Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews poet and editor Tom Montag

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As every media business continues to experience disruption and change, I’ve been talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as it is affected by technology and the larger context of culture and economics.

I’ve expanded this interview series to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. I’ve talked with editors and publishers who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and the present, and will continue to explore the ebb and flow of writing, books, and publishing in all sorts of forms and formats, as change continues to be the one constant we can count on.

Tom Montag is a poet, critic, editor and publisher whom I have known for many years. I love his biography, which emphasizes his pure identity as a midwesterner. Unlike so many Americans, he has lived in the midwest for his entire life, and his work identifies deeply with where he lives. He does not need to declaim his role as a true poet of place.

Tom was somewhat famously the editor of Margins: A Review of Little Magazines and Small Press Books during the 1970s, was active in the Milwaukee literary scene, and was an editor and feature writer for Wisconsin’s Fox River Patriot during its heyday from 1977 to 1979. With his wife Mary, he edited and published the Wisconsin Poet’s Calendar from 1982 to 1984, which was subsequently handed to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets to continue.

Tom spent the better part of his work life at the family owned Ripon Community Printers in Ripon, Wisconsin. During those years, he wrote pithy sayings from a character he called Ben Zen. Four collections of the BZ poems were published between 1992 and 2000.

His memoir, Curlew: Home is about his first fourteen years spent on a farm outside Curlew, Iowa, and about his sense of loss in revisiting the community forty years later. Kissing Poetry’s Sister gathered eleven of Montag’s essays about writing and being a writer, including his long piece on creative nonfiction.

After he retired from his Ripon job, he spent five years creating “Vagabond in the Middle,” an attempt to determine what makes us middle western. He has been collecting stories from residents of twelve communities across the middle west, true stories of their families, their lives, and their connections to the places they inhabit.

Tom and I have worked together on publishing projects at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, and we’ve presented together there and at the Lorine Niedecker festival in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Tom’s writing and editing has meant a great deal to me over the years, we are linked in so many ways, yet have such different backgrounds, and it was a great pleasure to speak to him here about his lifetime of work in writing and publishing, though to be sure, we barely scratched the surface of what we could have talked about.

SOMETIMES

Sometimes
in the weeds

a loveliness.
This moment

among all
the moments.

Rain when it’s
needed. Tom,

stop wanting
anything more.

 

MY FATHER,
holding the Y
of willow

lightly
in his hands,

walks the land.
The willow

leaps
for something

we do not
see: Here,

my father says
to the man,

drill here.

Tom is the author of many books and has edited anthologies as well. His most recent large scale collection is In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013.

There are two really good written interviews with Tom in the Wombwell Rainbow and the Mocking Heart Review. You can learn more about Tom and his work here and you can keep up with his prodigious output of poetry at his outstanding blog The Middle Westerner where you will regularly find him posting poems that will endure.

“Exploring the heart of the country; or, as Nancy Besonen has said, “Tom Montag is defining the character of the Midwest – one character at a time.”

Thanks Tom, for being who you are.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk Interviews Betsy Lerner

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals and other smart people about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.  We must wonder now, how will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and  economics?

I hope these Publishing Talks conversations will help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in and around the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends and they give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed by people in the book business.

A few weeks ago I read a piece by Betsy Lerner in Publishing Perspectives, the excellent online newsletter about the publishing business edited by Ed Nawotka.  It was called “Should I Tweet” and was adapted from the new updated edition of Betsy’s book “The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice for Writers.”  It’s a great piece, that says some important things about marketing and publishing aimed at writers (but good for everyone else in publishing to read too), and instantly made me want to talk to her (and buy her book).  This little quote from near the end of the essay really grabbed me:

“I’m not saying that everyone can or should be creating a personal literary dynasty, but it’s essential for authors to be thinking about how to market themselves. Always has been. Sometimes they cry, “but I’m no good at marketing,” or “Isn’t that the publisher’s job?” I think publishers should help authors think about what they can do early on in the process, whether it’s creating a blog, developing mailing lists, or getting speaking engagements lined up. If you’re lucky enough to be signed up without a platform, start working on one! Marketing and selling books is not for the faint of heart. Whitman knew that. Palahniuk knows it. Jay Conrad Levinson preaches it.

But no one knew it better than P.T. Barnum, “Without promotion something terrible happens,” he said. “Nothing!”

Betsy is herself of course, a terrific writer, as well as being a successful agent.  I admire her blog, where she extends the work she did in The Forest for the Trees.  She is funny and smart, entertaining and instructive, and obviously talented.  Her opinions are definitely worth knowing, and her advice for writers is always great stuff.  She’s a poet, and was for many years a successful commercial editor, and then became an agent with a great list of client writers; she is a partner at the Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency.  She wrote another book called Food and Loathing about her issues with eating and depression. She received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry and was the recipient of a Thomas Wolfe Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, and was one of PEN’s Emerging Writers in 1987. She also received the Tony Godwin Publishing Prize for Editors Under 35.  And Betsy also gives talks on every aspect of the publishing process from her perspective as a writer, former editor and agent.

We had a great conversation about books, publishing and marketing, during which I learned a few things and gained some valuable insights.  A key point she makes is how important it is for writers to understand their role in the publishing process.  While we are certainly in a period of heightened difficulties, the challenges writers (and publishers) face today are really not that different from what they have always been.  The specific tools we use may change, but the principles of marketing books remain the same.  Writers are in fact entrepreneurs, and not just “writers” and they must always be engaged in the public process of publishing, in a measure most likely equal to their own actual abilities.  And she also reminds us of the central matter: that the quality of the work must always be the focus of everything.  Everything else is secondary.

After talking to Betsy, I’m now looking forward to reading The Forest for the Trees – and sooner rather than later.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Ron Hogan

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.
How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Publishing Talks interviews help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends.
I believe these interviews give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed within the industry.

Ron Hogan has been a very busy guy in the book business over the past fifteen years or so, starting in the book business at the well known and now lamented Dutton’s Bookstore in Los Angeles.  He founded Beatrice.com in 1995 (the site is still going strong today as a popular book-centric blog), worked for Amazon, and then for Mediabistro’s Galleycat (“the first word on the book publishing business”), and is now the new Director of E-Marketing Strategy for publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in New York City.  If you look him up online, he seems to be everywhere at once, involved in many aspects of publishing, books and new media.  It’s difficult to imagine someone more aware of how books and readers interact in the online environment.

Ron is also an author, including The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!: American Films of the 1970s and most recently Getting Right with Tao: A Contemporary Spin on the Tao Te Ching.

In his new role at HMH, he will now have an opportunity to apply what he knows about marketing and online communities to the practical issues of helping to connect books and readers.  In this interview, Ron talked with me about his past work, and particularly what he has learned from his experience in retail bookselling, as well as his extensive online experience, and provides some specific and useful advice for authors (and publishers) to help them thrive in the brave new world of publishing.

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