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Small presses and little magazines are tools of orientation. The idea for Foundlings—what started as a zine of friends’ poetry and found poetry—came to Max Crinnin and me when we were reorienting to each other, to Buffalo, New York, and to our place in a widening world. Max was finishing up at the University at Buffalo and applying to medical schools. I had just returned from a Master’s at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, a year when we had corresponded infrequently, and then only by mail. We had histories but not roots; we knew that circumstances could take us anywhere. We had been English majors, and had connected over the books we loved, but we were leaving behind our years of formal study; we wanted some structure, more than a book club, to keep reading, to keep our conversation going. One night in the UB dorms Max brought out a shoebox of things from his dad’s days as a PhD student at SUNY Binghamton. There, in the mid-80s, the poet Gerry Crinnin and his friends—studying with Milton Kessler, Galway Kinnell, and John Gardner—started a little magazine called Slow Mountain. Like some of the other great SUNY-affiliated little magazines of the past, Slow Mountain published a mix of the editors’ classmates, teachers, and established poets, sometimes even internationally vaunted poets, along with the Xeroxed flotsam of the times—classified ads and sections of the local phone book. We thought we could do something similar and enlisted our friends Steve Coffed and Darren Canham to bring Foundlings[1] to life. Immediately, we felt a stronger connection to our city, to the writers living and working there, to a murky tradition of “independent publishing,” and to each other. We launched the black-and-white, staple-backed zine at a Buffalo watering hole on May 1, 2016.
I honestly can’t remember why we decided to hold a chapbook contest the following year, but it had something to do with pairing one poet and one artist, a notion that grew naturally from our juxtaposition of submissions to the zine with found text and images. We lucked into a manuscript from the Rochester-based poet Lytton Smith, whom we paired with the artist Stephen Fitzmaurice; My Radar Data Knows Its Thing was our first book by a single author, and the Foundlings zine became Foundlings Press. Later that year we embarked on bigger-than-we-bargained-for project to commemorate the late poet Frank Stanford with a special edition of the zine focused on responses to his work. By 2018 it was clear this would be an anthology, not a special issue; and soon we decided to give in to the inevitable, killing the zine to focus solely on books, chapbooks, and broadsides.
Co-editing Constant Stranger remains one of the great privileges of my life. It put us in touch with other generous stewards of Stanford’s legacy, like Gerry’s teacher Forrest Gander, the inimitable Bill Willett, Irv Broughton, and Ginny Crouch Stanford. It introduced us to the translator Patricio Ferrari (instilling in us a love of bilingual editions) and scholars like AP Walton and Murray Shuggars, and connected us with poets we would publish in the years that followed, like Canese Jarboe, Ata Moharreri, and Zack Grabosky, some of whom I count as dear friends. The response to the book connected us with even more wonderful writers and friends like Marty Cain, Leo Lensing, and the late Matt Henriksen and Shannon Jonas.
We were orienting ourselves, or getting oriented. We were suddenly reading so much new work we wouldn’t otherwise have discovered, the work we wanted to stay up late talking about; we were meeting new people who encouraged and inspired us; and every writer we met wanted to introduce us to three or four more writers. Publishing still works that way; at least it does for us. That’s why we’re still doing it.
The business side is less exciting, probably because we’re not “business people,” and we have so much less time now than we did in our early 20s. We’ve scattered a bit geographically. Kids and pets and so on. So I have a deep, deep respect for the presses that run smoothly. We’re often behind schedule. We ended our brief experiment with a distributor in 2021 and haven’t found a replacement since.[2] For a while, the money would run out every nine months or so, and we’d have to pitch in to pay for a print run—happily I think we’ve learned how to break even. My hope is that we will find a suitable distribution partner in 2024 and get our authors back into community bookstores.
Being realistic and upfront about what we can offer authors has always been important to us. We used to pay royalties quarterly, but these were sometimes comically small checks (and again, we’ve never loved accounting). Now we offer honoraria for chapbooks and the like and advance full-length authors all their royalties on a print run. Simpler accounting for us and more immediate benefit to the author. We also developed formats to suit authors who might want to work with Foundlings in some capacity, but publish their full-lengths on larger presses. The most notable example is the Strays series, which welcomes “stray” poetry—experiments, drafts, scraps cut from longer manuscripts—and publishes three short editions by three authors in a “pack.” We’ve found this form is equally inviting to poets who’ve never published a full-length as it is to poets otherwise dedicated to places like Tin House, Graywolf, or Wave.
We still see publishing primarily as a way to stay connected with each other and with the most interesting writing happening today. I don’t mean networking (we’ve never been to AWP). I mean that small press publishing gives us a means and a reason to keep reading, keep thinking and talking about what we’ve read, and keep our hearts and minds open to the next work that will excite us. We also keep connecting with other publishers—people like Chet Weise, Lucy K. Shaw, Marty Cain and Kina Viola, and so many more—who inspire us and frequently show us how we could do things better or smarter. On a personal level, publishing has also given me a vehicle to connect creatively with my sister, the visual artist Talia Ryan, who is now Foundlings’ broadside artist in residence, and designs all of the broadsides for our Ralph Angel Poetry Prize.
I’m very excited about our most recent announcement, the short collection At His Desk In The Past by the late Franz Wright. We worked with Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright for a few years on this one. It collects fragments that Wright developed and recorded on a handheld audio device in 2011 and 2012. Along with the print publication we will be putting out an audiobook—our first ever—comprising these original fragments. It’s Wright’s first publication in the U.S. since his death in 2015, and I hope it will draw attention to his posthumous full-length, due out from Knopf at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Foundlings Press today is far from the dorm room idea we cooked up eight years ago, but I think there are some important through-lines. We are still interested in found text, found images, and “the magic of the happenstance” (something the poet Carl Dennis said to us about our zine when politely declining to send us a contribution). We have developed an accidental but deeply felt commitment to the legacy of certain writers who passed, for whatever reason, before their work was done. And though we don’t publish a zine, we still love to put writers and artists in conversation, often in unexpected places.
I can’t say more about where we’re going because I don’t know. I do know we have so many friends we can count on to help us get there. Shouts out and a million thank yous to all of you.
[1] We took the name from a hardcover Jesuit commentary on Roman Catholic canon law that I had taken from my late grandfather’s office. (I still collect specialized encyclopedias and reference books like this.) A section on soteriology for children of unknown parentage reads: FOUNDLINGS are presumed to be legitimate until the contrary can be proved. It immediately struck us as a fitting ethos for an independent publisher.
[2] My hobbyhorse: We all need to take a hard stand against the practice of over-ordering, returning, marking down, and pupling unsold books. It’s a bizarre arrangement unique to the publishing industry, a short-term solution to the slumping book sales during the Great Depression that the Big booksellers got to stick. Yes, I know the Big part of the publishing “industry” depends on artificially inflated sales for their bestseller lists, and I know that small/independent booksellers would have to adjust their operating model if they couldn’t return unsold books—but that would be better for everyone in the long run. Most small presses can’t afford returns, the practice creates barriers to entry against the truly DIY operations, and the carbon footprint of the whole mess is obscene.
Aidan Ryan’s [photo credit: Mark Dellas] writing has appeared in Public Books, The Millions, The White Review, Colorado Review, and the anthologies Conversations with George Saunders, Silo City Reading Series, and Best New Poets 2019. He is a senior editor at Traffic East and literary curator at Artpark, an arts and performance venue in Lewiston, NY. As publisher of Foundlings Press, he curates a range of poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks and co-edited the anthology Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford. He is the author of the visual poetry collection Organizaing Isolation: Half-Lives of Love at Long Distance (Linoleum Press, 2017), a collaboration with everyone who ever wrote him a letter. He lives in Buffalo, New York. More at www.aidanryan.com
Photo credit [above]: Foundlings Press