A NECESSARY RESILIENCE
Fiona McCrae of Graywolf Press
PUBLISHING is such an intensively collaborative enterprise, I find it surprising that we in the industry value independence above everything else. After all, none of us is ever working alone—except perhaps when we read and evaluate a manuscript that is fresh off an untried writer’s desk. Two forces are always at play in the market: the one that follows trends and the one that creates them. When editors are reading manuscripts, therefore, I want to know which force is uppermost in their minds. Are they looking for something they know has worked before? Or are they open to the unexpected?
The loss of Toni Morrison this year gave us all a fresh opportunity to value her legendary contributions as a forceful editorial and market leader. She saw a yawning gap in our culture and had the determination, even in the midst of a larger commercial house—in the late 1960s she became the first Black female editor in fiction at Random House—to go after a generation of writers to fill it.
For me a spirit of openness and adventure is what defines a flourishing independent publisher (over and above size, per se). When and where this spirit
is strong, so will the future be necessarily rich and dynamic. Here in the United States and around the world, I see indie presses going against the tide as they publish the new, the strange, the nuanced, and the complicated. Independents are playing a crucial role in the publication of poetry, translation, hybrid work, and essays. And the good news is that these seemingly “commercially challenged” books are generating quite a stir. Across all genres, but poetry in particular, indie lists are bristling with talent—just look at the National Book Award, Pulitzer, and National Book Critics Circle finalists of recent years.
Our value as independent publishers lies in the authors we can say yes to when others may be turning them down; our greatest triumphs therefore lie in our discoveries. Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Valeria Luiselli are all now published within large conglomerates, yet my principal respect remains with the small houses—New Directions, Archipelago, and Coffee House Press—that first introduced their work to American readers. Conversely I define failure at Graywolf not so much as the book that has underperformed (one can still hope) but as the book turned away because there was something in the manuscript that we were not open to exploring.
When we are at our best we follow our writers, not the marketplace. I see it as an implicit part of our nonprofit contract with society that we have a duty to practice literary risk-taking. And with poetry at the heart of the list, we have learned to trust language that seems to come from the future to which it points. In 2014 we published Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, a hybrid work of poetry, essay, and image. It was singular, challenging, and forward-looking. It went on to become a national best-seller, and it continues to shape the future of Graywolf.
Publishing Citizen made us, at that time an almost entirely white staff, fully realize that our diversity needed to flow from the list to ourselves. We created the Citizen Literary Initiative, which includes book giveaways and a ten-month paid training fellowship. It’s a small but important step to make publishing more of a place that Toni Morrison would be proud of, and one that continues to bring exciting dividends to the press. Our board, our staff, and our national council now better reflect the inclusivity that we have created across the list as a whole. There is always more work to be done in this area, and I know it is a priority at other indies as well.
Graywolf is celebrating its fortyfifth anniversary this year, but with age comes fresh challenges to staying open. We maintain our list at no more than thirty-three titles every year, but we have a growing number of returning authors, which in turn makes it harder to keep slots available for writers new to the list. This problem is in part solved by the hungry nets of the larger houses that (following the market?) entice many of our successful prose writers onto their lists. It can feel bruising at the time, but it does create space. After we lost David Szalay to a larger house last year, for example, it opened a slot that we gave to Anna Burns, who subsequently won the Man Booker Prize for Milkman.
This “filling up” is an age-old problem. I was comforted recently by a vintage recording of T. S. Eliot addressing the difficulty of achieving this balance between list building and staying fresh at Faber and Faber, where he was an editor and director for over forty years. One solution is for other publishers to enter the fray. Again, here and abroad, we continue to see new presses form. Catapult, Restless Books, and A Public Space Books in the United States and Fitzcarraldo in the U.K. have all been strong out of the gate in recent years. I expect to see more arriving, with a mission to open different doors to show us what we have been missing.
There is certainly no end of new books to be written. Literary writers are weighing in on the urgent conversation about who we are and who we are becoming in an interconnected world of diminishing resources. In fact, in this political moment writing that does not reflect our times must work harder to win our attention.
It’s never easy to be a successful independent press, but I am optimistic that our field has the necessary resilience to stay the course. I had some reassuring glimpses into the future this past summer. Visiting the Columbia summer publishing course and the Bread Loaf summer workshop, I met lively, diverse, engaged, and informed young people, eager to make their way into our field.
We are going to want to publish, hire, support, and eventually yield to this new generation of talent. The independent spirits among the agents, booksellers, critics, media, distributors, librarians, and presenters are the ones who will continue to make a difference to the work of indie publishers. Even the awards are centers of openness— the National Book Critics Circle helped put essays on the map, and the National Book Foundation’s recent support of translations is going to affect the field tremendously. Let’s continue to hold one another up and help fight the monolith. Together we can reach and nurture a new generation of literary readers—and who is more independent than them?
There is certainly no end
of new books to be written. Literary writers are weighing in on the urgent conversation about who we are and who we
are becoming in an interconnected world of diminishing resources.
In fact, in this political moment writing that does not reflect our times must work harder to win our
attention.