the world with as much transparency and kindness as we can.

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

Our readers are seeking for stories outside the status quo, about individuals who stand up against conformity in a variety of settings—small towns, villages, boarding schools, and in challenging political times. Our covers are non-gendered; our designer Gigi Little brings her original style and her indie bookseller experience to each one.

In the last few years, we’ve been doing especially well with literary novels with fabulist or magical realist characteristics—titles that are pushing the boundaries of reality and constructing new narratives.

We do a mix of publicity and marketing outreach for all of our titles, including creating marketing materials, helping our authors earn big-name endorsements, organizing events, buying advertising, tradeshow appearances, and printing many more ARCs— advance reader copies —than most publishers of our size. If we don’t share our titles widely with reviewers, booksellers, bloggers, and other potential amplifiers, we won’t reach all that many readers.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

I am an advocate for authors and a mentor for small presses; I founded the Main Street Writers Movement in 2017 to create language around this kind of outreach and to encourage others in the literary community to step up and support each other. Part of the pledge that authors can take is to have parades for each other, by which I mean celebrate each other’s successes instead of feeling jealous or buying into the scarcity concept.

My biggest concern is the ebbing of reading culture. We aren’t competing against each other as authors and publishers; we are competing against shows and other forms of screen time. I attended the Yale Publishing Course this summer, and several speakers pointed out that our biggest competitor isn’t other publishers or authors; it’s Netflix. If we step up as individuals in our communities, and build relationships in a...