Taylor Davis-Van Atta chats with Graywolf co-founder Scott Walker

Hunger Mountain: Could you describe what you saw happening in the publishing scene in the early seventies?  What was the impetus to approach Copper Canyon and to set up Graywolf’s first, tiny print shop?

Scott Walker: I was in college in the early seventies, and while there I worked first on the college literary magazine, then (simultaneously) began, with a co-editor, a literary magazine of our own. I enjoyed being part of the creation-to-audience process, and found that as a reader I preferred reading small and large groups of poetry and prose by a single author rather than the grab-bag common to most literary magazines.

After school, I stayed active as an editor, and gradually migrated farther and farther north from Oregon, ending up near Port Townsend, Washington, where Copper Canyon was located. In Copper Canyon my life-partner-of-the-time and I found sympathetic friends engaged in the same general pursuit, and accepted their offer to pursue our separate imprints in the same building. It was satisfying to suffer together umpteen hours a day; we had fun.

As to why, it was primarily a set of simple impulses: to midwife a book (or, more often, a chapbook) of good poems that had integrity individually and as a collection; to learn and express the craft of bookmaking and ultimately just to hold a well-made and satisfyingly designed book in our hands; and to then share that work—the poems and the book—with an appreciative audience.

Only later—in retrospect, and in response to a need to justify ourselves to potential donors—were we motivated and able to say that we were fulfilling a cultural need, publishing things that larger publishers were disinclined to, and in a way nobody else was dumb enough to think they could afford. As we became larger and more ambitious, the need for donors became larger, and the stated cultural need became part of our mantra, but really we mostly just loved writers, writing, and the smell of ink.

HM: What did early promotional efforts look like? 

SW: The earliest efforts involved a word-of-mouth, store by store discovery of book retailers who were committed to poetry, and then engaging those folks personally, often in a bottom-of-the-invoice/check-stub correspondence that continues over months and years. Through this discovery process, we found some friends to poetry who became friends of Graywolf Press and of ours. We’d visit them in person on the rare occasions when we could afford to travel. We were lucky in the authors we selected, because once on the shelves their books found, for poetry, a largish welcoming audience.

HM: At what point did the realities of large market competition start becoming a factor?

SW: “The realities of large market competition” didn’t factor in, really, until some of the best larger publishers began to employ the same befriend-the-bookseller strategies, and then, much later really, as bottom line pressures began to force tighter inventory control on so many independent booksellers.

This was offset somewhat by the growth of Barnes & Noble and Borders, for whom large inventories were a marketing tool for getting more people in the store, so the effect was muted for a time. But as those larger stores and the Internet took business away from the independent stores we relied on, those stores were forced to become more inventory-conscious, shelf-life grew shorter, and the pressure to make sales happen in a tighter time frame grew more pronounced.

This was felt more for Graywolf in part because our list by then had expanded from poetry to include fiction and nonfiction, and those genres were really going head-to-head with the larger houses, who were at the time doing a pretty darned good job of publishing the same sorts of books that the independent presses were doing. Ultimately (for me) it seemed like our books were insufficiently “different”—so booksellers weren’t inclined to give them a longer shelf-life—and that we were forced to make all publicity—

reviews, interviews, tours—occur in the five week shelf life given to new books. Smaller presses just didn’t have the authority or money to make that happen.

HM: It’s no secret that new books haven’t been getting much help from reviewers over the past ten or fifteen years; likewise, the reading public has been underserved by all but a few, professional reviewers (of course this is not always the fault of the reviewer—a friend of mine who reviews for the NYTBR and Slate recently confessed to me that trying to review a full novel in 300-600 words is like learning to write haiku). How has the role of the reviewer changed over the past thirty years?  What should a reviewer aim to achieve when he/she sits down to review new work?

SW: Book reviews and book criticism are important, but in ways that have less and less to do with book marketing.

There are fewer venues of the old from-the-mountaintop-to-the-masses variety; the trick in publishing old-style is—after making sure you’ve got the right cover, title, and back cover—to orchestrate advertisements, bookseller enthusiasm, and reviews in an array of daily, weekly, and monthly publications that people pay attention to, so that they all say the name of the book more or less at once, in a 3-5 week window of time. The goal being to get a browser—or, these days, an Amazon impulse buyer—to pick up the book for long enough for the cover, title, back cover, design, and then writing style to work their magic and prompt a purchase.

Smaller literary publishers always hoped to push on the review and bookseller enthusiasm levers (because they couldn’t afford the advertising lever). But now the booksellers are bottom-line-pressured (shortening shelf-life) and mission-confused (i.e. there are so many books from so many publishers, and the literary houses are only a shade of grey different from the larger commercial houses’ literary output); and the reviews from top-down media are, mostly for economic reasons, disappearing.

The best review as always comes from somebody who has read and liked a book. So today, publishers use Twitter, Facebook, electronic author appearances, making things simple and rewarding for book groups, etc as methods to replace, to some extent, the role of book reviews. Finding three highly targeted, modestly audienced bloggers who will mention the book positively may have more of an impact on sales than a review in the NYTBR.

From the marketing perspective—i.e. getting books to a reader—reviews have less impact. Things change.

HM: You mention that the function of reviews and criticism is not so much to sell books any longer, but they still have something to do with an author’s reputation, his status, and the ability for his work to endure, right?  Thirty or forty years ago, if an American author had published his third or forth novel, there would be critics who were writing about and analyzing his body of work.  Critics would be giving context to this new literature, trying to figure out just how this writer is trying to progress the field of literature.  But this doesn’t seem to be the case today.  As a student of literature myself, I’ve found it very difficult to find good criticism on the authors I admire, especially when they’re foreign writers whose body of work has only been partially translated into English.  How do you account for the changes in this area over the past, say, thirty years?  How important is it for literature to have scholars who devote themselves to tracking the progress and the new in-roads being made?  In your opinion, what does good criticism do?

SW: I am tempted to opine but will disappoint you here. Publishing—identifying voices that speak to the issues and concerns of the day, and framing them so that they find an audience—is one thing; criticism is something else entirely, and beyond my expertise.

HM:  That is a bummer. I’ve been talking with John O’Brien of Dalkey Archive about the changes that occur once an independent press enters its “second generation”; that is, when their founding director leaves and the reins are passed on.  Typically, there is an over-dependence on the founder, so when he leaves major changes in mission and character must take place in order for the press to adapt and survive.  Grove and New Directions are our guiding examples for this discussion, but fifteen years after you left, Graywolf seems to be a rare success story.  Do you see it as that?  Do you find that the work published by Graywolf today remains true to your early vision for the press?  What adaptations did Graywolf have to undergo after you left in order to stay viable, economically and in terms of its spirit?

SW: I think Fiona [McCrae] might be better able to answer this than me, but I will say that creating a sustainable, founder-outliving organization is a choice; that choice is made easier when the founder’s role becomes more like an executive director/publisher than an editorial director—as was the case with Graywolf, a bit to my regret, and with New Directions, where Jay Laughlin was absent for such long stretches. Becoming an official nonprofit—

with the attendant bookkeeping, legalities, fundraising, and the like—usually results in the founder picking up roles extraneous to what initially brought him/her into the business.

In Graywolf’s case, we had the good example of other nonprofits first in Washington then in the Twin Cities, the mentoring of a bunch of great foundation people and executive directors, and very fortunate selections of members of a board of directors that was appropriately hands-on—i.e. hands-on in the right places. The board—given the chance—should create the organizational bulk to maintain momentum in the case of a founder leaving.

If the founder keeps hold of the editorial selection process, the transition is another issue entirely.

HM: Early on in your publishing career, was it your goal to publish work that was “timely” and had some immediate social resonance?  To what extent did your personal aesthetic dictate what was published in Graywolf’s early years, and to what degree did the extra workload of becoming an official nonprofit force you to compromise your editorial
vision?

SW: Early on, I just wanted to present a variety of good contemporary writers, people whose work—when I started it was just poetry—held up over the course of a chapbook or book, and whose books and chapbooks were constructed so as to make a whole. I appreciated different types of work, so there was no “NY School”-type dogmatism to the selections, and I wasn’t at all interested in social relevance. Did the poem say something meaningful, well? My personal aesthetic wasn’t narrow enough to hurt us too badly, but wasn’t comprehensive either.

I never felt that the editorial vision was compromised by hiring people whose aesthetic was sound but different from my own; in fact I always thought the press was strengthened by having a list that represented many excellent points of view. So as my duties drew me away from editorial work, I was able to appreciate that others stepped in to acquire and edit books that were excellent in their particular ways.

Early on, fundraising was very difficult—in fact a group of us did a heck of a lot of funder education, to help donors realize that literature was a fundable art form, not that different from dance or theater. At that time, the goal for me at least was to gain support for the publication of work that was excellent.

Later, I found it useful at times to present the work as addressing some social need—we got grants now and then for literary books about some social interest of the foundation’s. That was a nice bonus, but we/I never really thought we were changing the mission. Just like publishing—where you find a book and then try to aim it at its natural audience—we took on a good book, and then, after that, looked to see if there might be a donor-audience that would appreciate its non-literary aspects.

HM: Do you think fundraising becomes easier when a nonprofit publishing house can state that it has some specific social or political tendency?

SW: I think that if a literary house had a social or political slant, there would be offsetting upsides and downsides, so that the end result would be that the publisher would have a heck of a time getting donations, no matter what.

HM: You talked earlier about the satisfaction you took in learning the craft of bookmaking; in the beginning were you creating handcrafted chapbooks because you had access to that equipment, or was the choice to publish by hand tied to the vision you had for the Press?  When and why was the decision made to switch to modern binding and printing methods?

SW: The first bunch of years we made books via a treadle-powered letterpress—mostly because it was the cheapest way to create books—almost free simple equipment, no power use, binding by hand—again, because it was cheapest. We grew to love the craft and learn more and more about traditional book-making and book design, so our design, typefaces, papers, and binding methods evolved and improved.

The craft was terrific; we ended up making hand-crafted books, and delighting in being able to offer those to readers of contemporary poetry at prices equivalent to badly designed and haphazardly-made books. There was joy in that. The downside: creating the book took a long time.

We made the turn to machine-made books after spending nine-plus months of very long days and no breaks at all to create a book-length work by Tess Gallagher; the book was taken to a bindery to be sewn and glued, so that was one step. But to our shock the book sold out in 4 months; there was no way we were going to spend another 9 months on a reprint, so we had the second printing offset.

That was the start; a greater joy was to find good poems, help shape them into a book, and then get them—nicely designed, using good typography and high-quality papers—into the hands of readers. So that became the focus.

HM: Orion offers both print and digital versions of its magazine.  This is something I just learned; I buy two or three issues of Orion per year from my local co-op but have never looked it up online. Was there electronic content offered on the website three years ago?

SW: There was content three years ago, but little from the magazine was put online; instead the website focused on original content. I redirected the website to focus on representing the magazine better, for two reasons—the web is the easiest and cheapest way to allow people to discover us, and it extends our message via our articles to more people.

HM: In your time with Orion, what have you noticed about the way in which people are consuming the magazine in terms of its print incarnation versus digital?

SW: We see the same trends as everyone else: a large group of people who prefer print—especially since the juxtaposition of text and visual is so important to Orion’s work—but an increasing number of people who “consume” us digitally, for many reasons—they like a part of what we publish, but the whole does not resonate with their interests enough to inspire subscription; online conversation is important to them, so the article and its web interaction is a whole they prefer; taking steps to lower one’s carbon footprint inspires many digital subscribers, as does the ease with which they can share or save articles—art, photographs, and all. Digital will be an increasing part of our future, as devices get better and the demographics change, but nobody knows what that will look like exactly.

HM: Some other publishers I’ve spoken with have talked about a rather insidious side of the digital lit realm—especially as it applies to the critical inquiry of new literature—and that is the social aspect of the Internet.  They’ve noticed that strong critical stances, those stances that are likely to be unpopular, are less often taken by essayists and reviewers who write for online audiences.  Is this something you can speak to? Obviously there is a social component to a lot of literary sites that doesn’t accompany, say, a print copy of a journal when it arrives in one’s mailbox, but do you see the social aspect of the Internet as being a detriment to literature at the moment?  Or is it too soon to say?

I realize this is a hairy question, but I also imagine that you must be familiar with Orion’s print and online competition, and the general proliferation of lit sites on the Internet.

SW: I don’t agree about the “insidious element.” The Internet is such a great forum for self-expression and it is so easy for your natural audience to find you that I’d think niche audiences are enabled and amplified by its use, and not at all diminished.

HM: I find it fascinating that your publishing career began with a letterpress, tireless work, bloodied fingers, and 1,500 copies of Instructions to the Double—and all the joy that came with learning the craft of bookmaking—and thirty-five years later you are working with tools and technology that allows you to reach, at least potentially, thousands of readers in a snap.

SW: I know about the career arc. My never-to-be-written-because-bound-to-be-boring memoir would be titled “The 500 Year Career—from Gutenberg to Google.”

HM: So when it comes to literary publishing, are you a meliorist at heart?  Is literature’s shuffle into the digital age what’s best?  Is there a “right” direction?

SW: I don’t think I’m a reformer exactly, if that’s what you mean. I think media evolves, and, naturally, so does our relation to it, and with that people’s inclination to make the most of the medium they work in. “Directing” evolution isn’t possible; you can influence movements, maybe, but not direct them.

HM: For you personally, is there some intrinsic value in reading good writing that is printed in ink, on quality paper?  What would be lost if, some day, Instructions to the Double were available to read only from a screen?

SW: I love print—I hope that’s obvious. I love ink and type and good design. I read books in print, on my Kindle, and on my iPhone—though not on my computer screen, because I’m old and I’m not used to that. Different books do best in different formats; killing a bunch of trees is not an essential part of the process of transmitting ideas and shapes and values from one person to the next.