YES YES for YesYes Books

Post 11 From Vouched Contributor Tyler Gobble: YesYes Books

A long while ago, I vouched Volume II of Vinyl Poetry, a journal founded by Gregory Sherl and KMA Sullivan, who is the publisher of YesYes Books. Later, I vouched Thomas Patrick Levy’s “Please Don’t Leave Me Scarlett Johansson” pieces in Diagram. A collection of those pieces were later put out by YesYes Books (and I vouched that too!). Now, the various parts of YesYes Books — the press, the chapbook series, and the journal — add up to look as if they’re one of the hottest literary things on the scene. Needless to say, they’re something I’m really excited about, so I emailed KMA Sullivan and asked her some questions to further explore the goodness of YesYes Books.

1Q. YesYes Books has popped on the scene quick and loud and goooood. I remember seeing Volume 1 of Vinyl Poetry (YesYes’ journal) and being like yes yes (okay maybe not exactly but you get it) and really it keeps coming. Now, you’ve released a really really really moving chapbook, Please Don’t Leave Me Scarlett Johansson by Thomas Patrick Levy, and the couldn’t-be-more-appropriately titled Heavy Petting by Gregory Sherl; also, the new release Panic Attack, USA by Nate Slawson looks to be exciting stuff. Where did this all begin for you and your helpers? Where do you see it going?

1A. My one and only goal with both Vinyl and YesYes Books is to locate writing, poetry and beyond, that makes me glad to be alive and then get it out to as many readers as possible. I believe in words. I believe in art. I believe in the power of both to make this hard life better. And with that in mind, I’m going to run as fast and strong as I can, because in addition to being hard, life is short. So let’s go.

2Q. The previously mentioned chapbook by Thomas Patrick Levy is absolutely gorgeous (both writing and construction). I said all I’m smart enough to say about the writing in a review at Vouched Books. And the book object itself is a small delicate thing with its lovely cover and neat twine stitching. I remember knowing immediately that these pieces were must reads again and again and in book form after I read some in Diagram. What was reading these pieces like for you the first time? How do they continue to work for you?

2A. Every time I read a piece by Thomas Patrick Levy, it works for me. That is why his first full-length collection, I DON’T MIND IF YOU’RE FEELING ALONE, is coming out from YesYes in January 2012. I never get tired of his work. It is strange and sexy and broken. There is subtlety there. The reader doesn’t feel the complexity behind this work until after the piece is over and she realizes that what she thought the poem was about isn’t what it was about at all. For instance:

I get so hot I take all the hairs off my head. Each tiny knot a joke, each tiny knot a mockery of your grandmother’s cancer. You know I will come home late in a strange vehicle, heat escaping from my face in simple bursts, a strange sound humming like an artifact that glows golden brown. I can’t hide you like a knife, I can’t hold your smooth glints inside for long.

-Thomas Patrick Levy

from I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone

And thanks for mentioning the physicality of PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME SCARLETT JOHANSSON. That is important to me. YesYes is walking, indeed sprinting, into the online publishing world with eBooks and other projects, but the love of the physical book doesn’t go away. In fact, I think it is a time to up the game on the physical quality and life of books. Each chap, each full book out of YesYes will have its own physical personality and it will be one that reflects and enhances and lives with the words it contains. Wait until you see Panic Attack, USA. You will want to knit it a sweater and feed it oatmeal in the morning.

3Q. Heavy Petting by Gregory Sherl, in a much different way, is astounding in both its writing and construction. It looks big, like wide, but also kinda thick like it wants to be set on top of a toilet or maybe a coffee table. And the poems are thick too, Sherl busting himself open and throwing the parts around. I know too that Gregory was founding editor alongside you of Vinyl Poetry. So how did this book come to be a release of YesYes Books and how has the reception of it been?

3A. Vinyl Poetry was a lit mag long before YesYes Books was a press. Greg and I founded the magazine together out of an unadulterated love for the poetry we were reading online and elsewhere. Shortly after the first issue, Greg chose to focus on the many writing projects he had going. And I kept on with the magazine, bringing on Thomas as webdesigner (thank you baby Jesus!) after the first issue and Phillip B. Williams as Poetry Editor about midway through the third issue (again with thanks for blessings!). Some months later, I decided to start a press. This was entirely independent of the magazine in a sense but I brought the mag under the press because I was at the helm of both and needed to help myself stay as organized as possible.

The answer to “how did this book come to be a release of YesYes Books” is so simple. Gregory Sherl is one of the most talented poets I know. I asked him if I could publish his manuscript and he graciously agreed. Friends or not at the time, it was a risk for him to place his first full-length collection with a totally untried press. I will be forever grateful that he did. As to how it is doing:  reviews are coming out, sales are happening, readers seem well-pleased. And why not? With lines like “I want to smell the sound of you eating / my thighs, spread / like warm apple butter” honestly – what’s not to love? It will only grow from here. Heavy Petting is a keeper.

4Q. I guess that leads me into a question that comes up a lot in the small press world. In a previous post of the column, I asked Riley Michael Parker about his willingness to publish himself in Housefire. I’ve noticed a similar thing with YesYes; though not publishing yourself, two of the first releases were by Sherl, who, as previously mentioned, was a founder of Vinyl Poetry, and Levy, who is YesYes Books’ web designer. Let me make it clear I’m totally cool with and understanding of this kind of thing. Paths cross. Friends write good books. Authors become good friends or work partners. I’ll ask you something similar to what I asked him: how do you respond to people who frown on this sort of publishing (putting out work by work associates and/or friends)?

4A. I will never publish myself. But I’m the owner of this hamburger joint and I decide what gets served. And what gets served is what I love. Nate Slawson, Thomas Patrick Levy, and Gregory Sherl are three of the most exciting young poets writing right now. At least they are to me, and as I mentioned, I’m the one serving the burgers. That’s the beginning and the end of the answer to that ballsy question. I like ballsy questions though so I’ll offer a bit more. I knew Thomas through his poetry first. As a result, I don’t find any issue with publishing his work. I’ll publish anything of his he will let me publish. That’s how much I love it. Meanwhile, I will work him until he begs for mercy on all things webdesign or eBook oriented. I don’t actually understand how he can be both techno genius and artist – but I don’t question gifts dropped from the sky. I just pick them up and start walking.

Another gift from heaven was Nate Slawson’s PANIC ATTACK, USA. He was, in fact, the first poet who Greg and I solicited for the first issue of Vinyl. I can honestly say that being able to read more of Slawson’s work was one of the reasons we started Vinyl. The fact that YesYes Books is able to put out Nate’s first full-length collection makes me actually shake my head in disbelief. The work is incredible. Poem after poem. The complex and deep disturbance present in this work. The drive to possess and destroy the object of desire. The odd exuberance that lives in the midst of all of this. I find Slawson’s work absolutely intoxicating. Here’s why poetry is my drug of choice:

you are a river

My friends tell me you are

not a river & I am supposed

to believe them I guess

so I tell them all right but it

feels like a sick ventriloquism

two-by-four’d from my throat

but still that don’t mean

you’re not a river & I’m not

a thicket & together we’re more

alone than New Orleans

& if I was one of them old-

time preachers I’d drown

myself in you & grow a tiny

bridge out of my chest.

-Nate Slawson

from Panic Attack, USA

5Q. One thing I really appreciate, and find vital for small presses, is YesYes Books’ web presence. From having a slick website (and shall I say one of the most easy to navigate ones in the scene) to being active on Facebook (I like seeing a press like a status or post how you guys often do), YesYes isn’t lazy in being online. Maybe easy enough to assume, but I’ll ask anyway: how important is the Internet activity to what you’re doing, both in print and online? Tell us more about what you appreciate about the online literary community.

5A. I love the online literary community. It is vibrant and immediate and sincere. The only reason to do this poetry thing is love. There is no money to be made. No fame really. I mean really. Being big in poetry means what exactly? BUT man, the work out there now from known writers like Bob Hicok, Dorothea Lasky, Matt Hart, Ben Mirov, J. Bradley and Metta Sama, and lesser known but equally charged voices like Dana Guthrie Martin, Jessica Goodfellow Ueno, Ocean Vuong, and Lamar Wilson – honestly makes me happy to wake up in the morning. It’s an exciting time to be a poet and an exciting time to be a lover of poetry.

All of the folks just mentioned have projects in the works with YesYes. We are going to rock some socks and have a great time doing it. With just a couple of exceptions, I first encountered the work and got to know the person behind the work through the internet. The Internet has an amazing ability to connect people. It gives us opportunities to read words we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. It also gives us a chance to express our gratitude to the writers we admire. That’s one thing I LOVE about Facebook. I read some work by Amelia Gray for the first time last year and was blown away by her so I fb messaged some heartfelt compliments. She messaged back a couple weeks later. It made my day. The quality of her work makes her a superstar to me.

Thanks for the compliments about YesYes Facebook activity. I suck at Twitter though and need to improve my skills there. And additional thanks for the good words about our website. To be frank, a huge portion of YesYes resources in both time and money have gone to designing and constantly improving the website. We are in a time that is dominated by visual information. Shit needs to look good. Work good. Or people won’t be engaged and won’t come back. And so a large part of the website is devoted to not only the books coming out of the press but also to establishing a connection between an audience and the writers and artists associated with the press. This is why each author and artist has a profile page. I am incredibly proud and happy that YesYes is incorporating the artistic talent of folks like Megan Laurel, Allie Kelley, and Ghangbin Kim. We need and have a website that is good enough to introduce an audience to their work and who they are as artists.

6Q. You’re a writer yourself and an awesome one at that. (Readers: Need proof? Just check out Sullivan’s poems in >kill author). In a world that often requires other professional pursuits to make a living, how do you balance writing and editing/publishing? How does your own writing fuel the work you do with YesYes (and vice versa)?

6A. There is no balance. No fucking balance. Delete or add swears at will. I work about 12 hours a day on YesYes, frequently more. I no longer cook for my family. I’m lucky if I have clean clothes on. I never brush my hair. I’m not complaining. This is just reality. Folks like JA Tyler, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Patty Paine… work without stopping in order to publish, support, and pimp work they believe in. I am blessed by a life partner who does the money earning in the family, so I don’t have those time commitments. On the other hand I have five children, a granddaughter, an aging parent… So, you know, I’m getting the crap kicked out of me just like all y’all (as we say in Southwest VA). I’m just trying to keep up.

Meanwhile I try to set aside time for my own creative work but with only marginal success. I need to get better at that. Thanks for reading!

7Q. What is in the future for YesYes Books? What are your upcoming releases? Any plans you’d like to unveil for us?

7A. I want this press to be as good as it can be, as effective as it can be in promoting a broad range of contemporary voices.

It must be obvious by now that I am thankful to Thomas for his skill and commitment to YesYes. I’d pretty much be slamming my face into walls and getting nowhere without him. Right now Thomas is working on pushing the current limits of both the design and functionality of eBooks. We’ve got some great projects in the works, a couple of which I will mention a little further down.

What is less obvious though is the huge help that has come on board YesYes in the form of Rob MacDonald and Nick Sturm. Both amazing poets in their own right. Rob is also the editor of the gorgeous lit mag, SixthFinch. He has joined YesYes as the Director of Educational Outreach and is spearheading an inititiative to bring truly contemporary poetry – I mean the stuff that is actually happening now – into high schools. Meanwhile he is also co-editing an exciting project at YesYes that will be offerring the work of Bob Hicok, Molly Gaudry and Phillip B. Williams in a poetry subscription format that will push what we think of as eBook delivery.

Nick Sturm, the Associate Editor of YesYes, is focusing a lot of his energy on the public relations end of the business. He founded a wildly successful reading series in Akron, Ohio called Big Big Mess and is a regular writer of poetry reviews for Wave Books. Nick is taking his skills, vibrant personality, and work ethic and focusing it on placing YesYes publications more clearly into public view.

Our chief goal always is to get the work we believe in out to readers. Nick is doing that by attracting reviews and interviews from a variety of locations. He is also co-editing the Poetry Shots series from YesYes. The first of these mini-collections from Angela Veronica Wong, Ben Mirov, Dana Guthrie Martin and Metta Sama, will be coming out December 15. Serious goodness will be happening there.

Tyler, thank you so much for this interview. Thank you for your careful reading and unbridled exuberance for work that excites you. It is important.

Rock on and make art,

Katherine

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Learn more about YesYes Books now.

Short URL: http://www.smalldoggiesmagazine.com/?p=3970

Posted by Tyler Gobble on December 22 2011. Filed under Vouched Satellite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry