Phil Spotswood : on PRESS 254

 

 

 

 

PRESS 254 is a handmade teaching chapbook press founded by Steve Halle (Director of the Publications Unit at Illinois State University) in 2012. Each year we publish four chapbooks in two distinct series—currently, the Sutherland Series, which publishes writers from Illinois State University and the Bloomington-Normal community, and Spoonfuls, in collaboration with SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review). All chapbooks are edited, designed, produced, and marketed by undergraduate students enrolled in English 254: Introduction to Professional Publishing, taught by Publications Unit staff. Because of its structure as a teaching chapbook press, publication is an intentionally collaborative process between authors and students—beginning with a “meet the author” day and culminating in a launch reading during which students introduce the authors and their work.

Before helping run PRESS 254 as Assistant Director of the Publications Unit, I was one of its Sutherland Series authors. From 2019–2024 I was a PhD English Studies / Creative Writing student at ISU, and during my studies I was asked if I’d like to publish a chapbook with the press. Having now been on both sides of the publishing process makes me more fully appreciate the structure of the press and the opportunities it affords authors and students alike. When Halle founded the press, the English 254 course taught editing and publishing concepts using units, textbooks, editing tests, layout tests, and the like, and he really wanted to implement a version of the course with project-based learning and real projects. After brainstorming some ideas that included using his online journal Seven Corners as a vehicle for applied learning, he came up with the idea to publish chapbooks by recent alumni who had received the Sutherland Fellowship, which is a distinction awarded to incoming creative writing Master’s students—one in prose and one in poetry in most years.  Sutherland Fellow alums would receive an email and have the option to send a trove of creative work that Halle and summer interns and grad workers would develop into a chapbook manuscript or submit a finished manuscript without developmental editing.

The ongoing teaching chapbook press and workshop concept for PRESS 254 has also included partnerships with reading series, such as the Bloomington-Normal-based Word Bombing, and collaborations with local writers and writing groups like The Word Weavers, before settling into an ongoing collaboration with SRPR. The project-based learning environment of PRESS 254 raises the stakes for students and accelerates their learning progress. It is also emblematic of Halle’s thinking as an administrator, where he prizes win-win or, in this case, win-win-win thinking in his efforts as head of the Publications Unit. For PRESS 254, publishing studies students win by getting to work on real chapbook projects every semester; creative writing alumni win by being able to have a significant, early career chapbook publication; and English 254 instructors win by having the opportunity to have every semester be filled by the challenge of completing new works, by new authors, with a new set of emerging publishing professionals.

 

 

 

photos:

(top) Cover and interior of the Spring 2026 Spoonfuls titles—Everything Small Is Moving by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Inhale the Ghost by Nicholas Alti. 

(lower) 
PRESS 254 students binding chapbooks

 

 

 

 

Phil Spotswood is a poet from Alabama, and Assistant Professor of English at Huntingdon College. His most recent work can be found in Action, Spectacle, mercury firs, and ritual dagger. His chapbook, The God of Knots, is out now with bedfellows. You can find more of his work at https://www.philspotswood.com.

Lydia Mead : NOTES FROM A SMALL PUBLISHER: FENCE MAGAZINE & BOOKS (PART 1)

by Lydia Mead (Managing Editor & Publicist)

 

 

 

Over the first pandemic summer, between my second and third years at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, my creative writing professor, Sara Jaffe, connected me with Rebecca Wolff, who founded FENCE magazine in 1997 (manifesto written) / 1998 (first issue published), and Fence Books in 2001, for a virtual summer internship. I lived in the attic of a small blue house, & for Fence, I archived poetry reviews from The Constant Critic’s near-expired old website into a document for future upload onto Fence’s newer digital imprint, Fence Digital. I copied over and proofread some number of reviews per day (Ray McDaniel, Joyelle McSweeney, Tyrone Williams), & talked weekly with Fence’s now-Editorial Director & Fence Books Editor, Emily Wallis Hughes, about this process.

Over these near-six years since, I’ve dipped into and out of responsibilities and rhythms with Fence, as my commitments to college and other jobs variously shifted my capacity to engage with them. Now, I find near-every variety of task I’ve completed for Fence across those years represented in my current, consistent position: I support Fence Books through outreach and publicity efforts (I submit our books to book awards and reviewers/review outlets, & reach out to bookstores), post on Fence’s social media, write and respond to emails (of course!), & publish poetry reviews—new, and from the archive—on The Constant Critic.

When I describe Fence, I usually say some words like, “Fence was founded at a time in which the poetry world was really polarized between traditional, lyric poets and experimental, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to offer poets whose writing does not so clearly fall within a delineated camp or aesthetic—the “fence-sitters”—space to publish their work and enter into conversation with each other.” Fence resists binaries to embrace variousness and nuance. Fence creates and advocates for a “multi-minded” community.

I appreciate that I joined Fence through The Constant Critic, a project so palpably dialogic: poets writing about other poets’ writing. & I appreciate the variousness of my responsibilities throughout my time at Fence—an experience so shared between all of us who work for small, not-for-profit presses—& the ways in which they contribute, in shifting ways, to an ever-shifting ecosystem.

& I’ll note that I use so many ampersands in my writing because, six years ago, I read Karla Kelsey’s 2013 review of The Invention of Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard, trans. Cole Swensen and Rod Smith for The Constant Critic, in which she quotes Hocquard on his own use of “&” and “and”:

Here, the ampersand (&) is not a replacement for and. Rather, it denotes a tautological aim. Which is to say that it tends to mark, between two terms, a relationship (but can we still speak of relationship?) of identity: “Table & hands” (p. 10), “Person & path” (p. 86), or indifferentiation, closer to or. You could also say an augmentation. “The painting shows Alvina’s photographed arm augmented by a shoulder as if it’s a birth…” (p. 55) is less the description of an image than the development of a formula such as “Alvina’s arm & shoulder” while the other formula “Alvina’s arm and shoulder” denotes an addition. (82)

I internalized and remembered this distinction as something like, “and” designates an addition to a list or sequence in which the items remain relatively discrete, & the ampersand designates or indicates the relationship between two items, in which each changes the other. The ampersand articulates an interaction; a reciprocal exchange. At Fence, we believe and invest in literary conversation: in the “&”s that we generate when we collect and arrange nonconforming poetry, fiction, translation, and other in our magazine, & when our titles land on bookshelves and in readers’ hands.

…look forward to Editorial Director & Fence Books Editor Emily Wallis Hughes’ feature this summer!

 

 

 

 

Lydia Mead lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works remotely as the Managing Editor & Publicist for Fence Magazine & Books. She collaborated with Barb Tetenbaum, a visual artist interested in the act of reading, to publish her prose poem thesis, [some sentences & phrases I wrote once], with Barb's artist book imprint, Triangular Press, in 2024.

Micheline Maylor : Notes from a Small Publisher: Frontenac House Press

 

 

 

 

Founded in 2000 by Rose and David Scollard, and acquired by Neil Petrunia, and his wife Terry Davies around 2013.  I’ve acted as senior acquisitions editor there since 2013 and recently added the talents of John Wall Barger to the editorial team. We’ve focused mainly on poetry and solely Canadian works since the founding of the press. We look for manuscripts that say something new, while attending to the craftwork of poetry.
          I believe that Canada has its own literary voice distinct from its foundations as a commonwealth of the British Empire, and distinct from our America friends. We must. We have different concerns, values, and culture, distinct from both behemoths that flank us.
          Poetry has trends and schools, as do music, the visual arts, and film. At the moment, as Canada grows into itself, we are immersed in “voices of identity”. This creates gateways into worlds we cannot inhabit ourselves, and, hopefully, increases our capacity for understanding and empathy. It also can underscore our differences and increase tribalism.
          But what I’m most fascinated with is the existential commonality that exists in our humanness, and our common capacity for as Blake says in Auguries of Innocence, “the world in a grain of sand.” And I find myself increasingly drawn to existentialist phenomenology coupled with surreal metaphor. Poems the speak to common emotion and experience through description and experience embodying the commonality of humanness filtered through surprising language and imagery.
          One of our authors, Tyler Engstrom, published his debut collection with us, Think of How Old We Could Get, and I look forward to more from him. His work is mainly written in prose poem, with short scenes of high cinematic images and a punch of emotion. His voice is absolutely unique. I hope to see more from this promising writer in the future. I’d especially like it if some upcoming filmmaker would make some short films of his work. Hint, hint, out there. Here’s his poem “Crying Men” from Think of How Old We Could Get (2021) 

Crying men

I stuck my hand out the window
and made it a plane in the wind as we approached the gas station,
a pock mark on an otherwise naked body to run rubber on.
I walked in and the station attendant asked me,
“Do you believe in God?”
I told him no, or maybe when the moon seems right
and I need something more fitting to a poem than
believing in nothing.
He took me by the hand and we walked out back into the field
behind the station where I imagined someday wild horses had run free
and he asked me again
and I told him only when the wheat we pass through
becomes bread and wine will I believe the word of God
and he took my hand again and kissed me on the mouth.
We both tasted like cigarettes and I said still, no,
but he cried and I don’t do well with crying men.
He said God told him the next man would be beautiful
and tell him what he needed to know.
I told him I was not a beautiful man.
He said yes, but he hoped I might do
so I laid him down and told him,
“There is a hole in your heart no God can fill.”

I came back to the station and you were waiting there
with a soda in your hand and the tank full
and you said, “Who do we pay?” 

“Nobody, we’ve already given so much.”

It started snowing a few minutes later on the road
and you told me my eyes looked like Lake Louise. 

Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate emerita of Calgary (2016-18). She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta in 2022. She is the senior acquisitions editor (poetry) at Frontenac House Press. She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she a past Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Her most recent book is The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021) won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for best book of Alberta poetry and has been translated into Italian La Cattiva Moglie (iQdB). Her latest appearance introduces Hunger: The Poems of Susan Musgrave (Wilfred Laurier Press. 2025).

Natasha Cuddington and Kathleen McCracken : on Macha Press

 

 

 

 

Macha Press is a cross-border publishing initiative established in 2024 with the aim of addressing the underrepresented status of experimental and marginalised poetries in Ireland’s literary ecology – the island’s need for a publisher that is significantly ambitious to showcase innovation and expand parameters of the lyric tradition. Founded by seven poets (we have since added an eighth to our number) whose areas of practice and acumen span editing, literary publishing, author development, literary criticism, events curation and bookselling, our editorial team is comprised of Siobhán Campbell, Ruth Carr, Natasha Cuddington, Shannon Kelly, Alanna Offield, Lorna Shaughnessy, Kathleen McCracken and Milena Williamson. Together we are a diverse collective that includes members of various communities, national identities, ethnicities, religions, disabilities and sexual orientations and intermingles established with new editorial talent. We publish two books per year and seek to alternate between the work of established and emerging writers, with occasional works deserving of recovery.

The name of the press is pronounced “MAKH-uh” and it references the eponymous and pregnant goddess who runs through the Ulster Cycle. Macha appears in various incarnations and is usually associated with tropes of fertility and power. In Gaelic the word macha also means geographic plain, an open space for boundless possibilities. And there's a hint of the Scottish word makar, which translates as poet, maker.

At Macha, our twin organisational aims are to publish poetry by marginalised voices, including work that is innovative, experimental, formally hybrid and interdisciplinary, or requires historical recovery, and to promote the dissemination and visibility of underrepresented and innovative and experimental poetries to a wider audience local to Belfast, as well as on an all-island basis. We support poets with launch and satellite events – and also by way of our Editorial Services, which brings the editorial and creative acumen of our editors to the broader literary ecology. We also radically partner with an array of cultural and educational institutions and organisations.

At Macha, we place significant focus on the design of the book – as object, artifact – a volume of space that presents as compositional canvas, with each page celebrating the fact of paper and the visual comportment of its printed text. The books have a square shape, allowing for greater play, more formal and structural innovation, than the conventional rectangular area and A-5-ish footprint afforded by the shape of the traditional collection. These design principles extend beyond our 210 x 210 format to include a range of concern around accessibility and legibility, including monochromatic palettes and attention to typeface, font. Filosofia, designed by Zuzana Licko, has been carefully chosen for its humanistic, eye-friendly serif (at generous size, standard for inners, 13 point) and contributes to an aesthetic experience that emphasises readability. Each book is printed at Northern Irish firm W & G Baird and inmixes thoughtfully-managed production detail (thread-sewn binding, French flaps and sustainable offset printing) as part of a hand-numbered, five-hundred run collectable series.

In all of this, we've had the good fortune to collaborate with artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer, who designed our colophon, a paper-cut of two back-to-back horse’s heads (horses are one of the goddess Macha’s attributes) as well as devising a hand-mixed palette for our website and developing other foundational visual matter. Integral to our ongoing activity is the collaboration with our designer Julian Manev, an award-winning architect who brings significant skill and vision to each book, and also a collaboration with photographer Jos McGookin, whose flair shapes our developing visual archive.

Our first book by Belfast poet Eilish Martin is entitled !  All’arme / ?  And what … if not. It is a tête-bêche, a head-to-toe book that reverses so there are two books in one. The book consists of two long poem sequences, and in the centre of the book there is a reproduction of Eilish’s visual art alphabet sequence originally rendered in Letraset. This book was launched in Ulster University's Art Gallery in October 2024.  In aid of the dissemination of Martin’s work, we celebrated its publication of not only with a launch, but also co-curated an exhibition of her book objects and verbal-visual matter with the Belfast School of Art. We have since facilitated Martin’s work being featured in a range of journals, festivals, academic institutions and satellite events. 

Our second publication Crowd Work, by Dublin writer Sam Furlong was celebrated at sold-out launch events this May at Ulster University’s Art Gallery and at a companion event featuring Furlong and Martin supported by Poetry Ireland at the Irish Writers Centre (Dublin). Like Martin’s publication, it has garnered significant critical attention and has been featured at a broad range of public events. Our third and most recent publication, morsels by Belfast / Derry poet Susanna Galbraith, was launched October of this year in both Belfast and Dublin to notable acclaim. We are very much looking forward to the production of our 2026 titles by lauded poets Máighréad Medbh and Susan Connolly – which are currently in development – and to all of the dynamic titles planned on our list.

By way of collective networks of contact and affiliation, we hope to continue to harness not only practice excellence but also cross-sector collaboration and novel audiences. Our activities can be tracked on social media (@macha.press  /  @machapress.bsky.social) and our dedicated website (https://www.machapress.com/ ) which facilitates sales, our events calendar and a regular newsletter. There is also a funding structure available here so that readers can become subscribers to and supporters of our activity should they so choose.

Happily, a range of excellent independent booksellers retail the publications – they include: Belfast School of Art Shop, Books, Paper Scissors, No Alibis, and Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich (Belfast) with Seaside Books (pop-up / Northern Ireland), Little Acorns Books (Derry) and Cailleach (pop-up / Drogheda) and Books Upstairs, The Library Project, The Winding Stair and Gutter Books (Dublin) and Charlie Byrnes and Kenny’s (Galway).

Macha Press is supported by both the Arts Council of Ireland and the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and also by Belfast City Council.

 

 

 

Kathleen McCracken [photo credit: Jos McGookin] is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 2016 a bilingual English/Portuguese edition of her poetry entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems, was published by the Brazilian press Editora Ex Machina. A collaboration with filmmaker/photographer John T. Davis premiered at The Art Gallery at Ulster University in 2024. From 1992-2022 Kathleen was Lecturer in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at Ulster University.

Natasha Cuddington [photo credit: Jos McGookin] is a poet and critic. Her translations, essays and reviews have appeared variously. An assistant editor at Cyphers, she co-curated Of Mouth and was a Belfast Book Festival Associate in 2022 and 2023. She leads workshops at Crescent Arts Centre, Open Arts and collaborates with disability arts charities. With Ruth Carr, she co-edited Ann Zell’s posthumous Donegal is a red door and Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse. Her debut Each of us (our chronic alphabets) was published in 2018.