Scenes: Blazevox [books]: an interview with Geoffrey Gatza

Abstract

Scenes: Blazevox [books]: an interview with Geoffrey Gatza Geoffrey Gatza Click for larger view View full resolution Cover of a current release Would you briefly describe BlazeVOX [books]'s history? BlazeVOX started off as a college project while I was at Daemen College, Amherst, New York in 1998. The school is near Buffalo, so our contacts with poets and poetry is vibrant. I wanted to start a creative writing journal, but we only had a budget of $100. I took that, bought a copy of Dreamweaver and learned how to design webpages. I used this format for the college journal, and it was a great success. In 2000, I started BlazeVOX as the online journal was gaining momentum. The goal of the journal is to present innovative fictions and wide-ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Now we are approaching ten years and going strong. We have published over seven hundred poets in the journal using different forms of easy web access documents like HTML, PDF, and Flash. We expanded to e-books and now have seventy-five online. Our main goal is to provide good quality poetry and fiction for free. The technology allows for a very low overhead in our operation. We moved into book production, as there was a real market for us to expand our horizons, and once the print-on-demand systems began, we hopped right on board. The technology had been awful up until 2004 but now is really quite good. We have 160 titles in print with books by Anne Waldman, Raymond Federman, Ted Greenwald, and Celia Gilbert. All of our titles are available on Amazon.com. Click for larger view View full resolution Cover of a current release How would you characterize the fiction you publish? BlazeVOX [books] presents innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Our fiction reaches across many boundaries, from the far expansive realms of experimental to just left of center American hybrid work. Our motto is "Poetry that doesn't suck," and this applies equally to our fiction. BlazeVOX [books] publishes works of short stories like Greg Gerke's There's Something Wrong With Sven (2009) and Raymond Federman's THE CARCASSES (2009), and Doris Shapiro's 3 (2008). We also have flash fiction from Forrest Roth, and international fiction written in English: Goro Takano's With One More Step Ahead (2009). And cutting-edge novels such as Clarice Waldman's Victory (2006), Barbara Henning's Thirty Miles To Rosebud (2009), and Chuck Richardson's Smoke (2009). Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them? Audience is a hard thing to understand, and I never seem to be able to capture in my mind who comes to BlazeVOX. If pressed, I would say the AWP and SPD crowd, and if you know those acronyms and you don't know about our books, you'll probably love us. Our audience grows with each issue of our journal and with each book and e-book published. Each of our authors brings a new, diverse crowd to our site. And thankfully a lot of them are writers too, so we are constantly being sent awesome manuscripts. And in these manuscripts, the voices help us grow and respond to what is going on in the contemporary. One way we try to reach out to our audience is our annual Thanksgiving menu poem. Each year, I make up a conceptual poem menu for Thanksgiving, as if I could invite as many poets as I could to honor one poet. I make a menu and have poems in the place for the courses. And in 2008, I had Anne Waldman as the guest of honor using actual recipes I created for her at this breakfast. It was great fun all around. This year is for C. D. Wright and the following year, David Shapiro. Here is a link to the Thanksgiving menu page: http://www.blazevox.org/thanks.htm. Click for larger view View full resolution Cover of a current release What is your role in the publishing scene? We live in a world of rejection, and I try to offer acceptance. We offer several formats to...