So when I say crises in this context, I’m not talking about the reflection of a deadly virus and other catastrophes related to the deathly churns of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism that some parts of the world are finally waking up to on our doorsteps. What I am referring to when I say crises, is the set of reckonings that these events have brought, a confrontation of our own upon the way we structure our world and live our lives, and keep restructuring and reliving the same.
In the context of publishing, this means more than coming to terms with the inherent contradictions of an industry that claims, upon its very gloss, to abhor the profit-driven and, particularly now, to embrace an (admittedly feeble) left politics. Book publishing, like all industry, has a set of practices and traditions embedded in capital. The fact that many books are written and published against capitalism doesn’t change that, and the contradiction has of course always been there. But our internal practices, how we approach projects on a regional scale, on a personal scale, who we choose to work with and how we choose to work with them—none of these things are set. As in each and every structure that makes up this vastly unbalanced world, nothing is as cemented as any industry’s set of rules and norms would have us believe.
ARP was born in the mid 90s of the volunteer commitment of a small group of activist friends, and it ran on that steam for many years, as an editorial collective and volunteer-run venture. Our books have always been about the struggle against capitalism, colonialism, and their conjoined malignant expansion of exploitative values; and our list, literary, academic, experimental, continues to reflect this. Each and every one of those books of course, has a barcode on the back. As an object, there are few things better than a book, and the same can be said in this context of the book as an object-metaphor. The contradictions of capitalism are built right into its volume, or at least built into our kind of volume.
There is nothing inherently noble about book publishing in so-called Canada, an industry that as much as any other has traditionally staffed its power positions with the predominantly white, educated, affluent. The fact that books are a proven means to the dissemination of ideas, has served as an ethical escape hatch; this is how our industry justifies itself, how we justify ourselves. Now however, we’ve come up against it. Even in this burning house, with a floundering supply chain (we can talk paper another day), I’ll surely face some kind of censure for characterizing publishing as entirely chaotic, but I refuse to bend this; when executed in the service of anticapitalist ideals, this work is absolutely messy, inherently and incoherently so, because unless in that work we serve, and I mean actually serve, the marginal authorial voice, we fail tremendously, and the industry is built up against, not in support of, such voices; a glaring dissonance.
Fully acknowledging what Rinaldo Walcott discusses as a kind of ebbing and flowing faddishness in relation to public interest in and consumption of Black life, and equally acknowledging a similar cultural co-option attached to Indigenous resurgence, 2020’s white public may nonetheless have faced the possibility of a very real political awaking—diluted and undermined by a partial and always insufficient media response—about just how much of the world we inhabit is anti-Black and anti-Indigenous, and how much of this reality is woven and recompounded through the feeding back of systems that limit and control. This public is either facing or not-facing a world that requires dismantling. Some of us I hope are coming to understand just how much white supremacy infects and poisons all of our lives; and this publishing industry, historically and continually so-white, is called upon to publish that reality.
I’m not being truculent when I say that presses that run smoothly based on distinct operational values and procedures, run so smoothly because that set of values is old and sick and structured in exploitation. For disclosure, I’ve been with ARP since 2014. I can’t claim to have absolute clarity on the entire 25-year history of the press to lineate, but when I came on I immediately understood: that ARP’s foundation was Marxist; that its publishing program, while including national and international writers, was regionalist in ethic; and crucially, that the press, collectively-run and built up around volunteer labor as I have described, held individual relationships with authors as a lynchpin of process. By which I mean, individual relationships rather than a set of procedures, dictate how a manuscript becomes a book at ARP.
In this moment, I would define us as stationed firmly in the “amplifier” position, repeating a term that we’ve used to describe ourselves for years. The ways that the role of amplifier manifests continues to shift as we continue to learn from authors and others we work with. I would go so far as to say that in many ways the press is uniquely author-led. We do have standard elements that any press has; we have contracts, house style, and a set of steps in place as guidelines to approach each project with. But our contracts, particularly when placed against those of larger or university-affiliated presses, are designed to protect the author and for the retention of their rights; our house style is malleable, and that malleability is part of the larger project, because you cannot reflect radical politics of a rapidly changing world without keeping alert to the need for shifting forms of expression (academia is not exempt from that need).
What our approach distills is an open recognition of the fact that the way that top-down publishing functions is inoperable within our politics, so we have to be inventive in order to bring the books we most want to publish into being. An example: a project we are currently working on involves the conjoined authorial voice of an alliance of 35; this is not an anthology, this is a book collectively authored by 35 individuals who are also organizers on the ground; their work process is unique, and therefore our production schedule must adapt, with an understanding that the deadlines we think we can meet, often can’t be met while also respecting the need for each of the project participants to weigh in and contribute to each section of the text while also navigating their life-complexities. What I just described will sound like absolute folly to many publishers and that’s fine. I have faith that the end result of this work process will be a unique and useful text, well worth the time that its creation necessitated.
We take on projects that other presses would deem “unrealistic,” the incredulity lying in marketability. We try instead to be principled while surviving, which sometimes makes for complicated false starts, but also distinct, resonant texts. We won’t balk at publishing a book because the author has no internet access for instance, due to reasons of poverty, disability, and personal choice. We will work with them over the phone or in person. An author who is also an Elder will dictate the terms of our communication, not the other way around. Each situation is different, which is why a set of operational rules is useless if you are interested in amplifying the conventionally excluded.
I run the risk here of reproducing the self-congratulatory tone of industry rhetoric, but I feel it’s important to state that the fundamental dissonance of operating within capitalism is something that we look at squarely and regularly, and that that directness, in conjunction with scale and adaptability, offer the insight needed to understand why we have so many opportunities to work with amazing thinkers who are also doing effective organizing in collective struggles for change. This is why we are able to take on projects that reflect some of the most beautifully bizarre intersections of politics and experimentation; and this is why we get to work with incredibly sharp and motivated minds—each whom are often not just one but a combination of: organizer, artist, researcher, worker, academic—and whose involvement in myriad anticapitalist projects coheres our relationships. To put it simply, I think that working hard in flexible ways with the distinct needs of authors in the service of radical politics grows fruit.
Experimentation, I firmly believe, facilitates inclusion, and evolves naturally from inclusive approaches, and so I see it as one of our central functions. We embrace those approaches that take up a physical understanding that regionalism is a practice, that Land is the realest of all things; that change happens from the ground, and that thinking creatively also means relinquishing control. These are the things that form the basis of my approach as an editor, as much as anything else in this moment.
Everything is more precarious than we know, but publishing is used to being on edge, hyperaware of its precarity. As an organization we would certainly seem, comparable to other presses, even perhaps other “micro” presses, chaotic. And we are. A decided ill-fit for “business”; but all three workers on staff are also artists/writers with committed left politics who have picked up other skills, and we’re all committed to making books that push for change while being sensorially activating, and to getting these books to as many hands and heads as we can.
If that work were not deliciously punctuated every few months by the arrival of the physical object: book—I’m not sure I’d be doing it, because the endlessness of publishing is truly rattling. That is no exaggeration and something my colleagues in the smaller press world can confirm, that a sense of completion, if not completely unachievable, is scarce and fleeting. In this world built upon capital built upon profit built upon publishing “seasons,” and therefore built upon scrambling, faltering, deadlines, time is endlessly haranguing us.
The process, however fraught and flawed, of bringing manuscript to book is also beautiful. Perhaps we are terrible at filling publishing industry standards and processes, but we deeply give a shit about the ideas in the books, the people who make them, the language within them, the readers and their attendant understanding, the books as objects, and the Land we’re all more precariously than we know, working and walking around on that allows us to bring such things into being. When reigned through collectivity and creativity, I believe in the fight for individual power to survive institutional power, no matter the institution, and that’s one of the thoughts that keeps me excited for this work.
I hope that reading ARP’s books while surrounded by seemingly inexorable failures of justice, will also do something to throw readers into productively intwined actions they never thought they’d undertake, whether through direct impetus, or the oblique evolution of an understanding that affects action more broadly. Speaking of, if you pick up Wilfred Buck’s I Have Lived Four Lives... you’ll experience the “author-led”; a narrative and style that I promise you will not find elsewhere in what is called our literary landscape.
Irene Bindi
Editor, ARP Books
