Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and
publishing in the small press ecosystem
Michael Sikkema: Jason Teal, you have run reading series, are constantly reading your ass off, have edited journals, wrote your own innovative and interesting work, and taken up the responsibility of managing the Where to Submit stream for other writers. This strikes me as very very community minded. Why are you wearing so many hats? What do you think is good literary citizenship? Do you know how to relax?
Jason Teal: The truth about wearing so many hats is, it’s impossible to wear them all at once without looking a little silly. Reflecting on the series, I got to bring books to my city, which not many people get to say about their day to day roles. You can’t make these things happen by staring at paintings or playing video games, and conversations with brick-and-mortar clerks are transactional at best or even confrontational. So staying curious for me has become both an anthem and a relaxation. Meeting the people behind social media profiles or published stories, you get introduced to aspects you never before considered, organic threads to other media and artists. Through my experience, I learned about the landscape of other writers around me, people variously influenced by Robbe-Grillet and Elvira and Tarot and family, and I didn’t have to wait for these lessons in seminar, which is an important distinction. Good literary citizenship, in this sense, which is maybe the best imperfect word for it—well, you ever notice how other artists don’t name this aspect of living alongside each other? Maybe the freedom comes from the commercial aspect of other art forms, but I tend to view my organizing as self-discovery. There's something to be said about doing things for other people simply for the joy of it. I want the time I put toward editing and organizing to be honest and true.
Sikkema: You've lived in less densely populated areas and I believe you come from a more working class background? How are you navigating the current atmosphere in poetry publishing where some people expect to be paid for individual poem submissions, will pay extra for quick acceptances or rejections, and most magazines that have longer lifespans have institutional support? As far as I understand it, Heavy Feather Review is a passion project, AKA punk rock. What's it like editing such a project in today's poetry climate?
Teal: My dad is retired military and a mechanic. My mom was in childcare. The number of states I’ve lived in is a longer list than the number I’ve visited, probably, but I never built the magazine as a vehicle to bring respect from others. HFR has always been about carving out spaces for good writing in my life. With the magazine, I like to think there’s this tool within reach that has an infinite number of configurations. Corresponding with artists such as yourself, going to readings, and queuing submissions, all these processes continue to be important touchstones in my life. We don’t always have access to inclusive platforms, so why not build one? As for submission fees, HFR responds within a month, edits after hours, and we don’t require profit margins to do this. I’ve never seen fit to provide an accelerated fee service for writers. I spend my own time formatting posts, updating posts, updating lists, reformatting posts, proofreading posts, making books, reading books. The magazine for me is an especially responsive task. It’s unfortunate to demand capital for expedited responses, but the venues that people keep submitting to seem to foster that need.
Sikkema: Community seems to be at the core of the magazine project. Can you tell us about some of your co-conspirators? I know some of your crew has been on board for a while. How do these relationships form? Where is the magazine headed?
Teal: It’s funny how social groups solidify over time. We used to issue a formal call for editors, wanting resumes and everything, but I’ve gotten, I don’t know … lazier in my pursuit of cool beings? You also begin to recognize good people for the mission as they enter your lives. For instance, Bill Lessard kept up a sincere dialogue with me before he asked to be on staff. As such, we had found a similar wavelength through his previously published work—book reviews, experimental poems, Google patents conveying idiosyncratic messages about living in late capitalism. Now there’s hardly a day we don’t text something absurd back and forth, and often I’ll go to Bill with my life updates and color commentary when he picks up the phone. It can also start for me at the level of writing; someone submits work to be published before I am comfortable reaching out. Lucy Zhang was a very persistent submitter, and her writing was fun to watch grow with every submission. Eventually we found a story to publish in our Bad Survivalist feature and her submission to the 2020 Zach Doss Fellowship was among our finalists; some months later we had outgoing editors, so I reached out to ask her if she wanted to edit … great thing, she was very keen about the opportunity and has been one of the best eyes on copy edits! We also get to chatter back and forth about Attack on Titan’s forever never-ending format. At the same time that I reached out to Lucy, I emailed Jeff Chon, whose writing, previous experience running literary ops, and sports fandom I relate to very well. Plus he likes to riff about new horror movies. Jeff had sent us an essay we had passed on some time back (his “Cartesian Ghost Story” was published after that in our Vacancies issue), but something told me the piece we declined was worth revisiting after years away from it … starting the magazine when I was 21 (now 32), it’s safe to assume you didn’t always knew what was publishable. I reached out to say I was thinking about the essay, and my correspondence was met with news that Sagging Meniscus was publishing his debut novel, Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun, and all of sudden it was like talking to an old friend after years apart. Since then, Jeff has situated himself as a stalwart reviews coordinator and helps immensely on that front. Currently we’re working on having more interaction happen between us online, being located across the US as we are, perhaps forming a writing group between the editors so we aren’t lagging behind in our own work. Slack is a necessary platform to use for our messaging, but creating something social outside of this app is worthwhile, I think.
Sikkema: How do you balance all the press work with your own writing? I know that some editors are absolutely fed and energized by this kind of work and others call it quits so they can focus solely on their own stuff. I’ve fallen into both camps with my micro chapbook press and that is a considerably smaller, less time-consuming project than a magazine like Heavy Feather.
Teal: I don’t recall writing. It’s such a ghost for me right now. Employment has always been a tenuous balance to strike with writing that I’m hoping to reclaim, now that I have successfully moved house and have been in this role for about a year. I used to have a job and colleagues I thought were impressed by publishing (lesson learned), but now I have a job which ends at four PM, a work email I can ignore until eight AM, and this is great for my mental health! I am grading nothing, like zero papers at all. But friendships are different after 30 … once friends start marrying off and buying houses, many lose touch and simple distances can become an inhibitor to meeting up. I’ve also fumbled a number of people who drank themselves into abysses I had to climb out of. Then old friends find shared interests and hobby groups where they live and you aren’t there to likewise cope. The onus to explore and work depends on the individual, new friends use sports betting apps and talk about civics, and there isn’t that direct community pipeline to the arts. And although I’m fed by editing and reading other people’s work, seeing book reviews discuss themes and presses, the connection to my work, perhaps due to environment, maybe social media shock, has been fried, just fried. It’s a struggle to steer away from the jutting cliffs of turning 30. The job is more, the rent is more, and I need to sharpen my appraisal of writing again. But art is both nature/nurture, you aren’t just born with the impulse to create, it's a process of accumulation. A friend and I have started a Google doc to throw sentences into, without the pressure to cohere. A reading in a Kansas orchard has been pitched to me. I’m going to a mystery triple feature film showing for Shocktober. And so on.
Sikkema: I really enjoyed your book We Were Called Specimens. It’s unique and powerful and funny and sometimes perfectly dark. It’s tight and smart but doesn’t strike me as particularly academic in any way.
Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing it?
Teal: That little book jumped out of me like ear wax. It was a sort of exorcism. At the time, I was depressed, I couldn’t write, school felt inhuman, teaching felt like the worst job ever. Then I realized I wasn’t writing for myself. It was a mix of overexposure and epiphany from staring too long at the sun. I labored on a sentence for over a year, wrote eight terrible pages no one will read, something approaching a real mountain climbing story—and I had never climbed a mountain. After seismic conversations with/in myself, I remembered I loved comics, Iggy Pop, horror, movies, Russell Edson. Something about the turnstile of academia had cut me down until that moment. Maybe I didn’t like the professors who told me I should stop running the literary journal, who told me they didn’t understand what I was doing on the page, who made me write an annotated bibliography and report on a book every week that they didn’t read and couldn’t discuss. Or maybe all that was required to burn rubber. I drank a lot of beer. Recently, I saw a tweet that said artists need a lot of time to do nothing and I think I agree. I happened on the Mr. Show with Bob & David in which they were discussing an offscreen character named Aunt Marjorie who played the part perfectly; it tickled my nerve to imagine more about this oft-referred to but never-present specter. Then I saw Stan Lee in a Spiderman movie shouting from his open window at some neighbor—Marjorie!—to pipe down. More of these encounters kept happening with the art I engaged in and I wish I knew or prized the occult more, but it seemed … some entity had taken hold of my imagination. The zealot Marjorie Kempe was attributed with dictating the first autobiography in recorded literature. Cameron Marjorie was part of the Themelite organization and an artist. Similarly, during school, dinners with friends often defaulted to rundowns of movie cast lists, and I never had anything to contribute there, being labeled obscure for wanting to read books by people outside of big five publishing or not on university presses, so one day, frustrated, I made up a character named Marjorie Journey, which got some nervous laughter from the group. Once this bit was teased out between us, we challenged each other to include her in our stories that week for our shared workshop. Later, I wanted to write a story about gross feet, because I had experienced some foot trauma from working in a factory without insurance, and I tried to put Marjorie in that draft. After enough of these open face slaps accrued over time, and across different places of writing, it became a book. I just tried my best to fit Marjorie into everything I was writing, a tribute/acknowledgement, whether or not she was present to begin with. It became a space for levity, a game I could play with literature again, like designing an avatar before campaign mode. I’ve since heard of tulpas and their sporadic meaning applied to fiction. But it’s the best feeling to have netted a home for the weird thoughts that swirled around me in that very transitory time, all thanks to Jesi Buell at KERNPUNKT Press, who published the work in her exceptional catalog.
Sikkema: You’ve touched on some great stuff, near and dear to my heart and writing practice. Namely, comics, horror, sketch comedy, Russell Edson, beer. How do (any of) these things support you especially when academia lets you down and drains you? I think that The Muppet Show and comic books and sci fi and horror offered me a great education on genre and timing and creating expectations in order to subvert them, and paying attention to the churning kaleidoscopic mess of consciousness in a way that the classroom and anthologies seldom did. Have you watched that new GWAR doc that dropped on Shudder? It does a great job of showing how they were really an art collective and not just a band, and how they actively worked against the constraints of the art world. Your mag has a special section for horror writing, and for bad survivalism, and for political writing, and more. Can you say more about comics and horror and what is called low brow art and how it plays into your role as an editor, writer, person?
Teal: I like your comments about GWAR, and Bill keeps telling me about this doc, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I know of their crazy antics on stage and collaborative environment, and have even listened to one or two of their songs, but I haven’t sat down to immerse myself in their historical record yet. Using the band to inform a rebellion in artmaking. Adding it to the queue … Collectively, I think these other forms can help fill in the pieces of your armor that slough off over time. Most of it boils down to being open to experiences and influences beyond your metered exposure. I faced a lot of undue criticism for enjoying genre literature growing up in the literary world and teaching writing (and sometimes parroted that erroneous school). A lot of people will try to exclude it and call it unserious fare, casting aspersions, i.e. read the canon of medieval literature before writing a story about a dragonslayer. More importantly, exploring these modes, for me, can be kind of like knitting a quilt, something to keep you warm in the cold, underpaid sea of writing and editing. You learn tropes and images that you aspire to produce in your own writing or submission calls, without permission from careerists. Fan culture can be toxic, especially if you become as devout as those who exclude it from their daily rituals. But there are consciousnesses outside of your own that seldom get fully represented which are plentiful and colorful dance floors to navigate. Like you, Mike, I suspect other forms for me help forge trust in my decision-making on the page and find models for engagement with/in a tradition that is larger than myself. Not dissimilar to what many people ask for from their reading only regional realist fiction, I guess, but more colorful and adaptable for entry. Splash pages from comics become things to recreate in prose, moods evoked by images and scenes naturally find their way into my work, etc. I used to work with someone who outlawed genre elements, character deaths, second person, and more, in their workshops, which I found EXTRA extraordinarily dull. Why not talk about how to achieve these moments with convincing vigor? Checking into interviews and video essays on your niche interests can lend perspective to the overall mission you set out to complete. For the magazine, I like making those special sections because, otherwise, where else would I find the interplay of these writers and stories all at once? I don’t ONLY want to read Hellraiser scripts. It’s also just how I came to love books and selfishly don’t want to let that go, exploring and being immersed in new, sometimes contradictory forms. I remember looking at illustrations in some nature stories compilation for hours on end, battles with grizzlies, sharks, snakes, etc, capturing my Ohio eye for folklore. I don’t remember where my mom picked it up, but it was a significant factor in making Bad Survivalist happen. Gabino Iglesias helped usher in our Haunted Passages feature as one day I wanted to try to pump as much horror themed content in one month through our website. Eventually it stuck when I found independent writers through this effort, started follow ing them, and now I read this stuff year round without a drop of guilt as well as watch the movies and series it all references. The food writing is kind of new for me, but I like more cheeky references to brand names and recipes that don’t work out. Political response is harder to curate, for me, but important to expose yourself to, as it easily can bleed into other forms and models and enrich the moments crafted therein. Make it obvious and make it weird is my ambition for corralling these interests under the HFR banner.
Sikkema: What exciting things are happening next with Heavy Feather?
Teal: The magazine is pretty active, and we should continue to publish online/print issues for the foreseeable future, but I might be more keen to develop the books aspect now that Nicole McCarthy’s A Summoning has launched. Keep fine tuning things there as we move through having the book out in the world. We also attached ourselves to an AWP reading with KERNPUNKT Press and Alternating Current Press for the first time in many years as I’m hoping to jump into the waters again, missing people I used to see and places to travel to.
Michael Sikkema is the author of Half an Owl in Garden Light from Alien Buddha Press, and Caw Caw Phony from Trembling Pillow Press. He enjoys October beaches.
