TEV GUEST INTERVIEW: ROSE METAL PRESS EDITOR & PUBLISHER, ABBY BECKEL & KATHLEEN ROONEY

This week we've spent some time with writers who do good things with words, now let's get to know some people who make the packages.

Rose Metal Press was founded relatively recently in 2006 by Abby Beckel and Kathleen Rooney. Although the press is based out of Boston, the co-founders, both in their late 20s, live elsewhere. Abby Beckel is the Managing Editor of a business magazine for physicians in Washington, D.C. Kathleen Rooney is a Democratic Senate Aide in Chicago. Together, along with the help of a team of talented designers, interns, and printers, they comprise Rose Metal Press.

Their latest offering, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness, is a mega-chapbook that combines the manuscripts of the winner and three finalists of the Rose Metal Press First Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. It's a fascinating concept and a great value. It's also a very strong indication that more writers are turning to short short fiction. Rose Metal Press is committed to bringing their fine work to light.   

QUIZTUNES FOR ABBY BECKEL & KATHLEEN ROONEY OF ROSE METAL PRESS:

TEV: How did you two meet? What made you decide to launch a press together?

A&K: We met in graduate school at Emerson College in Boston. Abby was in the MA program in Publishing & Writing and Kathleen was in the MFA program in Writing, Literature and Publishing. We met while working on the graduate literary magazine, specifically right at the time around 2003-2004 when it was in the process of being re-launched, transforming from the old Beacon Street Review into the new Redivider, which has since gone on to have a series of wonderful editors, each of whom has added a series of wonderful features. Over the course of our time at Emerson, we realized that the two of us had this sort of alchemical ability, when we worked together, to become somehow greater and more effective than when we worked apart. Abby became the Managing Editor of Redivider and Kathleen became the Editor-in-Chief, and we realized even more fully how well we complemented each other in our working relationship. Inevitably, we graduated and could no longer work on the journal together, so—since Abby had always dreamed of starting her own press—in 2006 we embarked on founding Rose Metal. We felt that as a team we had a much stronger combination of publishing, editorial, and literary knowledge—plus, it's a lot more fun to navigate the pleasures and pitfalls of indie publishing with a partner in crime! And we're lucky enough to share a vision about the kind of books we think are important to publish and a dedication to beauty in both the writing and the book design.

TEV: It seems as if your slogan could be (with apologies to Emma Lazarus): "Give me your quirky, your irregular, your unconventional manuscripts yearning to break free."

A&K: Rose Metal Press is interested in writing that successfully uses hybrid and non-traditional forms. In grad school, we found that we shared a fascination with books such as Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's, that didn't seem easily categorized into—or bound by the rules, conventions, and expectations of—a single, easily identifiable genre. We wanted to help more books of this sort find their way into the hands of readers. Put another way, we are interested in works that take their form as a primary concern and match it to their content. So far, this has meant that we have done a lot with short short fiction—in our first anthology Brevity & Echo, our latest collection A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness, and our annual Short Short Fiction Chapbook Contest—the novel-in-verse in the form of Peter Jay Shippy's How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic, and prose poetry in the form of the forthcoming Tinderbox Lawn by Carol Guess. But it has also meant that we have picked up books—like Adam Golaski's forthcoming Color Plates—that fit into no readily handy category.

Also, when we were deciding what exactly—beyond just "starting a press"—we wanted to focus on, we knew that there were many, many excellent independent presses out there, publishing many, many excellent books. Right from the start, we wanted to be sure that we positioned ourselves to fill a niche that was not already being filled by many skillful and dedicated others.

TEV: What does "Rose Metal" signify?

A&K: "Rose Metal" (aka "Rose's metal" or "Rose's alloy") is an alloy with low melting point made of 50 percent Bismuth, 25–28 percent Lead and 22–25 percent Tin. [Editor’s Note: I knew that.] Its melting point is 100 °C or 212 °F. Also (and here's the really significant part), Rose Metal is typically used as a solder. [Editor’s Note: Okay, I didn’t know that.] Since the press focuses on hybrids, we thought that it made sense to name ourselves after something that is itself a hybrid, and that works as a link or mechanism by which different things are fused together into one new whole. To give credit where credit is due, the name was suggested by our fellow Emerson College alum Caryn Lazzuri.

TEV: What's been the biggest surprise you've experienced thus far?

A&K: Well, there have been many surprises. For one, we didn't expect to have so many amazing entries to our first annual Short Short Chapbook Contest that we'd be inspired to put out four of our favorites under the cover of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness.

Also, because most of our books are printed in the standard offset way, we didn't realize what a huge undertaking it would be to hand-sew every one of the 300 copies of the letterpress-cover, limited edition of the first contest winner's chapbook, Claudia Smith's The Sky Is a Well. Fortunately, we love the collection and it was worth every stitch, and we are eternally grateful to our friends and supporters in Boston who volunteered hours and hours of their time helping us get the job done correctly and quickly. We've had to allot our time resources a little differently this year, though, so although we are letterpressing the winning chapbook covers again at the Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA, we'll be saving our fingers and having the chapbooks bound for us professionally.

We are also continually pleasantly surprised at the generosity of our collaborators—our designers Rebecca Krzyzaniak and Melissa Gruntkosky, our intern Lauren Kouffman, and our web designer Aaron Sweet. These people and many others, too many to be named, have made us feel really lucky to be part of such a thoughtful and vital independent writing and publishing community.

Perhaps the greatest surprise—the outpouring of appreciation for our support and promotion of hybrid genres—should have been the least surprising since the reason we chose to publish the kind of writing we publish is because we knew the opportunities for those writers and their work were so limited. And yet, we never imagined there were SO many writers out there pushing the boundaries of genre and form, and in such amazing ways.

TEV: Let's talk about A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness. What led to the decision to combine the work of four writers in a single book?

A&K: As we mentioned above, it all stemmed from our first annual Short Short Fiction Chapbook Contest. When we gave the anonymous stack of finalists over to Ron Carlson to judge, we could honestly say that there were none in the pile that we wouldn't be proud to publish. We were thrilled when he picked Claudia's manuscript, but then, as we got ready to send out the inevitable batch of rejections, it occurred to us: we weren't bound by the limits of our own contest; we didn't have to publish just one. So we went back through the pile and found the manuscripts that we felt that it not only made sense to publish, but also that it made sense to publish together. The title of the book comes from Elizabeth Ellen's short short "Eastern Standard," from her chapbook Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix, and it speaks to an intangible quality that we felt drew all four chapbooks together. They all seemed to share a certain ineffable giddy energy. There are lots of things that you could say the books share in common: they are all incredibly well-written, they are all by female authors, they are all decidedly quirky and frequently funny-sad, but the overarching thing that inspired us to want to put them all on stage under the same spotlight was the distinctive—the peculiar—tone and atmosphere with which they are infused. We've noticed that short shorts can be very poetic in that way, that creation of a tone, and all four of these collections—Amy L. Clark's Wanting, Elizabeth Ellen's Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix, Kathy Fish's Laughter, Applause. Laughter, Music, Applause, and Claudia Smith's The Sky Is a Well—operate in this kind of poetic register.

TEV: How did the writers respond to sharing the stage, so to speak, with other?

A&K: Personally? They responded really well and are truly supportive of each other's work. Amy, Claudia, Elizabeth and Kathy are all extremely generous, gracious, and a pleasure to work with, and—fortunately for us—they all agreed readily to be a part of this project. Another surprise we've found through our forays into the field of hybrid genres is that the community of people writing short short fiction is tight-knit, talented, vocal, and super tech-savvy. These four authors all have histories of being involved in online communities or having online presences relating to the realm of the short short, and that has been an excellent network to learn about and begin to tap into. The short short is a remarkably flexible and versatile form, and it has a great number of much-deserved fans and practitioners who've done a lot to help support Amy, Claudia, Elizabeth, and Kathy, and the press. We've been setting up readings all over the country for Amy, Claudia, Elizabeth, and Kathy, sometimes in their respective hometowns and sometimes further afield, and their great performances at those readings have been immensely helpful in spreading the word about A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness.

TEV: What's next for Rose Metal Press?

A&K: This summer, we're excited to be publishing the winner of the second annual Short Short Fiction Chapbook Contest, In the Land of the Free by Geoffrey Forsyth, selected by Robbie Shapard. The chapbook consists of 10 very short fictions, and from the night a baby is born onto a cutting board in his mother's kitchen, to the day a rhinoceros mysteriously escapes from the zoo, to the morning a young man wakes to find his mud-covered relatives back from the grave, each story is funny, sad, and very strange.

This fall we're happy to be publishing Tinderbox Lawn, a collection of prose poetry by Carol Guess that is set on the margins of Seattle—beneath bridges and on the banks of waterways, in strip clubs and flooded farmland—and illuminates the intersection of domesticity and bohemia.

And next year, we are thrilled to be publishing Adam Golaski's Color Plates, which essentially captures how it might feel if you were able to read—not just walk through—a whole museum. We're also in the midst of compiling a new anthology for 2009 called The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field and edited by Tara L. Masih. This collection features essays by Ron Carlson, Pam Painter, Robert Olen Butler, Peter Orner, Vanessa Gebbie, and many others.

Comments

[Shya]

Over the last few days I've pretty much made myself clear about my allegiances, but I can't let an opportunity to praise Rose Metal Press pass me by. They're exemplifying exactly what will inevitably save the publishing world: presses which choose authors based on merit, and stick with their stated mission. Go team.