Anne K Yoder: on MEEKLING PRESS

 

Meekling Press is a small publishing and arts collective based in Chicago since 2012.

I met Meekling co-publisher Rebecca Elliott just as I’d moved to Chicago, during my first semester in the MFA Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From the beginning, we bonded over a mutual desire to make books and start a small press, and spoke dreamily of the possibility of doing this together. Reb’s studio was situated across the hall from my own, and I recall how they showed me a delightful and intricately made series of books they had written and made during the previous school year. Our friendship continued on through mutual making: during the final weeks of classes,  Reb was printing on a miniature letterpress what became Meekling Press’s first book. It was The Jury of Sudden Hands, written by our mutual friend, Patrick Cotrell, in an edition of 30. I (and many others) assisted Reb with handprinting Patrick’s woodcut image on the back of each page. 

So much of Meekling’s ethos and what has definied us as a press was intact then. I wasn't “officially" involved, but the press very much depended on the help of friends and friends of friends. Even then, maybe especially then, when most of publications were hand-bound, we were inspired by punk’s DIY culture. We defined ourselves as a “DIT” or “do it together" press, and have always looked at bookmaking as collaboration with the writers and artists we publish. Meekling members and collaborators that have been essential to our operations include co-founder John Wilmes, artist and author Suzanne Gold, Chelsea Fiddyment, Nicholas Davis, Amanda Goldblatt, Molly Gunther, Dan Ivec, Lori-May Orillo, and Parker Young.

Play and experimentation have always been important to us. We love being open to unlikely ideas, and to manuscripts that take risks with form. Until the pandemic, we producsed a performative series called Meekling TALKs, which drew its initial framing from the performance lecture and ‘Pataphysics. The only stipulation was that some aspect of the TALK must be fictional. We had talks on wind reading, molecular typography, ie,” the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters,” and on how to find the Celia Cruz in everything, and we published pamphlets of talk-adjacent materials with each performance. For example, to accompanyChelsea Fiddyment’s Trash Baby talk, Chelsea and Rebecca printed multiples of the trashbaby manifesto as a text affixed to a lid and housed within a trashcan-shaped cardboard container.

Initially we started publishing with a small tabletop letterpress, and then not much later acquired a larger 19th-century platen press. At the beginning, we were primarily making art books, zines, and chapbooks. As we grew and our reach widened beyond Chicago-based authors, we decided to start publishing paperbacks so that we could have distribution and printing capabilities and allowing our books to be readily accessible beyond the local Chicago / Milwaukee areas. At the same time, we’ve continued to produce handmade / artist books in-house and are working on growing our print studio, which now also includes an offset press and a perfect binder.

When we started publishing paperbacks and acquired distribution via SPD in 2019, we were terribly excited by the possibilities and by the work submitted to us. If we planned to select two to three book projects, we’d end up selecting five or six because of our enthusiasm for the work. However, when the pandemic arrived, fell way behind on our print schedule. Also, while Rebecca is a printing genius who essentially taught themself how to use the offset printer in this time, there was a great learning curve with what we’ve learned is a finicky machine. It’s incredible that two artbooks in the lineup at that point –  Suzanne Gold’s ALLTALK and Rachel Linn’s Household Tales – were Rebecca’s first projects on the offset printer. However, they were long delayed by the aforementioned reasons as well as such idiosyncrasies as the lack of humidity in Chicago midwinter. By the time we finished printing the books we’d committed to, we found ourselves depleted. And as everyone knows, distribution via SPD collapsed in the spring, complicating matters further. (We were lucky to escape relatively unscathed because we didn’t have spring releases this year)  We’ve drawn clearer boundaries and have a better idea of what we can handle with our small staff, and are still defining how to create a publishing schedule that leaves us open to whim, to take on one-off projects and new collaborations. We currently limit ourselves to two paperbacks a year, which we swear we’ll adhere to in our next season.

Rebecca has talked about developing a brief series of publications based on games; we’ve discussed publishing pamphlet series with various themes, as well as inviting in guest editors and artists to collaborate with. We’re planning on working in tandem with Writing Group, a Chicago based collective of women, trans+, and gender nonconforming writers, to respond to and document the final year of programming at Roman Susan, a much beloved  local storefront gallery, who’s being forced to close their main gallery space when their lease ends because Loyola University has purchased the building with plans to tear it down.

We’re over the moon about our two recently released fall paperbacks. Both share a fascination with and deep influence from visual art, film, and ekphrasis. Baltimore-based poet Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers is a debut poetry collection that creates a wholly new lens. With poems reminiscent of iconoclasts such as James Tate or Jay Wright, Jones simultaneously reimagines the past and revels in the absurd contemporary. Ashleigh Bryant Phillips calls Television Fathers “a transmission for our end-of-times, a prophecy priced out of the zeitgeist—and only Sylvia Jones can say it.” Olivia Cronk’s fourth book, Gwenda, Rodney, a genre-ambiguous poetry novel — a fever dream scintillating with art, ardor, and decay. Amina Cain perhaps captures it best with her commendation, “There is great excitement in reading Gwenda, Rodney, like coming to Mina Loy or Silvina Ocampo or Fleur Jaeggy for the first time, a deeling that you are experiencing literature at its most exhilirating, wild, and imaginitive register.”

Last but certainly not least, we’re in production now with our spring book, The Dead and the Living and the Bridge, by the brilliant poet, publisher, scholar, teacher, and public artist, MC Hyland. It’s a book of interconnected short prose pieces, or essays, that feels perfectly complete and pulls from deep reading, research, bookmaking and experience of being a sentient being. It's as very much its own and as striking as Mary Ruefle’s Madness Rack, and Honey or Anne Carson’s Short Talks.

And we’re now reading through submissions for our 2025/26 season. We're honored and excited to be entrusted with a fresh batch of marvelous work and encounter future collaborators. It's thrilling to read and consider what comes next!

 

 

 

 

Anne K. Yoder has been co-publisher of the Chicago-based publishing collective Meekling Press since 2014. Her novel, The Enhancers, was called “ a new contemporary standout” among “great books in pharma culture,” featured in Wired, NY Mag's Vulture, Nylon, and elsewhere. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, and her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, BOMB, and The Believer. She writes, lives, and occasionally dispenses pharmaceuticals in Chicago.

Photos, top to bottom: Anne at the Detroit Art Book Fair 2023; Trashbaby Manifesto; Reb at AWP Seattle 2023; Meekling Insignia.