What Press Books: An Interview with Katharine Haake

Abstract

What Press Books:An Interview with Katharine Haake Katharine Haake Could you briefly describe your press's history? With its genre-bending list of bilingual poetry, eco-fabulist science fiction, magic journalism, and graphic narrative, What Books Press exists to assert the imperative for writing that reflects the diversity of literary and political cultures emerging from Los Angeles, a center of art for the globalized world. We're a wing and a prayer operation, and we like it that way. With long, rich lives of writing and publishing behind us already, we took our cue from the younger collectives and came together in 2008 as a group of mid-career artists to publish work we wanted to see in the world and that we thought might not find another home. Some of us (like me) were dragged in kicking. But the man who called himself our fearless unleader and who, nonetheless, made it all happen—Chuck Rosenthal—was persuasive and had an idea. His idea was: we can do this. "We" were a group of writer academics, some of whom had known each for more than a quarter century, having met years before in the PhD. program at the University of Utah, some of whom came along later. We are mostly, but not entirely, based in Los Angeles and include writers of both prose and poetry, and one amazing artist, Gronk, whose work graces all of our covers. Our accumulated experience, combined, represents 250 years, plus or minus, of professional writing and teaching experience. We call ourselves The Glass Table Collective; we call the press What Books. In the beginning, we used print-on-demand (a newish technology at the time) and word of mouth. We paid on our own dime and asked authors [End Page 145] to chip in. We bickered and split up and brought in new members—that's what collectives do. We started out as an LLC and waited five years to become a nonprofit. We struggled with taxes and accounting, kept bad records, and hashed out the same decisions over and over again. In short, we tried, and we keep on trying. What books, indeed. As it turned out, plenty of books, and good ones—amazing ones—over the years. Some came to us by serendipity; some, by invitation to shy people we knew to have been writing closet texts; some, from within. We're old now. Our new anthology (Fall 2021), What Falls Away is Always: Writers Over 60 on Writing and Death, reflects on this. Still, we move forward, as our website says, with gratitude and inspiration, each year publishing works that thrill us with a bending of literary expectation, or a striking use of language, or a poignant portrayal of the human condition … or, ideally, all three. How would you characterize the work you publish? Since our inception, we have published work that resists easy categorization and that touches some kind of nerve. This includes a wide variety of hybrid genres—from magical nonfiction, to fabulist parable, to a stunning science-fiction based poetry/art collaboration with Gail Wronsky, Chuck Rosenthal, and Gronk. We'd hoped our work might center on California, or at least California-based writers, but found that, in fact, it comes from all over the world. And while we tend toward speculation, a lot of our work is firmly grounded in a world you and I might recognize and agree to call our own. We are a micro-press, publishing four books a year, give or take, about half of which are poetry and half, prose-based narrative—novels, short fiction, nonfiction, genres in between. Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them? For us, every reader is a gift. If we're lucky, we stumble on them at a bookstore or a book fair or just any old place. They are curious and open-minded [End Page 146] and recognize the value of language and care, a lot, about the world. We try to reach them by doing our bit—reaching out and holding annual launch readings, doing the book fairs, telling our students. We hawk books at AWP and do...