Five reasons why I love small presses and literary magazines
On the occasion of the NEA's termination of $27 million in funding promised to lit mags, small presses, and other arts organizations
I’m late to the hellscape, but this May many, many small presses and literary magazines (along with other arts organizations) lost the funding that they had been promised by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEA—or whatever White House official was ordering this to be done—wrote to a bunch of publishers who had applied for and (very competitively) won funding, and literally just rescinded it. There was a bunch of hollow reasoning given, but the upshot is that the White House resents free expression and thinks government funding should go toward supporting their closed-minded, usually violent ideologies.
Instagram was blowing up about it; publishers were asking for donations to cover the lost funds, since they’d predicated their publishing plans on the funds that were promised. You can find Literary Hub’s write-up here. To get a sense of the scope of who lost support, there’s even a shared document of the grantees who have lost funding—a $27 million blow to the arts, part of the MAGA movement’s step-by-step dismantling of governmental programs that help people in America.
There are lots of really good, inspired posts on social media about why this loss of funding matters. But I wanted to throw in my two cents, too, by reflecting on why small presses and literary magazines really matter to me, personally—with the hope that this will resonate for those of you who are also mourning this moment.
1. Small presses and literary magazines are accessible, in an “industry” that often feels like it’s made up of gatekeepers.
Small presses were there for me when I had no idea how the hell anything worked in the literary world. I am a white person from a pretty well-off family in a nice neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, so I had a lot of privilege growing up and still have a lot of social power; I even had a neighbor who worked in New York publishing who I did an internship for one summer (checking and updating facts for the Frommer’s Best RV and Tent Campgrounds in the U.S., possibly this very edition). I went to a private college and graduated debt-free, with huge gratitude to my parents and grandparents. But when I got out and decided I wanted to be a writer, I still had no idea what that meant. I hadn’t majored in creative writing, and I hadn’t learned anything about publishing contexts or, more broadly, how to “make it.” All I knew was that writers write.
I was privileged but naive, in other words; I was passionate about what I was doing but definitely not strategic about achieving “success.” Literary magazines were the very first context where I felt like I could be a real writer in a public way. They popped up in Google searches; they were referred to on cool websites I discovered like HTMLGIANT. They often published online, so I could read them while living outside the country (I was based on Taiwan the year after college), and the online mags didn’t have the imposing, implicit gates that a lot of the glossier publications did. I’m talking early online lit mags like elimae, Juked (also a print mag), and >kill author: they were born of communities of people just making stuff and publishing it. For the most part they weren’t trying to be famous or build a “career.” They just loved what they were doing and put their energy and time into it, like I was doing with my writing.
Plus, from my point of view as a writer and submitter, there weren’t too many steps between the writing and the writing appearing. You could just submit and the editors would read what you sent. To me, it was miraculous: whether they accepted my work or not, they made room for me when I showed up.
2. Small presses and literary magazines prioritize the writing over how well the writing can be sold.
This fact really came home to me as I got to know the submission process itself. As most publishing books tell it (I hadn’t read these at the time), getting published with mainstream magazines and Big 5 book publishers is a matter of pitching your work first and foremost. You have to make your writing sound good, and you have to make yourself sound good. The pitch precedes the writing itself.
But with lit mags (and eventually small presses, when I began to submit to them) the implicit contract was totally different: You just send them your work, try not to say something completely alienating in the cover letter, and they read it. The writing itself.
Because the writing, as we know, can’t be distilled to a soundbite. It has to be as long as it is to say what it wants to say. You have to show up for all of it.
I didn’t know this practice of prioritizing the work (rather than the pitch) was magic at the time, but it is magic. Like I said, I was kinda naive. It’s actually really hard to find a corner of the world will people will take you seriously and read your writing just because you exist, but that’s exactly what these editors were doing. It was a gift of time, energy, and passion. And sometimes, if I got lucky, they would even publish what I wrote.
3. At their best, small presses and literary magazines center the marginalized, both stylistically and in terms of the subject matter of the writing they publish.
After I got into literary magazines, I started learning more about small presses. The expansive landscape of independent publishers opened up my world. Up till then, my experience in bookstores had become a bit of a disappointment whenever I tried to find something new and fresh to read. Booksellers are the best, but my experiences even in the coolest bookstores were usually scattershot and often resulted in me forcing myself to read 200 pages of some coolly-designed book by a major publisher that actually kind of sucked.
Libraries were more curated, but the magisterial hardbacks that had staying power there were both excellent (Dellillo! Murakami! Atwood!) and, it felt to me, too classic to resonate personally with. I was always looking for something unheard of, something that felt like a discovery, a contribution to the conversation just to be reading it.
That’s when small press publishers began playing a big role in my reading life. Specifically, publishers like Tarpaulin Sky Press, Sidebrow, Les Figues Press, and Civil Coping Mechanisms made a practice of publishing hybrid/cross-genre writing, which resonated massively with me. They were often small prose fragments with intentional, poetic language, but woven together with narrative, and readerly/fun to boot. I loved pieces of writing that let you in as a reader—they felt possible to reside in, to be in community with. And that’s what I really wanted, both as a reader and a writer: to communicate, to be with.
It’s not just style, but marginalized subject matter and authors themselves that small presses and lit mags support, especially when they’re explicit and conscious about this mission. Margot Atwell says it really beautifully in her article for Lit Hub in 2022:
One thing that’s especially galling is that independent presses often lack the money to provide authors with higher advances because we take risks on work that is more experimental and pushes boundaries—books written by writers who are BIPOC, trans, queer, disabled, neuroatypical, immigrants, or in other ways marginalized by mainstream society and mainstream publishing. We often publish work that has less obvious “commercial appeal” to serve our missions and enrich the literary landscape.
When I read the writing published small presses, I always felt like I was getting the real story, something under the surface of the stories it was more profitable for larger publishers to sell me.
4. I would rather love a book for its gaps and aporias than be bored by its perfection.
Over time, as I read more lit mag and small press writing, I did discover the limitations that the lack of labor and funding bring up for publishers. When you don’t have paid staff and are running a press entirely as volunteer labor, or when you’re a single person publishing 8-10 books a year, you can’t catch every single formatting error. You can’t sand each book down to a lucid, sparkling sheen. Oversight is a little looser and awesomeness is prized more than professionalization, so you get books that are fire, and that sometimes burn holes in themselves.
I’ve always loved writing that embraces its own imperfections. Clarice Lispector is like this too; it’s not just small presses. Her work is often crazed, uneven; sometimes it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t need to. It’s also absolutely brilliant, too bright to even look at. Lispector was writing at a different time in a different place, but she’s emblematic of the best of small presses (and, of course, her translated books are published in the U.S. by the very established, large small press New Directions): when we letting go of a highly professionalized, glossy text, the more visceral, revelatory stuff can come out.
5. Small presses and lit mags are not a rung on the ladder. They’re a wellspring that keeps the whole thing going—on both a systemic and personal level.
What I want to say, finally, is that small presses are still there for me, even now that I understand better how things work in the literary world. I’ve walked the path of getting an agent. I know (more or less) how big publishing works, even though I’m not in the New York publishing cool-kid circles personally. I’ve published several books, and it’s still hard to “get published”—even though I wrote a book on the subject.
And still, small presses are the place: they’re where people are doing the work without marketing departments telling them what to do, without trying to guess at the next big trend, without requiring a pitch for writing that stands on its own. In the small press and lit mag landscape, I’d argue, “getting published” isn’t the point. Being part of the community is. And that community goes on and on, generating passion and the language we really need to bring into being the world, and I guess even the country, we want to live in.
For some other great articles about the meaning of small presses especially, my go-tos are these:
“Books Are Not Products, They Are Bridges: Challenging Linear Ideas of Success in Literary Publishing” by Janice Lee, December 4, 2019
“The PRH Trial Has Revealed a Barely Hidden Scorn for Independent Publishers” by Margot Atwell, August 18, 2022
“'Power to the people's mimeo machines!' or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics” by Matvei Yankelevich, February 3-25, 2020
The ongoing podcast Index for Continuance
To support the publishers and arts organizations affected by the NEA cuts, consider directly supporting the organizations who have had their grant funding rescinded. It’s a great excuse to buy some books.