Three Short Interviews with Independent Presses
featuring Arsenal Pulp Press, carousel Magazine, and collusion books
Arsenal Pulp Press
Tali Voron: You are the director of Marketing & Publicity at Arsenal Pulp Press. What does a day in your role look like? What is your favourite aspect of marketing and publicity?
Cynara Geissler: My days always vary depending on how many books I’m personally handling, what I’ve contracted out to external publicists, and where we’re at in the current season. There are just so many different factors to what each day might look like. We’re currently in this moment where spring books are about to come out through April and May and we’re preparing internally for Fall 2023 releases. So, we’re firming up the final event details and doing follow-up on outreach for spring while meeting with authors publishing in fall.
There are a lot of things where I try to work ahead, but those confirmations—for media and events—might come a lot more down to the wire than I would hope. That’s the nature of the business. We’re also pitching Fall 2023 literary festivals that take place in September, October, and November. So, part of my day is spent preparing for those meetings. And then you always have to reverse-engineer that prep. So that means I’ve been emailing with authors and writing notes, and reading—or at least heartily skimming—the latest iterations of manuscripts, some of which might still be in editorial or awaiting sections that need to be added or changed. And I’m also managing various event admin tasks for upcoming launches or festival experiences. It’s a job with a lot of variety and I think that part is a strength, but sometimes it can also be a curse because you do always have that feeling of “I’m missing something, I must be forgetting something!”
It’s a very dynamic job. My favourite part of the job is meeting and talking with writers. We might liken it to if you were a teacher, your new students come in and you’re excited to meet them. And it’s bittersweet to say goodbye to the folks you’ve gotten to know really well over the latest publicity cycle. But that’s the nice thing about Arsenal: we’re still in touch because we want to promote the back list as well. So, it’s not saying goodbye, it’s more like I won’t be emailing you twice a week, every week, anymore. But you’ll still hear from me.
I love talking to authors about their books and about how they feel about their books. What excites them about the writing process? What drove them to write the book, and how did the book change? I think there’s a real art to asking questions that allow people to open up and talk about their work, and that’s really special.
TV: What is one thing that most readers don’t know about Arsenal Pulp Press, but you wish they did?
CG: I think the challenge of our industry is it’s very opaque from the outside to almost everyone. That includes authors, readers, booksellers, even book media. I don’t think it’s deliberate—I don’t think that I’m a dragon sitting on my hoard of trade secrets. It’s not that, it’s that there’s a lot of different deadlines that are quite rigid that are set by the other parts of the industry. We need to make books, right? So, you’ve got your print deadlines and maybe there’s a supply chain shortage with paper, so maybe you have to figure out when you need to send your book off to print if there’s a four-month delay on paper and you need your book in stores by April. There’s a lot of these behind-the-scenes administrative pieces that we’re navigating. And retailers also set deadlines for when they want to order books or when they need to order and receive books by. And they want information from us, like what reviews are we expecting sometimes six months before a book has even been offered to the media (!). So, there’s a lot of speculation and almost fictional elements of the book industry that are quite wild that I don’t know are true of other industries in the same way.
And of course granters and government funders have their own deadlines for when you need to complete that grant and report on that project. We’re always juggling these many, many internal deadlines. Kevin Williams, publisher of Talonbooks, often talks to the SFU Master of Publishing students at the start of their Book Project (where they simulate developing a list/season of books). He refers to everything trade publishers do as “the value-added chain.” What he’s explaining is that if you self-publish, you would have to handle or hire people to take care of editorial, design, layout, distribution deadlines, shipping deadlines, metadata deadlines, printing deadlines, and part of the reason—arguably the reason—an author publishes with a trade publisher is that we are dealing with all of this on the author’s behalf.
I see really great social discourse asking why publishers don’t publish less and focus on supporting a few authors at a time. I think there isn’t an indie publisher in the business who wouldn’t love to operate on that model. But the reality is that how we’re funded as a for-profit arts business (based on the amount we publish) in the landscape that we’re in doesn’t allow it due to the unpredictability of sales, and the idea that you can’t just generate a bestseller every season. Nobody knows how to do that! If they did, they would.
I just want people to know (list optics aside) we work in this business and publish the amount we do not because we’re hungry for every dollar. It’s because we believe literature is a wonderful, worthy, and transformative art form. We also have to be scrappy players in a game where we really don’t get to set a lot of the rules and we’re trying to keep doing that work. We get to set some rules within our little realm of how we operate as a publisher with our authors. I would just love for folks to know that it is a business relationship that we’re in with our authors, but we have the same goals that readers (and authors) do, which is that we want to get books into bookstores and in the hands of those who want to read them. We want you to know about the amazing things that we’re publishing. And at the same time, we’re facing some of the same obstacles that our readers do, which is being inundated with information in a very upsetting twenty-four-hour news cycle that makes you not want to be online (which is also one of the main spaces people learn about books). There’s just a lot going on in the world. I want readers to think of publishers as allies to literature because I think that’s what readers (and authors) are, too. We’re all on the same side.
I also think people don’t always know the best way to support writers and books and publishers (beyond buying the book, which you should do! It matters!). One way is to talk loudly and repeatedly about books you love. Truly tell someone about it or even tweet at the author. They love it. Never feel timid about expressing how much art means to you. No one will ever be sad or put out to hear that their work meant something to someone, right? It’s not embarrassing—actually, it’s cool.
TV: Can you speak to the role that marketing and publicity play in the success of a book?
CG: Books are such a fascinating business because you could try to replicate all the conditions that worked for one book selling really well and it could have a completely different outcome. As I said before, we don’t actually know how to engineer a bestseller. This is part of the reason why lists are so big. Sometimes it’s because publishers are throwing everything out there. Especially small publishers, we’re throwing things out there, hoping that a few of the books will really hit and help carry the list. And this is true of Canadian publishing, where we publish books for literary merit, not just because we think they’re products that are in high demand. So if you’ve had any old-school marketing training—think Mad Men—one of the first things they will tell you is that a product should not go to market unless there is a measurable large demand for it. The reality of some books is there really isn’t a massive sale of demand. We know that there are readers waiting for it, but are there millions of readers for every book? Probably not, but that’s also not how our business is structured. So, we don’t have to treat books that way, but yet we still have to sell them as products. That’s the ugly part of the business. I think people are uncomfortable with the part where it’s rooted in capitalism, but it is. And so it’s making your art a sellable object. I think there’s grief and fear and all kinds of things tied up in that because we want to think of our art as pure and expressive and not subjected to the whims of late capitalism, but unfortunately, when we’re making our art a product, that’s what happens.
What I would say is the book itself is always its best and most comprehensive selling tool. I can talk about a book and I can get a book in front of editors and I can submit it for awards. But at the end of the day, I don’t make the decision if that book is picked. I just present the package of the book the best way that I can and hope that it’s selected among the hundreds of book media, awards jurors, and literary festivals that are hearing about it.
Every aspect of a book is marketing, like the cover. It’s so important! It’s the number-one tool in meetings; I start by questioning the title, the cover and the subtitle, because even before I think about angles or I pull together the really exciting things about the author and what they have to offer to the reading public, I have to think about what the reader, the bookseller, the algorithm, is going to encounter first. There are just so many concerns now about how people encounter books (a bland or vague title or quiet cover might easily be overlooked) and how to best present those books. You don’t want every book to look the same, necessarily, but you want to read or to look at a non-fiction book, for example, and go, “Oh, I’m looking at a non-fiction book.” You can’t always articulate why something doesn’t look like the right genre of book, but these elements make a big impact and so you have to try (and of course it’s subjective!).
Writers know (but may need reminding) that a lot of what can help to make a good book successful in the sales sense is really paying attention to those key parts of it. Of course you have to write a great book; that’s very important. And then when it comes to actually selecting the final title, selecting the cover, and selecting the subtitle, you do need to listen to your publisher because they’re listening to sales reps. They’re listening to booksellers. We all want this book to make sense in this type of selling environment.
TV: What’s one marketing pet peeve that you have?
CG: I encounter this a lot because I am chronically online. I think this is the plight of the elder-millennial. I can remember my life before I was online. And then, you know, most of it now has been online. The internet is a beautiful tool, but also a weapon, and so I think a lot of writers, publishers, publicists, we sort of forget that we’re all in the same internet spaces. Everybody needs a group chat, a private chat, a diary where they can express their frustrations about art. I think everyone deeply needs that. And I want them to have that. But I do think (because this is a hard industry where rejection is common) we can be a little bit badly behaved online. (I include myself in this.) My pet peeve is I often encounter language like, “My publisher or my publicist just didn’t do anything for me.” And I think it’s so revealing, knowing the job, knowing how much work we do on each and every book. It’s just this very revealing moment for me that shows the gap between what the job of publicity really is in reality versus what authors want or expect or hope it to be.
I feel like I’m constantly trying to create transparency around that without seeming defensive because the nature of any pink-collar worker is that we are taught to see being overworked or not being able to do everything as a personal failing rather than a comment on the system that we work in.
I’ve noticed in myself and my peers in publishing that there is a fear of being called lazy because so much of the vibe of writing (and the way we undervalue/frame the function of art in culture—as a grind that we should celebrate (because the alternative, of talking about the realities of late capitalism isn’t pretty). There is pressure to perform “worthiness” and to some, that looks like talking about writing all the time. We’re stealing moments between our three jobs to write down an idea. It’s a business that many of us are forced to operate in scarcity, but we also mythologize that and turn it into a badge of honour. Or we want to talk about how many jobs or projects we’re doing at a time, in a way that we hope is impressive. But I actually think overworking (and expectations that we all can or should want to work ourselves to exhaustion) is ableist and a problem. Grinding more isn’t actually a solution. So, what I really think is being communicated when an author says, “Oh, my publisher didn’t do anything” or “I don’t think my publisher or publicist cares about my book” is they’re saying that they are disappointed that their book didn’t get major awards nods and it didn’t get high-profile reviews that they hoped for. And that’s real and that sucks. So, it’s perhaps natural and real to equate not getting the press or acclaim you want to a lack of publisher/publicist effort because that suggests that if everyone just “tries harder,” the next book will be a smash hit. It’s nice to believe there is an obvious path to success. It’s not actually all about effort though—a publicist could be the Meryl Streep of pitching and get all the right meetings, and the book just might not connect with the person who decides what is reviewed, who is booked for the gig, what wins. It’s as much about luck, and trends, the makeup of that year’s awards jury and, and, and … It’s just so unlikely, so completely unlikely, that a publisher or publicist did nothing at all.
TV: Can you pitch us one title that you’re looking forward to this spring?
CG: This is very hard! They’re all my children and I love them equally. I have to talk about Corinna Chong’s debut short story collection, The Whole Animal. I am so in love with this collection. One of the stories, called “Kids in Kindergarten,” won the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize, very deservedly so. That story is available online and you can listen to her read it (please do!). The best short stories affect you in the present, but also in the future, in a way that you don’t realize—you find yourself thinking about a line or an image long after you’ve finished the book. And to me, this is one of those collections. Corinna Chong worked on many of these stories for over fifteen years. It’s taken a long time for this collection to come together and that (revision, stepping away, returning to a story with new eyes) shows in the quality of the work. Chong published a novel in 2013 and since then has been working on these stories. Many of them have been published in literary magazines. And again, I think to me, that just demonstrates the effort and understanding of how much work (and time!) it can take to write a really good short story.
The book is about people and bodies and the ways that our bodies change and how that’s uncomfortable or the ways that our bodies are perceived by others and found wanting, and it’s about love. It’s about how cruel children can be. And the moments—bad and good—that end up becoming core memories—events that embed themselves in you and define or shape you in ways that you don’t realize at the time.
It’s set in the quotidian, but profound and magical things happen within that. And I just love it. I think it should be taught with Alice Munro, Greg Kearney, George Saunders. If you want to learn how to write a really good short story, read this collection because this is somebody who understands craft and knows how to deploy that punchline ending, but also knows how to make space for subtlety and let the reader reflect. It’s all in this collection.
TV: Pick three words that best describe Arsenal Pulp Press.
CG: Oh my gosh. This is a hardball question. I’m going to cheat and pick more than three. In terms of our work culture, I’m going to say: creativity, care, collaboration. Those are the values we bring to our work with authors. As for the books we publish—the books we’re looking to acquire— I would say: daring, original, and bold.
Carousel Magazine
Tali Voron: CAROUSEL has been publishing since 1983. How has the magazine evolved since then?
Mark Laliberte: That’s almost forty years of publishing! In that time, the magazine has shifted gears and changed forms a number of times; the spirit of the journal has, however, always persisted. I wasn’t around, of course, when the team who started the journal set things in motion, but interestingly, it had a kind of curatorial emphasis on literature and visual arts right from the beginning. That unique position, though, kind of fell to the side pretty quickly, as the realities of maintaining a journal with a continually shifting editorial team set in. Generally an issue a year came out for the first decade or so; there seemed to be a struggle in the early years to maintain focus, which eventually led to a hiatus in the late nineties. Energy was clearly lagging. After a few years of silence, a new group revisited the journal, in 2004, and gave it a visual and editorial facelift, I think that was at issue 15. I was involved then firstly as designer, and eventually took the reins as managing editor. I really leaned heavily into creating a space where visual arts and literature overlapped, began to experiment with playing works off of one another in our pages. Flow became a really important way to express an editorial position. That was a significant and promising change for the journal. From issues 15 to 43 (2004 to 2020) the magazine existed within that hybrid space, a long-form experiment in print.
The summer of 2020 was another important transitional year for the journal, a very transformative one that kind of aligned with the pandemic in terms of timing; although, the changes implemented were not exclusively driven by the realities of the pandemic. At that time we published our last physical issue (43) and stepped away from a lot of the subscriber and distributor obligations which were weighing down the inner workings of producing a journal. We streamlined our operation by taking the magazine online and making it all-access—free to read, from cover to cover. We ended our relationship with/reliance on subscribers, fulfilling any remaining issues of their subs with back issues or refunds, whatever we needed to do to get to a reset point. No longer did we have to babysit the parts of the magazine that felt draining, the kind of work that nobody notices unless there’s some mistake, like making sure people’s addresses are up to date when sending out issues, chasing readers to renew their subscriptions, et cetera. We also notably shed our printing costs, and increased the rates we pay to creators.
I look back at the printed issues I helped to create with pride. I mean, I absolutely love print and really do prefer it. However, my feelings and tastes often run a bit counter to the rest of the literary community. The move online was really about putting my perspectives regarding the “superiority of print” aside for the sake of growing our audience, and trying to make peace with the major philosophical changes that had occurred within the community. The desire for writers to want to share their creative accomplishments directly to their feed—to give readers everywhere a chance to read a work in full—had grown exponentially in the past decade, and was impossible to ignore. If CAROUSEL wanted to keep going and growing, we had to acknowledge creators’ perspectives on the matter. Once we did that, evolving our journal into an online platform that still framed new content around discrete issues made perfect sense. It’s all about sharing and going with the flow, free from paywalls.
TV: What is one thing that most readers don’t know about CAROUSEL but you wish they did?
ML: We have a very robust archive of previously published works accessible on our site. The shift to a digital space has allowed us to rethink our archive, and how we want the public to interact with it. We used to interact with our audience primarily through the promotion of every current issue by revealing a table of contents, a cover, and a few examples/excerpts with a primary push to subscribe or buy a copy. That, and by pointing them to a collection of purchasable back issues. When we decided to shed the commercial aspect of marketing a physical magazine, it allowed us to open up our archive a lot more. During the pandemic we began posting tons of free content on to our blog … at this point, we’ve made available almost two hundred archival works sampled from issues 15 to 40, released into the wild for anyone to enjoy. Literally hundreds of poems, stories, and singular artworks have been liberated from the confines of our back issues, alongside interviews with major contemporary artworld stars like ORLAN or Chip Kidd or FASTWÜRMS (who just won a Governor General’s Award). It really is a lovely cross-section of the best or the most interesting work we’ve published over a few decades time.
TV: Your tagline: “Hybrid Literature for Mutant Readers” is incredibly evocative. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to you?
ML: I connected the term “hybrid literature” to the spirit of CAROUSEL early on in my tenure as an editor. I think issue 19 was the first time the term appeared as part of an editorial stance, a way of going back to that original mandate of overlapping writing and visual art within our pages. Bringing in comics—which, in a way, are a perfect overlap of those two things—into this hybridized editorial space for the first time made a lot of sense, particularly when we would come across creators working with abstract comics or comics poetry.
Over a period of about ten years, we spearheaded the “hybrid lit” term, but eventually started to see it appearing everywhere. It became ill-defined, with a lot of magazines or people in the lit scene using the term “hybrid lit” to simply refer to two genres overlapping in a single story. To push against that, and to formally champion a more thorough defining of the term hybrid literature, we expanded our usage to “Hybrid Literature for Mutant Readers” in 2013—which first appeared as a tag line on our cover at issue 30 (and on every issue since). This speaks, of course, to the ethos of the journal, but also to the kind of mind that we strive to attract. It describes both the people we publish and the readership we cultivate.
TV: What was your favourite piece or part of the previous issue of CAROUSEL?
ML: We recently published CAROUSEL 49, which contains several perspectives on creative “prompting” that ended up being incorporated into the issue. We almost never apply themes to an issue, but sometimes they organically kind of creep up. In this instance, I was at Art Toronto in the fall of 2022, and they had a little section at the fair focused on literary-based explorations and artist books, and there were a few creators present writing PWYC prompt poetry. Essentially, you give them an idea and they’ll write a poem on the fly; you get handed a completed poem a few minutes later. I thought, “Well, that’s interesting” because it’s so counter to what we do. We have this rigorous editorial process at CAROUSEL: people are vetted via our curatorial team and it’s a very slow process—but I thought, “What if I just rolled the dice as an editor and commissioned two poems on the spot? We would have to agree to publish whatever we get, and the writers would have agree to appear in the journal in a special impromptu section.” So I introduced the journal, I pitched the idea, and both of the poets were into it. I wasn’t even sure if their work as poets was ever aimed at publication. I mean, I think it’s a little bit more of a performative thing, a one-to-one interaction between poet and customer. I’ve since learned that photos of the best works end up documented on their personal websites. Anyway, I thought, “Well, let’s prompt that. I have a venue to offer. Let’s just play it and roll the dice …”
That got me thinking about the idea of prompt poetry, and I guess prompting in general, and just around that time there was all this buzz about AI prompting in the culture. So, as a writer, artist, and art director, I spent six months just sort of sitting back, watching the news and listening to all the controversies, trying to figure out what I thought of it. In the end, we actually dedicated our portfolios for the issue to AI-prompted work, and I actually did a piece for the section, which I don’t at this point normally do. When we started our comics section it was the same thing: I worked out the bugs myself by trying to figure out what worked and didn’t work for our venue. And so I felt like I should do that in a way this issue, in terms of playing with AI art-making tools. I also found one or two other artists that were making work that I thought was interesting.
This focusing of attention culminated in an extended editorial for the issue around the idea of technologically guided creative prompting, and I postulate that as a journal we are going to have to face the impact of AI on the future of creativity quite directly. I mean, there’s a huge controversy right now with some of the sci-fi magazines closing their calls for submissions because they feel they’re being inundated with AI-written works … they’re trying to figure out what to do about that. This was a way for me to declare editorially that this technology is not going away, and to consider whether it can be used in the production of art. You know, I certainly think it can.
I actually set a challenge for myself right before the issue came out to design C49’s cover using AI prompting; that was my learning window. I just sort of went in cold and a day later I had created a cover that I was quite happy with, one that I felt didn’t stand out as an AI-generated work amidst our historical gallery of covers. I think it lends itself quite nicely to the issue and I also think that as an art director with a goal in mind, using Midjourney didn’t seem much different than using any other set of tools to produce a cover.
TV: Having authored books and a forthcoming poetry collection, you’re experienced in the world of book publishing as well. What would you say is the biggest difference between book publishing and literary magazine publishing?
ML: Fundamentally, when publishing a book, I think you’re trying to create something that, from cover to cover, is a closed environment. And it’s more open-ended with a magazine, which is one part of a sequential, serial experience. That’s the major difference …
I’ve always viewed book publishing as an attempt at creating a closed environment. I approach making a book with a desire to ideally produce a timeless object. A really great book has no shelf life; or a never-ending shelf life, depending on how you look at it. A really compelling book will pass from owner to owner over time. Between owners, it will just sit on a shelf somewhere, like at a used bookstore, until someone new comes across it and is compelled by a force that is timeless—a message in a bottle that says: read me.
But I don’t think magazines work that way at all. I think magazines are fundamentally a spotlight of the moment—that’s when they’re at their most compelling. For me, a magazine answers a series of questions, both from the perspective of what’s going on in the lit scene and who the new voices are: what do they want to say and how do they want to say it? Also from the perspective of the journal as a presentation platform: what do we want to spend our time highlighting at this moment? Or editorially, how do we want to interact with our readership? What the best format is to take those questions on can constantly be in flux with a magazine.
TV: What role does CAROUSEL play in Canada’s literary landscape?
ML: I think our key role is to act as an open environment for creators to express themselves and to experiment, to provide that space so that they can get to a point in their careers where the mainstream begins to take notice so that more robust careers can be built. Looking back at our history, we’ve definitely accomplished that on many, many occasions.
TV: Pick three words that best describe CAROUSEL Magazine.
ML: Confident. Innovative. Underappreciated.
CAROUSEL Magazine’s fiftieth issue was released in July 2023 and is free to read on their website. Additionally, be sure to check out their USEREVIEW book column—featuring a new review every Wednesday authored by a changing roster of critical voices … over one hundred exceptional reviews have been published to date!
Collusion Books
Tali Voron: Collusion Books is a micro-press that started as an offshoot of long con magazine. How did you start the press, and why did you choose to go in this direction?
Andy Verboom: long con and Collusion were two faces of the same core idea that I wanted to pursue. It was always the plan that we would launch the press a year after launching the magazine. Then the pandemic hit and I realized that poets had all this extra time to write together and there was no better time to get Collusion off the ground. The reason I say that Collusion and long con are two sides of the same coin is that long con is all about response, publishing artworks that respond to other artworks in some way—a kind of asynchronous collaboration—and Collusion publishes synchronous collaborations.
TV: That’s awesome. It’s fascinating to know that Collusion was always part of the plan and that you were able to bring it into the world earlier than planned as a result of the pandemic.
Collusion focuses on publishing collaborative works as you just mentioned. What is that process like and how is it different from working with single-authored works?
AV: I wouldn’t really know what it’s like to work with single-authored works—other than as an editor. But in terms of the whole process, from submission consideration to publication and shipping the books, there is a lot of variety among collaborative pairs and groups. When it comes to discussing layout or covers or edits, some collaborative pairs or groups extend their collaboration, so I’m coming in as a third party. They’ll discuss with each other privately and then come back with a synthesized response or position to an editing suggestion or a cover option. Other pairs or groups treat the publishing process as a new collaboration—the manuscript was one collaboration, and now we’re starting a new one—and they bring me into that collaborative discussion.
I don’t have a preference either way. I mean, obviously, being a member of the publishing collaboration is a little more labour-intensive, so sometimes it’s nice when a pair or group comes to me and says, “No, we as a group want this.” And that’s also easier for me to respond to because I’m less likely to argue my point. But being part of a new collaboration, a publishing collaboration, brings its own joys because I gain a greater appreciation for how those two writers worked together on the manuscript—and that just deepens my appreciation for the work.
TV: Can you speak to the role that art, whether audio, visual or digital, plays in Collusion’s chapbooks?
AV: Audio and visual art plays a formative role in Collusion—not only because of its association with long con, which publishes all forms of art, but also because launching Collusion at the beginning of the pandemic gave me an opportunity to do some low-stakes experimentation with digital chapbooks. Digital chapbooks are, for me, not just ebooks, but chapbooks that are laid out and can be read only as web pages, taking advantage of the longscroll format of the screen and of interactive or animated elements that help the poetry shine. Initially I put out anthologies of collaborative poems, just single poems taking advantage of that scroll format, and then later branched out into anthologies that took advantage of more digital features like image hotspots—so that a suite of poems could be laid out on a map rather than in a linear format—and included GIFs and other interactive features that made the layout less extricable from the work. I wanted to push the poetry toward having to be presented this way, away from convertibility into print format. Those experiments didn’t quite find their audience—or I didn’t find the audience for them—so they’re on the back burner for now.
But audio and visual art still plays an essential role in how Collusion chapbooks are launched. Because I’m out here in lonely Nova Scotia and most of the writers I publish live in Ottawa or Toronto or Montreal, I don’t do in-person launches. Instead, I create virtual launches that feature video-poems drawn from the season’s titles and performed by the poets. Sometimes these video-poems include original artwork or video that the poets have shot, and sometimes they’ve assembled the visuals into montage themselves. Sometimes they’ve created original music or ambiance for the background. Sometimes they give me video or just audio of them reading, and I source public domain or creative commons visuals and audio to accompany it. The community aspect of Collusion, the time everyone in the season can come together, even virtually, is always based around visual art and audio art in that way.
TV: So, a tough question: what is one title you’re most looking forward to in your next season and why?
AV: You’re going to make me pick one? Okay, this one really gets me in the solar plexus. It’s called A More Perfect Union, and it’s by Adam Hauin and Jack Daniel Christie. I love this chapbook because it’s this skitteringly political, bulldozingly rhetorical, choral-voiced long poem—qualities that swaths of my own poetry have tried to achieve. But it’s just so much better, so much more elegant and effective. As soon as I saw the manuscript, I was filled with this weird mix of envy and excitement: it’s exactly the type of poetry I’ve tried to write, and it’s the type of poetry I want to see more of, especially in Canadian literature.
TV: What is one thing that most readers don’t know about Collusion Books, but you wish they did?
AV: Collusion Books is this amazing collaboration between me, my bank account, and the Adobe subscription my day job pays for.
TV: What role does Collusion Books play in Canada’s literary landscape?
AV: A very, very small one. I see Collusion as one more checker in the scales, trying to tip those scales a little more toward author number neutrality—which is a kind of magical land where collaboration is abundant and abundantly recognized and the solo-authored book is no longer the default. Solo authorship is always going to be in the majority, I think, but it would just be lovely if it were no longer the presumed default and collaborations were no longer treated like eccentricities and sideshows.
When I approached Meet the Presses, which runs the bpNichol Chapbook Award, about explicitly expanding their eligibility requirements to include collaborative works, they responded very positively—and now Collusion’s chapbooks have been on more than one annual short-list. I’m grateful and consider this enthusiastic welcome as an achievement of and for collaborative writing. I’d really like to see more prizes that explicitly invite collaborative submissions. As an arts administrator, I know that our systems for recognizing literary accomplishment treat collaboration like a headache, and I understand the romantic traditions that keep major prizes from going in this direction. But it’s a very small headache, really, and it opens territory for really good work. From what I’m reading, collaborative work is just better, and I think two writers are inherently going to produce more interesting work than one of those writers toiling on their own.
TV: Final question: pick three words that best describe Collusion Books.
AV: Make. Stuff. Together.
Collusion Books will be open for submissions in July and August 2023.