November/December 2014
Michael Szczerban
State:
Minnesota
Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.
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These days, it’s tough for an editor to take a chance on writing that is risky, experimental, or hard to define. That’s why writers everywhere should be heartened by the success of Graywolf Press, an independent publisher in Minneapolis that has been taking chances on new work often overlooked by editors in New York—and reaping big rewards.
Graywolf was founded in 1974 by Scott Walker in Port Townsend, Washington (home to another outstanding indie, Copper Canyon Press). Its headquarters moved to the Twin Cities a decade later. This year the nonprofit publisher celebrates its fortieth anniversary, as well as recent critical and commercial triumphs.
At the heart of Graywolf’s outsize success is executive editor Jeff Shotts, whose poets and essayists rank among the finest writers in the United States. They have also been racking up the accolades: In the past three years, books of poetry by some of his authors—Vijay Seshadri, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and D. A. Powell—have collected two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. This past spring, his author Leslie Jamison debuted on the New York Times best-seller list, where her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, remained for four weeks.
That kind of national commercial response is rare for Graywolf, but is the product of years of patience and the relentless pursuit of interesting writing. Shotts’s roster of essayists and poets also includes Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, Eula Biss, Matthea Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Claudia Rankine, Tomas Tranströmer, and Kevin Young, among others.
We spoke this past spring at the Graywolf offices in Minneapolis, a day after I saw Shotts introduce Tracy K. Smith at an event benefiting a local library system.
Let’s start with a little about Graywolf. Do you think this press could exist outside of Minnesota?
It could, in the way that other nonprofit independent presses exist elsewhere, but the Twin Cities is a coveted place because of its support for the arts. The philanthropic support in Minnesota is unparalleled—not just for literature but also visual arts, theater, and music.
Our nonprofit, independent structure creates a culture. We’re absolutely a mission-driven organization. That allows us to make editorial decisions that are often deemed risky, because we have a safety net of support underneath those decisions in a way that other presses don’t.
How does Graywolf’s mission affect what you do?
We bring our mission to every editorial meeting. It’s how we talk about all the decisions we make. We take risks on books that aren’t obvious—in the proposal, the content, the profile of the author. We publish poetry and essays. Our nonfiction prize is defining a new kind of writing that is positioned to the side of most popular notions of what nonfiction is. We publish challenging novels and short stories. Some of those books really do succeed commercially. But we absolutely support the challenging but nonetheless great books that don’t, on their surface, seem likely to hit the best-seller list or win a big award.
We’re a nonprofit so we can take on these books, but we’re also a nonprofit because of the kinds of books we take on. We build our list in ways that would strike neither the publishing industry nor the culture at large as the methods of a commercial enterprise. It’s been extraordinary to see the success we’ve had with books that get passed up, frankly, by larger houses.
If I were to say one word about my role in how our mission operates, it’s patience.
That’s a rare virtue.
Exactly. And it’s the thing that distinguishes us from any other publisher. Leslie Jamison is a case in point. The success of The Empathy Exams began when we started the Graywolf nonfiction prize ten years ago. That prize attracted a number of great writers. Ander Monson’s book Neck Deep and Other Predicaments is a marvelous work that challenges our notion of what nonfiction and personal essay writing is. Not too long after his book, we published Eula Biss’s Notes From No Man’s Land, which has been one of our most successful nonfiction titles. That book won the National Books Critics Circle Award, was adopted in classrooms, and established Eula as one of the foremost essay writers in the country. And Eula’s book, Leslie has been saying, is the reason she sent The Empathy Exams to Graywolf.
We couldn’t have known when we started this prize that we’d have a New York Times best-seller or a National Books Critics Circle Award winner. But the success of the series has been in supporting each of those books so that other writers read them, see them, and want to create books like them. Only a press like Graywolf can be that patient.
How did Graywolf come to select The Empathy Exams for the nonfiction prize?
It was a fast and furious and unanimous choice. Leslie had sent us about a hundred pages—a lot of which is no longer in the book—and a cover letter and proposal for what the book would become. Those pages did contain an earlier version of that title essay, and it’s a remarkable, life-changing kind of essay. It blew us away from the beginning.
Watching that project build was extraordinary. Being the editor as Leslie turned in these new pieces, seeing Harper’s or the Believer pick them up, and building the conversation in the book around that central concept of empathy—it’s been one of the most extraordinary editorial relationships I’ve had.
Something similar to the nonfiction program is happening with the poetry list. Some writers have stayed with us over the course of three books now, and in the case of someone like Vijay Seshadri, he puts a decade between each book. We have not only the ability to patiently develop each individual book that we take on, but also the patience to develop an author’s career over a course of several books or, in some cases, several decades. Publishing as a whole has lost its patience with that kind of development. The commercial presses have ceded that ground to us, and we’re glad to take it.
They’ve ceded other ground too. Poetry is a great, fertile genre for us; it’s at the heart of what we do, and it’s territory that we get to inhabit. This new nonfiction writing is really fertile ground. Translations have also been ceded to independent publishing, by and large. With support from the Lannan Foundation, we’ve had extraordinary success with our translation list—fiction and poetry—and that’s yielded us Nobel Prize winners and Per Peterson, who is one of our absolute star international writers. His book Out Stealing Horses—that was work that had been passed over time and again.
We’re trying to move into these territories where we can be exciting. It’s author-driven territory, not commercial-driven territory. Authors are defining this new nonfiction. Poets are defining what poetry is for us. The way we attune our ears to them, the more that we can listen to them and what they’re writing, even if at first it unsettles us—that is what Graywolf is to me.
But don’t many of the pressures on a commercial publisher act on you, too?
I've been in independent publishing a long time now, and there is a Kool-Aid that you can drink. Even though I’m talking about this ground that’s ceded to independent publishing, I don’t want to make it sound like a shortfall of commercial publishing. They’re dealing with a reality that we’re in too. Of course we want to hit the Times bestseller list. Our mission is also to reach readers. These scrappy, odd Graywolf books sit at Barnes & Noble and everywhere else right alongside books from Simon & Schuster and Knopf and Random House and Farrar, Straus and Norton and so on. We have to exist in that world, and that’s a real challenge.
I want to go back to that sense of patience. It’s a huge part of what we’re able to give a writer. We take on individual books, absolutely, but we really are taking on a writer. We look for writers who give us the sense that their work is the beginning of something that we want to support over a long term. It can't always happen, of course. But that’s the ideal: to get in with an author on the ground floor and build them up to where the third, fourth, fifth, tenth book gets the front-page review or the big interview, and breaks out.
I think you’re underselling yourself with the word “patience.” You’re not just waiting around, are you? You’re identifying writers with talent, and then nurturing it—knowing that it will take time to reach their full power.
No, you’re right. It’s active patience.
Is it more challenging for you to identify young talent and nurture it today than it was ten years ago? You’re more established as an editor, for one, and you now have a list of continuing authors—take Matthea Harvey, for example.
Sure.
I remember first encountering her at the Dodge Poetry Festival when I was in college, and thinking that her voice was so fresh, so smart, so funny. She was totally new. But nearly a decade later, she's part of the establishment.
[Laughs.] She would never accept that designation—but yes.
On the one hand that’s fantastic. And on the other hand, every book she publishes with you takes up a slot that you might use to break out a new poet. How do you find the equivalent of Matthea today, when your list is already populated?
There’s truly no equivalent to Matthea. Let’s talk for a moment about her because I delight in her in so many ways. She is both a marvelous person and truly one of the geniuses of her generation. There’s no one who has the vision and imagination that she brings to the page. Her new book, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, is a hybrid book that is half her visual artwork and half her text, and there's nothing like it. Some of what we’re talking about is supporting authors who can challenge themselves like that. You know what I mean: There are many authors who stop challenging themselves.
I could not have anticipated this new book when we took on Matthea’s second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine. Now I see the connection: Of course there is this giant leap to the visual, a bigger scope that is even more political and more emotional. I had read her first book, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, published by Alice James, and I was blown away. I remember being introduced to that book by Mary Jo Bang, who was then my teacher and is now one of Graywolf’s award-winning poets.
I saw Matthea’s new poems come out in magazines, and I e-mailed her and just said, “I’m coming to New York. Do you want to meet up?” We did, and had a couple of gimlets. I was fascinated by what she was doing and what she was writing, and so thrilled she was willing to meet with me. It wasn’t a big pitch. Of course she knew Graywolf, and there was an understanding of what this meeting meant. Relatively soon after that, she sent what became the second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, which we’ve done incredibly well with, and then we did Modern Life, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the NBCC. And now we have this big, bold, ambitious work.
We don’t publish a lot of work with high-end artwork included in it—it’s an expensive book for us. But being able to support a major force in contemporary poetry—that feels essential to me. It does mean we have to be nimble, but I love that we can take a leap alongside her.
How did you come to work with Eula Biss?
I’ve lived my life alongside her, and I adore her as a writer and as a person. In the summer of 2002, I had finished my MFA at Washington University, and was reading an issue of Harper’s. There was this amazing piece called “The Pain Scale” by a writer I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen anything like Eula’s writing before, and I checked out her first book, The Balloonists, a wonderful book about the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. I wrote her to say that I had noticed these amazing things she had been writing and asked what she was working on. At that point she was just going into the University of Iowa nonfiction program. I was twenty-eight and she must have been twenty-four or twenty-five. We started a conversation, and every few months she’d send me some new pieces, and I tried to get her to start cohering some of these pieces around... something. I wasn’t quite sure what. But you can’t read a piece like “The Pain Scale” and not see the greatness and the potential in someone writing like that. I held onto that, even when she sent me pieces that were not up to that standard.
I kept trying to push her: “These are great individual pieces, but what are you writing about?” You know, I’m the guy who has to write the catalog copy for these books. [Laughs.] I have to stand in a room with our sales reps and say what a book is about. Sometimes that’s hard for poetry and essays.
Several times we got to a point where Eula could have ended the conversation, which would have been the saddest thing. Then, at some point, probably in 2006, she sent me a piece called “Time and Distance Overcome.” It is one of the single most essential pieces of writing I’ve seen.
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She started writing about Alexander Graham Bell, when communication from sea to sea by telephone was a new concept in this country. The piece continues through the history of how the government started putting telephone poles up across the towns and highways of America. Then, in the middle of the piece, she goes to the New York Times database and types in “telephone poles.” And almost every entry that comes up is about lynching. This is not where the essay was going. It takes a turn, and becomes a remarkable piece about racial violence just at the moment when we think we're in this great moment of connection. It is an amazing, chilling piece.
That was the moment we put our finger on what she was writing about. What then cascaded was this frank book about race, about whiteness and American culture. At some point, as the editor, it’s fascinating to get out of the way. These pieces started cascading together and making coherence out of what had previously been a kaleidoscope. No longer in that book is there the original spark, “The Pain Scale,” and it still hasn’t been put into a book.
That’s the nurturing patience. I hope some of what comes through to writers from our conversation is that it’s one thing for the publishing industry and editors to be impatient. There’s an economic drive around that. But writers can be the most impatient ones of all. That’s understandable, especially if you’re trying to get a teaching job, or we’re talking about poets or essayists who aren’t making life-changing advances, but are finding means to write through teaching. But if Eula had done that kind of kaleidoscopic book earlier on, I don’t think she’d be anywhere close to what she ended up accomplishing with Notes From No-Man's Land. Similarly, in Leslie Jamison’s case, there was a throughline all along, but a lot of her hundred-page sample didn’t make it into the final book. And as these individual pieces started to cohere, there was also a fascinating cascade. I keep coming back to that word.
You’re talking about that moment in the creative process when the work takes on its own momentum.
It’s the greatest moment. A good editor needs to recognize that moment as they’re editing on the page, but also when they’re in that nurturing conversation with their author. When do you shut up and get out of the way?
The line editing has to come at some point, but it’s that larger conversation where you as an editor gain the trust—and hopefully friendship—of your author.
I’ve yet to meet an author who sees a document filled with an editor’s comments and doesn’t think, at least for just a second, “Who the hell do you think you are?” [Laughs.]
Especially poets! [Laughs.] But if you’ve developed that trust and friendship, by the time you’re really doing the line-edit type stuff, you can spill ink as necessary. Editors can over-edit, of course, but developing that trust and friendship is so important.
How do you know when to shut up?
By listening to the author. When I send an editorial letter, it unnerves me when an author replies with, “You’re right. We should change that.” This happens very rarely, but when an author comes back and just says, “Yes, yes, yes,” it makes me concerned about their confidence in their voice.
My job is to get that author into a conversation about the work. I want that poet or essayist to draw a line for me, to say, “Yes, I’ll take this suggestion, but not this one—I don’t sound like myself anymore.” I’m willing to look a little stupid, or maybe a little pushy in some cases, but I love it when an author pushes back. That’s when I feel that the author is ready, confident in the work and in her own style and voice. That can be true for an author’s tenth book, but more often for the earlier books in a career.
An author needs to learn how to be an author.
Yes. And as an editor, you want your author to be able to present what their voice is. So I listen for that moment when an author pushes back. Sometimes that confidence is there from the beginning, and other times you do have to search for it. Finding that moment is the spark that keeps me coming back and makes me feel like a contributor to the conversation.
That moment of pushback is an inflection point. It’s when you can begin to work together and say, “Okay, your aim is this. This is how I’m not following you there. How are we going to make this better together?”
Exactly. That’s one reason I often phrase my suggestions as questions—because I see myself as on the same team, not an adversary saying, “This is how it should be.” I don’t think writers are interested in that.
It seems to me that there are basically two ways to get someone to buy your book. The easier way is to write about something that people have an active interest in. The other way, which is perhaps one challenge in selling poetry, is to conjure a new interest in a reader.
That’s interesting, and it brings up what poetry can do. I’m hearing myself automatically talking about subject matter and essays—the nonfiction part of myself. In terms of poetry, I hope that there’s something about poetry where the reader not only has to be nudged toward the interest of the poet, but the reader is also asked to perform a great feat of empathy: inhabiting that poet’s voice.
In a poem, “I” might be the poet who wrote that statement, or maybe not—regardless, it’s the reader. I don’t think that intimacy is achieved in any other art form. Part of the interest in reading poetry, and part of what is gained by reading it, is this leap into another identity. The poet creates the space for this to happen.
I’m interested in poetry that does collide with our culture. Vijay Seshadri is writing about an immigrant culture, and I think that’s something the Pulitzer committee probably responded to in some way. What does that amalgamation of voices and languages sound like on the streets of Brooklyn? You can open any of Vijay’s three books, but particularly 3 Sections, and overhear that street-level conversation he’s attuned to. I love books that get under the language in that way. There is a moment of familiarity, but the way the poet has transformed that is unfamiliar to us. That’s the unsettling area where poetry lives. But the poet does have to beckon us over there through some kind of subject matter, or through some kind of voice.
Tony Hoagland comes to mind. He’s a controversial writer for this very reason: He takes on voices that are sometimes very affable and sometimes very funny, but he is also willing to give voice to voices that are disturbingly ugly. In the process, he raises questions about American culture, about what poetry should or shouldn’t be talking about. We don’t always have to agree with Tony. And yet I’m excited by that risk, to inhabit these characters, these voices that we have to admit are part of American culture.
I love that he tramples on the idea that there’s a limited domain of interest that poets should engage with. He, along with a poet like Matthea Harvey, engages with questions I actually have, rather than ascending into a rarefied aesthetic landscape.
Poetry as a democratic act. That Whitmanesque impulse is something I aspire to. The Dickinsonian impulse very much alive in Matthea Harvey’s or Mary Jo Bang’s work. But it’s the collision of those impulses that I think makes poetry great.
That reminds me of the poems Tracy K. Smith was reading last night—those postcards by the victims of horrible acts of murder writing back to their vanquishers. But they do it with this voice of beauty, this acceptance of their fate. I remember first reading them, and it was shocking—most people would assume you should take those stories and witness them in a very particular way. But for Tracy, it’s really only an act of empathy if you include everyone in the story—that includes the person that we don’t like to look at. Tony would say that sometimes the person you don’t want to look at is yourself.
That’s poetry. What a powerful little thing a poem is.
I want to talk about audience. Is poetry read only by other poets?
A lot of people say that.
What’s your take?
No. Everybody is reading poetry. Robert Pinsky talks about poetry being the thing that exists from the breath. He says we walk around all day saying poetry to each other, and there is some truth to that. We’re helpless in the way that our language is cadenced. If you think widely, in the way Pinsky encourages us to, we’re speaking poetry all the time.
Of course there is something about the act of codifying and distilling the language into a piece of art that’s different from the way we’re talking now. Our culture gives that heightened moment to the poem. Even when a writer like Tony is doing something very conversational, there is still something ceremonial and ritualistic about the poem that can be the place where readers and audiences get lost. That heightened place gives poetry its great power in our culture, and maybe that’s why we turn to it for inaugurations and weddings and funerals. Poetry moves us in a different, powerful way. Those are other ways everybody is engaged in poetry.
But is everyone engaged in the purchase of poetry?
Right, right, right. Well, in that way, no, poetry still tends to be niche. [Laughs.]
How have you seen the audience for books of poetry change?
I’ve been engaged in the publishing side of that question since the mid-1990s, and also as an MFA student. MFA programs have continued to increase in numbers. There’s a lot to be made of the effects of that rise—what the workshop model means for poetry, aesthetically, and I’m engaged in that question too. But in terms of audience, those MFA programs are talking about poetry in their classrooms and in their auditoriums, and that has only increased the audience. When authors do appearances, even if the book isn’t part of that transaction, the poem is—and that is incredibly valuable, even if it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line of a publishing house.
I tend to be pretty optimistic about the audience for poetry. Writing programs and reading series, book groups, National Poetry Month, Billy Collins on the radio—there are more ways to access poetry than there ever have been before. It is an exciting time to be a poet, and to be a poetry editor trying to keep your ear to the ground in terms of where poetry is being experienced. It’s a much wider response than one might initially assume. Many of our poetry books have been our best-selling titles in these last few years. Some of those sales are propelled by the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize and the National Book Award, and so on. Some are propelled by the excitement about what a particular voice has to offer.
Tony Hoagland is an incredibly populist and popular poet. Tony is not hitting the New York Times best-seller list, but he has hit a cultural nerve. Claudia Rankine, a poet who’s also doing very slippery nonfiction poetry stuff, is also hitting a nerve with her fearless way of talking about America. We’re in multiple printings. Any publisher would kill to have numbers like we have on those books.
Is every first book of poems going to perform that way? Of course not. But it’s wonderful when poets do tip their work toward a wider audience, because that allows us to publish more so-called new and emerging voices.
I have only seen poetry become more popular, more read, more taught and discussed. It’s part of our mission to find that audience. Absolutely we market our books toward those writing programs. We go to AWP and make sure those books are front and center, trying to get those books on syllabi that get taught time and again. We’re out trying to make all kinds of things happen for these books. But also finding those—it goes back to the subject matter, and the way those authors sort of talk about their subject matter—how can you reach those audiences for that book?
This fall we’re publishing a book by Katie Ford, a marvelous younger poet. It’ll be her third book, Blood Lyrics. There’s a section in it about experiencing an extremely premature birth, at twenty-four weeks. And it’s a story of survival, it’s a story of a hospital, it’s a story of a marriage, it’s a story of a childhood, it’s all these things. I haven’t seen poetry hit that subject so head on, and with such an urgent voice. We want to reach people outside of the usual poetry audience for whom that’s personally urgent. We think that way about each of our books: How do we reach an audience that might not be sitting around and waiting for a poem? But when the right poem does reach them, it changes their worldview.
Do believe that there is no segment of America that cannot be reached by a poem?
Absolutely. It’s naïve, perhaps. [Laughs.]
No! If you don't believe that, it’s probably time to fold up.
You do see Random House taking on Billy Collins in a particular way. There is a commercial opportunity with poetry too.
Oh, that reminds me: I brought you a copy of one of my books. It’s an anthology titled Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, edited by Anthony and Ben Holden.
Oh, good! I've been so curious about this, because it’s for the masculine audience that Tony Hoagland, for one, is reaching. Men do read books. I’m not only talking about poetry. The publishing industry seems to ask itself whether that’s true, but very clearly, men do.
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You and I have done it!
Here we are! [Laughs.] You and me, we might be it. But do men read poetry? Maybe that is an interesting question. At Tracy K. Smith’s reading last night, there were significantly more women than men, so that audience provides some anecdotal evidence about who’s reading literature. But every editor, and every publishing house, must maintain the hope that what they’re doing has the power and the potential to reach anyone. Even the most experimental, innovative, destabilized voice—if that author is able to clutch the culture by the collar, I think any reader can go there.
The academic audience is an important one, because it’s often the place you have to start with challenging books. At a writing program or in an English department, there’s an engagement with the question of what it means to challenge a reader. Can you get that conversation to start there and gain enough traction to move further out in the culture? Sometimes yes, and often no. But it does happen. There’s still what used to be called the avant-garde. I love that there is still a mechanism through publishing houses and magazines and online and self-publishing for the new James Joyces and Samuel Becketts and Gertrude Steins. The writers who are pushing the language in such a powerful way that our first encounters with it scare us.
New Directions is a national treasure. That they're still committed to that kind of innovation is a testament. New Directions was the model that Scott Walker founded Graywolf on. Every small independent press that’s still active in this country is founded on what that press stands for. That’s very moving to me as a reader and as an editor.
Well, now that we’ve covered everything, let’s start at the beginning. [Laughs.] How did you become an editor of poetry books? I’ve read that you grew up in the Midwest in a very Scandinavian household.
I’m from the middle of Kansas, from a very small, rural town named McPherson. Deep Scandinavian roots.: 1880s immigrants from Sweden, many of whom came to central Kansas, some of whom didn’t like it and got scared and went back. Church steeples, oil wells. It was a beautiful place to grow up, and I was fortunate to have a lot of people lifting me up. It’s one of the most conservative places in the country. But my family had a tried-and-true-blue quality that I was completely oblivious to at the time, but which certainly seeped in. Even my grandfather, who’s gone now, was canvassing up to his last year or two for John Kerry against George W. Bush. My mom is a deep thinker and a reader.
We had these red faux-leather books in a series called the Book of Knowledge. And I remember us buying the encyclopedia letter by letter as the volumes came to our grocery store. I read a lot in the encyclopedia, and I remember my mom reading from the Book of Knowledge. [Laughs.] They’re absurd in terms of their impossible breadth. But it provided me with an imaginative world as a young person. I was lucky that those books were among the many ways that I was lifted up intellectually. I grew up believing I had to think my way out of there.
What do you mean?
Every teenager grapples with central questions of identity. Who am I, and what do I love, and is it supported here? All of those things.
I’ll back up a notch. My mom was a really big figure, but my grandfather gave me a worn copy of Tennyson that I still have. It was an odd gift, because he was not a readerly person. He went to the agricultural school at Kansas State University on the GI Bill, very proudly, and was a county extension agent. I used to walk wheat fields with him. He had these ritualistic practices and would walk a field in a certain way, seeing things that of course to my eye were invisible, and then he would chew the grain and deduce something. My dad had a master’s degree in theater, though he was a real estate agent and broker for most of my youth.
I’m sure this joke isn’t new to you, but: Did you hear about the Scandinavian man who loved his wife so much he almost told her?
[Laughs.] That’s the world I’m from. You keep it secret, that part of you.
But you noticed that part of you, and saw it in other people in your family.
My parents are very aware people. They were invested in making sure that my two sisters and I did things like go to art museums in Kansas City, which was this big three-hour drive from home. We took trips outside of Kansas, and that felt important. I mean, now that sounds pretty average, but Kansas is a land of settlers. That austere thing you’re talking about is deeply ingrained.
How did you come to realize the role creative expression could play in your life?
Mostly by reading. Then I tried writing poetry. Middle school is where it sparked. And then I had a remarkable high school English teacher named Carole Ferguson. We read Shakespeare and William Blake and the Romantics and Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. She was a remarkable teacher in how she introduced that writing without killing it—in a way that allowed you to think deeply about it but also enjoy it.
We had another high school English teacher named John Hudson, but everyone called him Hud. He was also the track coach, and he was all about Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville. Those writers in the deep masculine American vein. He taught literature the way he coached the track team, which was to inspire. He would stand in front of the class—he had this comical hairpiece—and take off his glasses and read us passages he loved. It was alive for him. I didn’t learn a thing about the critical appreciation of literature, but I loved it. Having those two very different English translators opened up a path.
Mrs. Ferguson recognized something in some of us. She gave me a poem called “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford and said I should read it. Stafford was still alive at the time, and he was from Hutchinson, Kansas—what we called Hutch—about thirty miles away. That was very powerful: to have a teacher take that interest in me, and to be shown that poetry didn’t end with Frost. She showed me that poetry was still alive, and in fact that there was a guy from right nearby who won the National Book Award. That was eye-opening.
Graywolf publishes William Stafford now; that’s not an accident. His new and selected collection was one of the first books I published. I remember it came in a big black box—this was after Stafford was gone—and I thought, everything has led me to this moment.
Were you the lone reader of poetry among your peers?
I have to mention the Hollow Men. Growing up in central Kansas, as I mentioned, there could be a sense of silence, and a sense of a narrow path forward surrounded by immense horizons that seemed to lead everywhere and nowhere.
The Hollow Men was a group of us in high school who stole away in secret up to Coronado Heights, the highest point in McPherson County, the legendary northern point Coronado reached on his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. He reached that point, saw what he assumed was nothingness, and turned back. But that’s where we turned, a bunch of guys who went there at night to read poems out loud and try to eke some meaning out of that nothingness. T. S. Eliot’s poem provided us with our name.
We were pretentious and hopeless, embarrassed and beautiful, and around those fires in the humid Kansas nights, we introduced ourselves to Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, and we uttered poems by living poets whose names we might not have been hearing in our classroom. Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, William Stafford, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, many more.
It’s amazing to me now that we Hollow Men found one another. We’re still all marvelous friends, now trying to be fathers and artists and teachers and editors. I suppose we never stopped being Hollow Men. I think we’d all say poetry saved us from ourselves and provided us a space where we felt in control of our lives. That’s one way to answer how I came to poetry. Another way to answer: listening deeply to what others brought to light for me.
Why did you move from Kansas to the Twin Cities?
I made the great decision to go to Macalaster College in St. Paul. I was an English and classics double major, studying a lot of Greek and Latin language and history, seventeenth-century literature, Chaucer, Beowulf. Charles Baxter had been the editor of Macalaster’s art and literary magazine, so there was a kind of literary history at Macalaster. Tim O’Brien went there, Mary Karr.
What decade would this have been?
I graduated high school in 1992, and then graduated Macalaster in 1996. During my senior year at Macalaster I did an internship at Hungry Mind Review, which used to be a magazine for independent and university publishing that was distributed for free in independent bookstores. I did everything from pitch books for review to sell ads. It was there, while I pored over independent publishers’ catalogues, that I realized the Twin Cities has an amazing literary scene. Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, Milkweed Editions, the Loft Literary Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and so on.
I wanted to get some more experience in publishing after I graduated, so I started an internship at Graywolf. The second day I was there, the guy who hired me said he was leaving and asked if I would consider applying for his job. It was shortly after Fiona McCrae had taken over the press, and I was in the right place at the right time. I owe Fiona everything. She was very patient not only in developing books and authors and a list, but also in developing her staff. I learned like you, like everyone, by really doing it.
Fiona deserves all credit for moving the press from, at the time, a potentially disastrous financial moment. Scott Walker left in 1994 and there was a board of directors in place that then hired Fiona. Slowly but surely Fiona saved the press from that precipice, and we’ve been thriving since then.
What did you accomplish those first few years?
In the first year, I was able to put my finger on some poetry books that excelled for us. One of them was William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. I knew the power and potential in that manuscript, and it continues to be one of our best-selling titles, period. I’m very proud of that, both for mythic personal reasons and because it was a good publishing decision. Another one around that time was Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel. His books are among our best-selling titles as well.
You were all of twenty-two or twenty-three at the time?
Yes. Not all of them went on to the same success, of course, but I was given freedom to march into the publisher’s office or to be at an editorial meeting and say, “This is big. This is important,” and put some enthusiasm—if not acumen—behind those books. The community here was willing to lift me up. It means everything to me now, that there were people who listened to that young jabber-mouth wannabe.
I got promoted and took over more of the poetry. I worked at Graywolf as an editorial assistant, and then assistant editor, and I think I was just editor by the end of those first four years. By then I knew I wanted to go to graduate school for an MFA in poetry.
I imagine you had some pretty nice recommendation letters by then.
[Laughs.] I did, and that probably helped my application. I hope I had a decent writing sample, too, but please don’t try to find it!
What was your motivation to go back to school?
I needed to figure out if I was an editor or if I was a writer. I studied with Carl Phillips and Mary Jo Bang, who are both absolutely terrific teachers, at Washington University in Saint Louis. I learned a great deal about the history of prosody and craft from Carl, and from Mary Jo I learned how to read new and innovative kinds of writing. I realized later that I became an editor through my MFA program. In those workshops I learned how to read and line edit and respond to a writer. I really took that very seriously and earnestly—as I tended to take everything. [Laughs.]
Were you publishing any of your own work?
I did a little, and I did some reviewing. But I recognized by the end of that experience that my path was back to Graywolf. I had been freelance editing during those two years, and Fiona asked me to come back. In 2002 I took over the poetry list. Then we started to make more commitments to our series of books on the craft of writing—that’s when we launched the “Art of” series with Charles Baxter—and started the nonfiction prize soon after that. It was a marvelous moment of upward movement and growth.
Fiona put extraordinary faith in me. We took on D. A. Powell, Matthea Harvey, Katie Ford, Claudia Rankine, and many others, and continued longtime support for Dana Gioia, Linda Gregg, Jane Kenyon, William Stafford, Eamon Grennan. I was given amazing autonomy to bring in the kinds of work that expanded our list.
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Tell me about a couple books you got behind.
I really got behind Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, which we published in 2004 and have reprinted many times. It was not the kind of book that Graywolf was known for, but we succeeded with it.
I was building a diverse list, because that’s what I saw in contemporary poetry: fragmentation. The historical idea of schools of poetry had been upended, and we wanted Graywolf’s list to reflect what writers were writing. We published Thomas Sayers Ellis’s first two books, and started relationships with Cave Canem, the African American poets group. We published Natasha Trethewey’s first couple of collections.
Mary Jo Bang’s first book that we took on, Elegy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s a marvelous and moving book, and it meant a lot that it was by my teacher. We’d been a finalist so many times and we finally had broken through in one of the big three awards. We got up to around thirty books a year maybe four years ago. We’re roughly equal thirds: fiction, nonfiction, poetry. I love that in the same season we might have a book like 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri, which uses a lot of traditional craftmaking and rhyme, and it might be next to something like Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine, this remarkable lyric voice, next to Tony Hoagland’s cultural conversation about identity. We are deliberate about trying to have some new and emerging voices, some midcareer voices, and then some established voices on each list. That’s a way to avoid competition within the list itself.
How do you schedule a book of poetry for publication?
Everyone asks if we only publish poetry in April. When I first started at Graywolf, the Academy of American Poets was just starting National Poetry Month, and the larger houses didn’t catch on for the first few years. Early on it was really driven by independent publishers, and they really promoted our books well. Later, Knopf and others started publishing their big poets in April. What do you do with that promotional machine? It’s positive for poetry, but now it means that April might not be the best month to publish a poet’s first book—something that might get lost alongside Philip Levine or Billy Collins.
We operate in three seasons because of our distribution through Macmillan/FSG, with three to four books of poetry each season. We have lead poetry titles, which is to say established poets like Tracy K. Smith, Tony Hoagland, Fanny Howe, Matthea Harvey, Claudia Rankine, and so on. And then we might have a translation, and a first book we selected for a prize or from an organization we have a collaboration with. Those books aren’t really competing in the same conversation.
The main thing is to support the roster of poets that we’ve built, to space their books out in a meaningful way. It does mean making some of those poets wait, and that is a difficulty. Most poets are willing to work with us, and we try to make use of that time as an incubator to make the book as ready as it can be by the time it comes out.
How do you use that time?
We’re able to do more editorial work, place more poems in magazines. Frequently that extra time ends up yielding some of the best work around that manuscript.
Take Nick Flynn. We’re working on his new poetry book, and the conversation about its title, My Feelings, has led to him working on a title poem to insert into the book. For a book of poems, that’s a major edit. He’s also on the cover of American Poetry Review, and that helps create some anticipation. And it’s never too early to gather blurbs. People think it’s funny to talk about promoting poetry in the same way you might promote a book of stories. But it’s the same.
How else do you conceive of promoting poetry?
Some poets want to do, and are very good at doing, a lot themselves. Doing readings, placing poems, all of that. There are marvelous places that want to know about our books and talk about them and support them. We are always sending them our galleys, getting them early copies. The AWP conference is a really powerful tool: You get thirteen thousand people. But a lot of this goes back to what we were talking about before: What is it about this poet or this book that might reach other special audiences?
You’re trying to increase the poet’s profile in the world of poetry while you try to find readers outside of it.
Absolutely, and that’s not unlike how one would promote a nonfiction book. We treat poetry as a genre that is up to the sales potential of our fiction and nonfiction. Are there specialty catalogs that this book might fit into? Are there particular magazines that this particular poetry book might enter into?
In March we published a book, How to Dance as the Roof Caves In, the third book by a poet named Nick Lantz. It’s a great book, imaginative, smart, and it’s very much about the collapse of the housing market and the downturn of the economy. NPR has picked up on this book and has done a couple pieces on it that I’m not sure the book would have gotten without talking about this subject in such a candid and imaginative way.
It’s that assumption that poetry is its own circular beautiful self. It can be, but what else is it? We’ve been able to get that book in the hands of good reviewers who might not otherwise review a poetry book, so that’s one example where subject matter can drive the way we promote a book. Nearly every book has an angle that gives it appeal to varying audiences.
Would you walk me through acquiring a book of poetry? You publish ten or so poetry books a year, but must receive some vast multiple of that.
Technically, if you go to our website right now, you’ll see we are not accepting unsolicited manuscripts. That said, I still am inundated.
More than a thousand a year?
Oh, easily more than twice that. I’ve checked e-mail once this morning, and there were at least three by 11 AM.
Some of it is stuff that I’ve solicited: people I’ve met at Bread Loaf, AWP, authors who live in the Twin Cities, people who one of our authors have recommended. I’m seeing more and more agents sending poetry, often because their client does something else. I wouldn’t say that’s a huge percentage, but they are there, and I take those submissions seriously.
How do you triage that volume of reading?
Those poets whose work I’ve solicited or who have been recommended by one of our poets, or who I’ve met at a conference or read in a magazine—I take those pretty seriously right out of the gate, more than something that just comes in cold. It’s human nature, I suppose. But we do look at what comes in.
Do you have readers who do a first pass?
We do have some readers in-house who we kick some stuff to. Because our list is technically closed, most of the submissions we get are from people who are trying to go around the door. I look at them as I can—I’m far slower than I want to be, but that’s just a reality of time and commitment to the books that we have taken on.
We have such a roster that of those ten to twelve books we publish a year, eight might be filled by returning poets. Balance becomes a huge question. It is part of our mission to keep the list fresh. So far we’ve done a pretty good job, but there are harder decisions ahead. That’s the worst day: turning down somebody you’ve worked with before.
What happens when you read a submission and love it?
I take that manuscript to our editorial meeting, where I present the book and say why I’m excited about it. Often, I will send out a sample ahead of the meeting. We talk about where this poet has published work, if it is his or her first book, whether the poet is a good reader of his or her own work. There’s absolutely nothing like a great poetry reading, and there’s nothing like a really bad poetry reading.
What makes a great poetry reading?
It surprises people when the poet is able to move out of the expected territory, that slow, elegiac, incantatory tone that doesn’t add much value.
I love hearing those poets who really allow for their own voice. I love when poets are risking something during the reading, whether that is what they are reading or how they are reading. What they are risking at that microphone is something people are moved by and interested in. Not all poets can be great presenters of their work, but it’s a huge help for any author to present work in a unique and exciting way. It adds to the experience of the book.
Is the poetry reading one of your most important promotional tools?
It’s huge. It is poetry. The page is one significant method of transferring the art of poetry, but part of its deep tradition is oral. That is part of the alchemy for a successful poetry book. People take note of the really great readers. Having a big reading at AWP, or a breakout reading at Bread Loaf at that famous theater where Robert Frost read years ago can make a difference. I’ve started dialogues with poets because I sat up at their poetry reading. I think those things even can influence the academic job market for a writer.
I’m curious about the unexpected places you find terrific writing.
One way to answer that question is social media. I’m a clicker, and I love it when someone tweets out a poem or posts it on Facebook. It might be a poem from Rattle magazine or a publisher’s website or the Paris Review, but getting it funneled through someone else’s enthusiasm is one of the ways the tool of social media can be interesting for an editor. It can also be incredibly deceptive and a waste. But I love books and poetry that ignite conversation.
Word of mouth is for poetry is huge. Tony Hoagland’s early success was due to word of mouth: “Can you believe how beautiful this poem is, how audacious this guy is, how this person is pissing me off by saying this in a poem?” That conversation is exciting. That’s what we’re in it for: people who are not only appreciating literature but are passing it on and saying it is important. I want all of our books, whatever genre, to do that.
I try to look outside my own aesthetic value. The conversation is as important to me, and maybe more so, than what I think is “good.” As an editor, reading outside yourself is everything. You can’t possibly put yourself in the shoes of every audience member. That is another reason why I take notice of word of mouth, even when the material isn’t my cup of tea.
You want to understand why people are responding to it and you are not?
Right. My assumption from that Scandinavian background is, “What’s wrong with me?” [Laughs.] “Why don’t I see this?” The deficiency is mine. That interests me, because it’s a place from which I can expand and learn. I learn a lot from the books that on first read I was startled by or assumed that I didn’t like.
At the editorial meeting, you come to the conclusion that you’d like to publish a particular piece of work. Then what happens?
We do a P&L for all of our books. We’ll talk about format, season, advance, and then I’ll contact the poet and make the offer. That is the great day, the best day in publishing, when you get to make that phone call, especially with someone who is new to the list. For a first or second book of poems, the advance might be a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars, so it’s not a life-changing amount of money.
But it is a life-changing event.
I hope so. That’s a lovely phone call to make.
Okay, now on to a big question. How do you edit poetry?
Very carefully. [Laughs.] And with a green pen.
Never red?
God, no! I haven’t really had writers flip out, but green is a psychologically friendly color. That’s tip number one: Green is helpful.
You edit poetry by listening deeply and taking on the voice of the poet. For me, it is an act of empathy. It is an act of taking on that poet’s voice and plight and subject matter such that I can make intelligible suggestions that are within the conventions and voice of that writer. I go through everything that I think needs to be gone through. That can start with the title of the book. A title often suggests what the central set of concerns is in this book, so it is a way in. You want to make sure you put your best foot forward.
What are some of your favorite titles?
Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me has probably received as much or more attention than any title—purely as a title—on the poetry list. In a much more subtle way, Mary Joe Bang’s next title is The Last Two Seconds, which is so unusual and fascinating to me, and it's not a usual poetry title. And I do think Nick Flynn’s new book, My Feelings, has a great title because it flies in the face of every poetry workshop and thesis advising committee in this country. He’s managed to challenge himself and risk something with that title. It’s risky for being the most clichéd title imaginable, and yet readers will see the title change in a really meaningful way when they come to the moments where that phrasing occurs. I had to come around to that title, I admit.
One of the things I work on the most with poets is this: How does the poet earn our trust and get us into that voice? The first movement of the book is so important, and that starts with the title. Is there an epigraph? What is that epigraph saying, what is it doing, how does it relate to the title? I’m intrigued by the way that a reader starts to accrue meaning. Maybe there’s not an epigraph, maybe there’s a dedication. Sometimes a dedication can totally change the way you read a book.
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Why is that first poem first? It’s the first impression and is going to define what we expect from the second poem. Does that second poem subvert those expectations or does it delight in continuing what we've seen, either by subject matter or voice or form on the page? In that first movement, the poet can bring you into the collection, or keep you out. I want to interrogate those things.
You’re talking a lot about organization and flow.
I don’t want to make it sound like we read a poetry book the same way we read a novel. But I do think that it’s valuable for the poet and editor to get on the same page about the vessel of the poetry collection. Is there a sequence that is meant to take us through a particular kind of experience? I want the work of art, that vessel of the book, to be respected by the reader, so that the reader doesn’t just want to flip around. In a new and selected collection, sure, go ahead and flip. But for a single volume in which the poet has thought very carefully about that sequencing, I want to make sure that experience is there for the reader. How do the poems accrue? Does this collection take us somewhere?
What about the individual poems? Are you working on them, too?
It’s the same thing.
What if a poem has been previously published in a magazine?
It really depends on the poem, and also where that poem fits in that manuscript. It’s a really different thing when the poem is by itself in the New Yorker as opposed to when it is in the middle of a poetry book, or if it’s the first or final poem. That might mean changing some lines or a title to fit the sequencing.
Some poets say, “Oh no, that poem appeared in Poetry magazine, that’s got to be just how it is!” Sometimes it does work that way. But something really different happens when a poem moves into the pages of a single poetry volume. The overall book needs to operate the way a single poem does. That first poem operates as the first line of a great poem across the book. That fifth poem is the fifth line.
One thing I think about is the sequence for each poem, where it fits and why it fits there. Is that the right title? Is this the right way into the poem? We call it throat-clearing when there’s a first stanza or a first paragraph that can be removed or trimmed down. Of course, you have to make changes by understanding that if it is a sonnet, it needs to remain fourteen lines!
If there’s a very particular style, lineation, use of capitalization, punctuation, all those—I help find the right conventions for that individual poem as well as the conventions that fit the entire book. If something seems off from the poet’s own conventions, I’ll point it out. Very small things like a change in capitalization can potentially get in the way for a reader.
And then I edit for meaning. Does the poem really start here, does the poem really end here, should this penultimate line really be the last line? It is making those kinds of suggestions without, I hope, being interruptive. If nothing else, I hope making suggestions like these allows the poet to get back into the poem. Writers can get stuck. Sometimes it’s just helping them to get back in.
Some poets like early involvement, some do not. Every poet is different, and every poet’s process is different. It keeps my job interesting, and it’s one of the things I love.
Does your editorial process with poets differ from the prose writers?
I’m surprised how similar it is. The reason I say that is I think you’re dealing with pieces, and any time you have two poems or essays or chapters rubbing up against each other, do you want the heat and energy of friction, or a subtler bridge between those two things?
The nonfiction I tend to work on is often by writers who also identify on some level as poets. On Immunity by Eula Biss has a deeply poetic way of sentence-making and argumentation that feels very natural to me, as someone who works with a lot of poetry. There is a lyric insistence in the writing and metaphor-making in that book. I’d say something similar about The Empathy Exams. At the end of that book there’s a cadence towards a revelatory end of the final essay that feels to me poetic.
You do move from the line to the sentence, and yet there is something about unit-making that feels akin. I hope editing one makes me good at editing the other. It may not be for me to say. I hope it gives me an attention to language. That’s at the heart of Graywolf: that the information being offered with a book of nonfiction is being offered in a very artful way, and the same might be true for a line of poetry.
Have you ever edited a novel?
I never have.
Do you have any inclination to?
I’d love to. We have so many other good editors that it’s probably for the best in terms of workload, but I love reading short stories and novels and fiction in translation.
Who are your favorite novelists?
Per Peterson is a remarkable, amazing novelist to me. It goes back to that Scandinavian silence: No one creates that quiet landscape better than Per Peterson. Another Graywolf writer, Kevin Barry, is an Irish phenom. I love Marilynne Robinson; Housekeeping and Gilead are remarkable. I’m a huge reader of Paul Auster. Louise Erdrich. Charles Baxter. Toni Morrison. Denis Johnson.
Is there something that unites those writers? Is it their use of language?
Now that you say it, I think it is the use of language, but for very particular ends. The silence of Per Peterson is in direct opposition to Denis Johnson’s high-energy voice and dark humor in Jesus’ Son. An attention to and a delicacy of language is probably it, but with a real conceptual edge. Auster is such a conceptual writer. The pure language and sentence-making of Marilynne Robinson is remarkable stuff. And with Marylinne Robinson or Per Peterson, there are these quintessential images of those books that appear when I think about those books. I think about Housekeeping and that moment when the character falls down into the river where that train had fallen and the foot touches something metallic in the water, and it’s so visceral—a haunting image of the train that went down in that water.
It’s funny that when I start talking about fiction, I turn to the language of poetry, not just the language of sentence and unit-making, but the making of images. I suppose when I’m reading fiction I’m still looking for poetry.
Why do you