Holiday Café Interview with Karen Lillis
1. What inspired Small Press Pittsburgh to be born?
When I was moving to Pittsburgh from New York, a Brooklyn poet told me, "There's Gist Street Readings [now defunct], but there's nothing else there. I would never move to Pittsburgh for the writing scene." I knew about the visual arts in Pittsburgh, but I didn't arrive here with many expectations for a lit scene. I was pleasantly surprised that there was a lot going on. This was in 2005. Great bookstores; lots of interesting small press activity; collaborations between artists and writers; high-energy literary events like parties with readings, music, and wall art; a poet on every block.
Next I observed that Pittsburgh writers didn't always think much of the Pittsburgh lit scene as a whole--some of them talked about it almost sheepishly. But that seemed like it was because they didn't regard each other as worthy--they didn’t care about the scenes they weren’t in. So when I made Small Press Pittsburgh as a literary directory, I wanted to show Pittsburghers that they had built a lot, if they could respect the whole literary cosmos of the city. They didn’t have to love every lit scene in Pittsburgh, they just had to acknowledge that each scene had its own value. I was in cataloging classes and thinking of it like a librarian: From a detached distance, I could help show the Pittsburgh literary scene to itself by cataloging it, by giving each aspect equal weight and letting the readers sort out which parts they felt a connection to. I also wanted to give librarians a context for small presses and their output, so that discovering, obtaining, cataloging, and ultimately circulating Pittsburgh indie lit would be easier--so that libraries would have fewer obstacles to reaching these books.
2. What should publishers, writers, etc. know about your site?
People should know that there’s a new site in town that is helping to make Small Press Pittsburgh obsolete. I mean that in the best way. The new site is called Littsburgh and it’s a very dynamic website that lists Pittsburgh’s literary organizations as well as Pitttsburgh lit people: Editors, authors, booksellers. There’s a space for new content coming in: Not only an events calendar, but news about and writing by Pittsburgh authors. It’s a site that’s much more geared to the post-Facebook world we live in.
Small Press Pittsburgh played a part in where the Pittsburgh literary scene has landed today, I’d like to think. I hope it got people to appreciate their literary city as a whole. The wiki began around 2007 or ‘08 with pages for each of the small presses and indie lit publications (mainly literary journals). At that time, I also started to make a catalog (on LibraryThing.com) of all the books and zines being put out by Pittsburgh presses, but that got too labor intensive to keep up with. Next I added pages for Pittsburgh’s reading venues, reading series, and bookstores; each page had basic info to give context and contact information, location specifics, and a photo when I could. I also added historic Pittsburgh author sites, and travel info--all of this trying to allow outsiders a way in to Pittsburgh, physically or with their imagination. When I moved here from New York, no one there had the imagination for what Pittsburgh was or could be. I wanted to allow writers to imagine coming here, to facilitate authors to make a tour stop here, to give publishers a way to book them.
Later, in the spring of 2013, I started collecting books from Pittsburgh small press publishers, sending these collective donations to the “Mellow Pages” small press library in Brooklyn. This was a new lending library that really got the small press world excited, and I wanted Pittsburgh’s indie lit to be part of it. I’d send the library packages labeled “Small Press Pittsburgh” and they were baffled and thrilled. Soon after that, I collected books on consignment and expanded Small Press Pittsburgh into a pop up bookstand featuring books from Pittsburgh authors as well as small press wares from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and many other places across the country. I added a mail-order component, creating Small Press Roulette with the same stock of books. With Roulette, I could send books I recommended to readers near and far: This let me send Pittsburgh books to readers out of the city, and recommend non-Pittsburgh books to locals. I’m always interested in cross-fertilization, in making introductions.
Small Press Pittsburgh has always been about showcasing and contextualizing Pittsburgh’s lit scene and literary output, whether as a website, bookselling service, or the readings I’ve organized over the years--I’m usually pairing touring small press writers with our best local indie lit authors.
3. What do you feel is the most valuable information you have on your site?
Putting everything together in one place was the most valuable thing, I think--letting people view the whole Pittsburgh lit scene at a glance. I think it helped change people’s minds about what was going on here. People already thought of the Pittsburgh film scene, the visual art scene, the theater scene. But because there were very different camps, I don’t know if most people thought of the “Pittsburgh literary scene” in the same way. I used to refer to the literary scene here as “Balkanized.”
For specifics, I am proud of adding several travel pages and a hotel accommodations page (which is one of the most visited pages on the site). These are designed to demystify getting to Pittsburgh, getting around Pittsburgh, and staying overnight affordably. I wanted to put Pittsburgh on the map, to get Pittsburgh included on author tours whether the writer or the publisher was looking into it, to break down the barriers to visiting Pittsburgh that seemed to exist before we landed on all the “Best Place to...” lists. And every city has a lot of specifics you don’t hear about before you get there. Are you going to find Not Another Hostel or the cheapest Oakland hotel on your own? Then there’s The Pittsburgh Left. In 2008 I did a reading at The New Yinzer Presents, at ModernFormations. An indie novelist from Chicago was the out of town writer on the bill, and driving to the reading she got slammed by a 17-year old driver making a Pittsburgh Left. Her car was totaled, but she was alright, so she went through with the reading. The (paper) chapter she was going to be featuring was ruined in the car by exploded brake fluid, so she read from her laptop instead. She had to get a rental car for the return drive to Chicago.
I made sure to include a warning about The Pittsburgh Left in the Small Press Pittsburgh directory, because not only do I want to keep authors alive and well, but I’d like them to take a good impression of Pittsburgh back to where they came from. I can imagine that our Chicago novelist never wants to come back here. Every visitor is a potential ambassador of Pittsburgh, or a potential bad-mouther. I believe in Literary Tourism, in Bookstore Tourism. For a city like Pittsburgh that is actively remaking its image as we speak, the impression we make on writers in particular seems vital to moving in a good direction.
4. If an author wanted to become a part of your catalog, what do you suggest they do?
I would suggest they contact Littsburgh at< littsburgh@gmail.com>. Small Press Pittsburgh the website does not showcase authors in particular, but Littsburgh is doing a fabulous job of just that.
There is a quality of Pittsburgh that I’ve noticed: It’s very easy to start things up here. Not only tech start ups, but anything start ups. You can start a reading series, you can start a small press, you can start a magazine, you can open a bookstore, and people will cheer you on. But this openness, this permissiveness, does not speak to the other aspect, which is whether there is a full audience for your start up once it’s up and running. If you start something, it better be unique and fill a certain niche. It better be high quality and well advertised. And even then. Say you start a reading series. Soon enough, you’ll notice that on any given evening there’s an abundance of fabulous art and cultural events going on in Pittsburgh. Your potential audience can often choose from two or three readings per night, to say nothing of art openings, music shows, plays, short-run films, etc. The challenge is putting your start up on people’s radar, cultivating an audience beyond your close friends, making them show up for the other vibrant people they know will be there.
What I’m getting at is that I don’t think it does anyone any favors to have too much redundancy. If Littsburgh has stepped in to fill essentially the same role as the Small Press Pittsburgh website but in a more dynamic way, then I’m willing to consider passing them the baton.
5. Where do you see your site going in the future?
I’m at a wait-and-see moment for a few reasons. Mainly, I want to spend more time on my writing and less time on all the other literary activities that aren’t the writing itself.
It also seems that a new crop of literary Pittsburghers are excited by the scene as a whole. This is great to see--it’s one thing to have poets and writers clump up in their own scenes and be jazzed about their friends or energized to promote their students. But it’s important to have people or organizations who are looking city-wide, who are agnostic about the players, who can appreciate the whole and try to encourage everyone, inspire everyone, give all the writers a forum to interact and overlap--whether in real space or virtually. In addition to Littsburgh, the Poetryburgh blog has been doing a great job of illuminating the Pittsburgh reading scene. Peter Webb, the blogger, attends as many poetry readings around town as he can and blogs about what they’re like. This is a great service, and it creates another trail of information about what’s here.
The Haven is another new literary initiative in Pittsburgh. They started not long ago as a group of indie fiction writers supporting each other through their novel-writing process, moved on to be a roving reading series at spots like Cyberpunk Apocalypse and Bayardstown Social Club, and they’re aiming to have their own physical space in about a year. They’ll host affordable writing classes, workshops, and writers’ retreats, and create a café workspace that can also double as a reading venue. The Haven will be available to Pittsburgh writers of any genre and they’ll offer a resource library as well. This sort of open-arms, open-ended, affordable writer’s resource is a gem for a city. It reminds me of the organization Small Press Traffic (San Francisco), whose resources and classes encouraged experimental writers like Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian.
And of course we have the City of Asylum endeavor on the horizon: the pending Alphabet City literary center on the North Side. This is aiming to be a high profile reading space, bookstore, workshop series, and restaurant. I’m very eager to see how it shapes up, who it attracts. City of Asylum Pittsburgh is adept at getting diverse audiences, and they’re one of the only lit organizations in town that regularly gathers audiences full of people who aren’t even writers. If you’ve ever tried it, that’s very hard to do.
Excellent spotlight on Karen Lillis. It's obvious she was a literary pioneer in Pittsburgh.
ReplyDeleteI was already a fan of Karen's writing, but I didn't know about Small Press Pittsburgh till now. Glad to catch up!
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