Showing Our Work

Publishing as a creative process.

As the director of a small independent press, I share in the enthusiasm that builds around a book as it comes into its final, bound form. But if I’m being honest, I sometimes wonder if we place too much emphasis on the moment of publication. In the larger scheme of things—in the great, long life of a book, any book—this moment of celebration can seem fleeting. And with all the effort that goes into writing, editing, producing, and promoting, I do wish we could linger a bit. Not just on the launch, but on the small and often meaningful events that bring a book into being.

On this Substack I’d like to offer some time and space for thinking about publishing as a long game. Let’s use this platform to enjoy the process that leads up to publication, as well as the life of the book in the months and years that follow its release. For example, I’m interested in the ways in which one book may (and often does) lead to another. And I want to celebrate those backlist titles that take on new lives when, suddenly, they meet some urgent need or wish for contemporary readers.

For those who don’t yet know us yet, Grid Books is a nonprofit publisher of poetry, fiction, and fine art editions, with a special focus on the work of older writers and artists. Since our founding in 2003 as Off the Grid Press, this focus has helped us to overcome a long-held bias in publishing that favors the output of younger writers. More recently, it has also shaped our interest in projects that emphasize intergenerational exchange. In fact, every book project we undertake is a collaborative effort that spans generational borders, whether between our editors and authors, or our designers, artists, and curators—as well as within and among the various contributors to our books.

Why is this important to us? Because each of our contributors brings to the press not only the contents of a book, but a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, skills, interests, and experiences that, over the course of our collaboration, broaden our view of publishing and strengthen our project.

Sure, our authors bring talent and expertise in areas of writing, editing, design, and publishing. But they also come with skills I consider more precious, more vital to our collaborative project and our current moment—skills like listening, patience, persistence, deep reading, discipline, artistic courage… This list goes on.

And then there are the ways in which, through their work, and their ways of interacting, our authors teach us how to live a more creative life, how to find and embrace whatever it is that animates a creative endeavor, and then how to stick to that creative work, how to maintain an ongoing practice.

We’ve learned so much from our authors over the years that it’s not overstating things to say that they have, collectively, made the press what it is.

• Take three-time Grid poet Elaine Terranova. In 2019, Elaine came to us with a proposal that we venture into audiobook production—something we’d never considered. She offered up her recently published Perdido for our trial run. Five years later, audio editions are an important part of our poetry programming, and in 2022 we received an NEA Challenge America grant to fund their production.

• Or the visual artist and writer JoAnne McFarland, who believes fiercely that “each act of making thwarts violence’s aim to destroy,” and whose willingness (always!) to experiment, to try something new in the name of a creative effort, led to our reimagining two of her multimedia collections, Pullman and A Domestic Lookbook. The results of that collaboration are, quite simply, stunning.

• Then there is our very first Off the Grid poet, the late Henry Braun, whose art and attitudes were the instigating forces that began this press. Braun’s commitments as a teacher and social justice activist—as well as his choice to retire, quite literally, “off the grid” in Maine—inspired Tam Neville and Bert Stern to found Off the Grid Press with the mission to honor older poets. They began with Braun’s Loyalty: New and Selected Poems, which his former student, Michael Alpert, offered to design. To this day, Michael, recently retired as director of University of Maine Press, is the designer for all of the titles in our Off the Grid poetry series. How is that for loyalty? We are so honored to continue this collaboration.

Much like writing, editing too is a creative effort. Although it’s not often viewed that way. Like writing, editing is recursive, requires time, thought, and inspiration, and is often, also, writing-heavy. Indeed, much of the work that takes place in the making of a book—collaborative work that involves designers, artists, and audio engineers, as well as editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders—is hidden from view. Why not look at all of it, and linger a bit in the process?

We plan to do that here.

The Plan

We’ll use this venue to reflect on our project as a small press publisher, provide opportunities for readers to peer in as we work, and celebrate our contributors throughout the process.

• Monthly we’ll post a long-form essay or interview with one of our contributors that digs into some aspect of our larger theme of process.

• Weekly, we’ll post shorter reflections that focus on work we’ve published, a chance to celebrate our backlist titles and our growing audio archive.

• We will also keep up a presence on Notes, for those interested in receiving snippets and news from the press, or who want to interact or share their own thoughts on the creative process in publishing.

Here are a few of the series we’ll be working on, with more to come as we go—

Other Lives

Every Grid author comes to the press with their own set of lived experiences. Many come with skills they honed in past professional lives—whether they were teachers, doctors, editors, or bricklayers. These lives are the stuff of their poetry and the materials of their storytelling. They are also the foundations that reinforce their discipline. So, to start off, Other Lives will feature interviews with our authors and other contributors, focusing on the work that has informed and strengthened their practice. We expect the focus and form of these posts will evolve over time, and we look forward to it.

Show Your Work

In my “other life” as a freelance editor, I develop and revise college-level books that teach people how to write. These books usually feature a chapter that prompts students to build and maintain a writing portfolio—basically, a website that showcases their writing-process work, a way to demonstrate to their instructors how they got from their first brainstorm, say, to their final polished draft. In similar spirit, we’ll use this series to offer insight into our processes, sharing examples of drafts, false starts, instigations, revelations—all the work that led us to the book you see on the shelf.

Keep Reading

And here we want to offer readers a chance to sit back and enjoy some of the work we’ve gathered and published over the years. Keep Reading will feature selections from our poetry, fiction, and fine art backlist titles, including audio highlights, poetry “mix tapes,” and mini anthologies, all drawn from our growing list of poetry audio editions. Alongside these selections, we’ll post short responses to the work we feature, written by our editors, and our authors, too.

I want to start things off by thanking the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), who have supported small presses through all the upheavals in publishing in recent years, including those unfolding now under the new administration’s efforts to shutter nonprofits and eliminate our sources of funding. CLMP chose this Substack project for its capacity-building grant program. Their support has helped us enormously in getting the ball rolling.

Thank you for joining us—

Elizabeth Murphy
Director & Publisher, Grid Books