It’s such an honour to get a chance to talk a little bit about Pinhole Poetry for the small press section of periodicities. And truthfully, a bit of a surprise. If not for the reality of the submissions that keep rolling in, I’d find it hard to believe I’m actually doing this.
I remember a few years ago, during the pandemic, tuning into a webcast about Noemi Press. One of the things they were talking about was how the press started. I decided I should start taking a few notes, not with any intention but just in case, maybe someday… I don’t know what happened to the notes. Probably they got shuffled into school-from-home worksheets and recycled. As a result (shh … don’t tell the Pinhole Poetry contributors) I’ve been totally winging it since the beginning (April 2022).
Thankfully, I figured out how to navigate Wordpress without tearing out too much of my hair. And people responded to my first issue submission call; they sent lovely poems and photographs and I had choices to make. I also had rejections to send. Worse than Wordpress, worse than managing submissions through Outlook, sending rejections gave me the nervous shakes.
I know how awful it can feel to get a general rejection, and if there was anything I wanted Pinhole to do differently than most, it was to be quick and clear when it came to saying ‘no.’ I try to make sure that people get an answer about their submissions within a month of sending it. I don’t send rejections on Fridays, weekends or holidays. It’s never going to feel good to get a rejection letter, but I think there are ways to make it less awful (email schedulers are a great tool for publishers who can only do their work on weekends or holidays). I don’t get the shakes when I have to turn someone’s work down anymore, but I still take as much care as possible.
I try to extend this care to every Pinhole Poetry contributor and the art that they are generously sharing. I know I probably spend more time making pre-issue proofs, and thinking about the design of the website than a one-person editorial team normally does. I grant that it’s not necessarily efficient to spend time trying to find just the right background image for an interview quote that’s going up on social media. Pinhole Poetry just published its first print collection and the hours of time that went into finding fly leaf papers and textured paper for the interior, the hand folding and hole-punching and saddle-stitching, none of that will ever be earned back in sales. But Art is labour, and if I can’t pay Pinhole Poetry contributors any more than an honorarium at this stage, then their work deserves the maximum amount of my enthusiasm and attention. I’ve read many threads on Twitter, from journals and presses justifying bad behaviour with the excuse of ‘I’m just one person,’ or ‘We do this in our spare time.’ It makes me angry. As publishers, we have a responsibility to the work, but also (and more so) toward the artist that creates that work. I hope Pinhole Poetry will always be a publisher that recognizes and reflects this attitude as we go forward with new issues and new projects (end semi-rant tangent).
The most recent new thing that I’m very excited about (and partly a product of an inspiring AWP talk about multi-modal publishing) is a feature that will appear in our next digital issue, something I think I’m going to call Dialogue. Using a pinhole photograph as a prompt, I’m asking for submissions of poetry in conversation with the image. In future issues, I’d like to switch it up and have a work of poetry act as prompt for pinhole photographs. It’s a way to have some play between the two art forms featured in the journal and, selfishly, I’m just interested to read the poems that come about.
I’m also gearing up to publish two printed chapbooks, beginning with a submission call in September. I really enjoyed the manual work of making the Volume One Selected chapbook, and think that it turned out beautifully. On behalf of the poets featured in Volume One Selected, I organized a virtual launch and set up a web shop, so in a practical way, I feel ready for the special responsibility of ushering in collections by individual poets.
And I’m always adding to Pinhole Poetry’s page of resources for poets. I’m interested in developing a community for poetry feedback and mentorship and I’ve been thinking about low-cost/no-cost ways to provide workshops and webinars that are useful and accessible to emerging poets. As a non-mfa poet, I’ve been on the search for learning material since I started writing poetry and I would love to be able to share what I’ve found and help others find what it is they need to keep writing, improving, revising, submitting, etc.
I expect the coming months will be very busy, but it’s work that I look forward to doing. Even after six issues and a print chapbook, an educational trip to AWP 2023, a branded t-shirt design (!), and a table at the Ottawa Small Press Book fair this past June, I still can’t quite believe I’m doing this. I feel so lucky that poets and photographers whose work I admire so much, trust me to put their work out in the world. When people ask me where the idea for Pinhole Poetry came from, I tell them that it’s been the only good idea that came to me in a dream. As my Notes App will attest, everything else my unconscious mind thought surely was an amazing idea or a mysterious phrase to build a poem around has, upon waking with a clear head, quickly revealed itself as total nonsense. To some, starting another online literary journal that makes no money and expanding it into a micro-press that publishes handmade chapbooks that also make no money probably seems like the same kind of sleepy foolishness. I think Pinhole Poetry has become something a bit better, a bit more—a little poetry/photography dreamscape in the real world.
Erin Bedford is a poet and novelist. After completing an Honours B.A with a Specialist in History at the University of Toronto, she attended the Humber School for Writers and was later mentored by poet Betsy Warland through Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She is a member of The League of Canadian Poets and her short work has appeared in The Temz Review, Juniper, Map Literary, Train, GUEST, the lickety split & Catamaran Literary Reader. In April 2022, she founded Pinhole Poetry, a digital journal of poetry and pinhole photography.
