I was first asked to write this when Hem Press launched, on 1st May 2022. I declined thinking, after publishing book number 4, I’d have enough critical distance to write about running a press, albeit as a beginner. Now I’m reflecting on the last ten months, I have less critical distance than ever.
The idea for Hem Press started around fifteen years ago, when I first learnt about bpNichol. I made very rough artists books in editions of one, containing visual poems and asemic writing. The image of hem spoke to me about language’s material qualities, yet also signified its edge: a place where it might be pushed so far it falls off and changes completely. The name, Hem Press, followed.
In my early 20s, I didn’t have the knowledge or resources, financial or otherwise, to make Hem Press a reality. As the years went by, the name stuck. After I closed my journal, The Babel Tower Notice Board, towards the end of 2021, I had a sense the doing of publishing: of engaging with writers and publicly presenting their texts.
While an online journal can be fast-paced and easily pick up momentum, a print publisher takes time. Going from doing whatever I wanted to having to negotiate proofs and schedules was a shock to the system. Having said that, the technical side of publishing - the side I feared: design, typesetting, printing - has not only been straightforward but enjoyable.
There does seem to be an unspoken belief, on social media at least, that writers are struggling artists and presses are big bad gatekeepers. As a writer and publisher, I promise you publishers have it worse: spending hundreds of pounds of their own money without profit; getting messed about, not able to express it to anyone lest they come across as unprofessional…
Yet there’s also the support from writers I’m already in community with, and from strangers who actually enjoy reading. It flies against cynicism: that the only people who buy books from small presses are writers’ friends and family members, and folk who wish they were published by the press.
Hem Press’s international releases began with Canada’s own Amanda Earl, and her October 2022 release Trouble, Hem Press looks forward to publishing books from Ireland, America and Europe over the next two years. That the press gets to exists on a global scale came as a pleasant surprise.
Unlike foreign language cinema, so easily subtitled, literature not written in English feels unattainable to the monolingual. I didn’t necessarily realise the ways world literature - a term, like world music, so often reduced to a patronised, neoliberal ideal - would be open to me.
I’ve also had the opportunity to publish some of the UK’s diverse contemporary writers, to unknown poets such as Ivy Allsop to the better known James Knight. This country’s contemporary literature, far from a mere rehashing of the British Poetry Revival of the sixties and seventies, has multiple communities, countercurrents and outliers. Hem Press seeks to show this range, much like The Babel Tower Notice Board did.
I would be remiss not to note Hem Press’ sound poetry imprint, Angry Starlings. Set up to explore sound poetry through modern frameworks of composition and performance, Angry Starlings is on its first two releases: Echolocation by Susie Campbell and Chris Kerr, and Orphanage (for Ami Yoshida and Utah Kawasaki) by myself. Currently, the imprint intends to put out three or four projects a year. These can be streamed for free, and purchased as MP3s by donation.
It’s hard to romanticise running a small press; it’s even harder to not be grateful for it. Everything about it feels absurd - an unwaged part-time job throwing books into silence - but the desire to do it is stronger than anything else: that the more beauty and dissent one puts into the world then… The more beauty and dissent one puts into the world. As if, ineffably, the silence is singing.
Richard Capener is a writer and publisher living in Birmingham, UK. His releases include The Voice Without (Beir Bua Press, 2022), KL7 (The Red Ceilings, 2022), Dance! The Statue Has Fallen! Now His Head is Beneath Our Feet! (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) and, in collaboration with Imogen Reid, Today is a Thursday (Overground Underground Books, 2022). He edits Hem Press, and its sound poetry imprint Angry Starlings. He is also Reviews Editor for Mercurius Magazine and writes, on occasion, through his Substack La Bête.