Monthly Archives: May 2016

Eloise Millar & Aidan Semmens

Eloise Millar is one of the directors of Galley Beggar Press, a literary journalist, and a novelist. Aidan Semmens is a poet and a journalist, and the editor of the poetry e-zine Molly Bloom.

As it’s now the summer term, the event kicked off with four student readers. We heard Katie Szyszko reading a fragment based on a house she lived in in Hungary, Chris Scott reading a scene set in Paris at night time from the novel he’s writing for his PhD, John Wright reading poetry written in dialogue with articles by Robert Macfarlane, and David Dykes reading some poetry that he had written in a seminar taught by Simon Smith. You can read all of this work in the summer reading series booklets, available at the reading series every week — do buy one!

The summer term reading series events are about the publishing industry, and so while both Eloise and Aidan are published writers, they were here in their capacity as publishers and editors.

Molly Bloom is an online poetry magazine that Aidan says is pretty much in ‘the modernist tradition’ — which doesn’t mean that everything he publishes has to be explicitly modernist. But it is a tradition, or a general area of poetry, that he’s interested in. That he likes. The magazine is a reincarnation of a print magazine that Aidan published in 1980, shortly after leaving Cambridge. He set the website up three years ago after being persuaded to recreate it online — he could reach a much wider readership. “Poetry is a niche within a niche,” Aidan says, and finding the readership for the print magazine had been difficult. Online, it’s much easier.

Galley Beggar was set up in 2012, Eloise tells us, by three people — her, Sam Jordison, and Henry Layte (who is no longer involved; he runs The Book Hive in Norwich). She says that they’d been meeting in Henry’s bookshop for a year, “arrogantly moaning” about publishing — about ugly books, and about how it felt that writers they liked weren’t able to get published, or weren’t selling so well, which would then stop them from being able to publish their work. They have eclectic tastes, and the books they wanted to see were often considered maybe too experimental, too left-field. And then one day, she says, they decided — let’s do this! Henry’s godfather, Simon Gough, had written a fictionalised book about his great-uncle — Robert Graves. It had been commissioned as a drama by the BBC as a drama, but when they dropped it, he turned it into a novel. He had been working on it for 25 years. So they took it on — it was their first book. It was a process of learning very quickly. They’ve now published a number of books, including the multi-award-winning A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by recent guest to UoK Eimear McBride! Eloise says that like Molly Bloom, Galley Beggar is also interested in publishing works that fit into a modernist tradition, with their authors Eimear McBride and Alex Phelby as key examples.

Amy asks if it’s been difficult for them to publish works that are modernist and/or experimental, and why they think they’re not being more widely published. Eloise says that at Galley Beggar they can publish what they fancy, and with Eimear and Alex their work is definitely modernist, with a real focus on interiority, but both have done well. Aidan says that poetry doesn’t sell — nobody is in it for the money, and so he’s able to publish what he wants, too, without worrying about what is financially viable. The project is about him working out what he likes on his own, without external/monetary pressure.

Next they talked about how they promote the work they publish. Aidan says that he uses Facebook to connect with writers, and that his network is always expanding there. Facebook is also his prime means of distribution. In 1980 it cost £400 to produce a single issue in print, even as cheaply made as possible. Now he can reach people for a fraction of the cost.

Eloise says that at Galley Beggar they publish 2-4 writers in print books a year — they couldn’t manage more books than that. But Sam thought up their Singles Club short stories and subscription package, that allows them to publish one short story a month as an ebook. These tend to be small pieces of work by new writers, giving them a platform. They’re for sale online, and they go to a few hundred subscribers. They had a headstart with publicising their books because of Sam’s contacts (Sam works as a literary journalist at The Guardian and elsewhere), and their skills from publishing — the networking really helps. The book trade is the only industry where stock can be returned up to 18 months later. So Waterstone’s might order 800 books but send 600 back — which is really difficult and dangerous for small presses. So they have to do their best to survive. Eloise deals with the production side of the books herself — she talks to the typesetter, printer and distributor directly. She has a database with literary journalists in and a good sense of what everyone likes, what’s been reviewed lately etc., so they can email people individually about their upcoming titles. This allows them to ask for feedback, and knowledge of what’s happening. They go to events, and meetups with other small publishers too. “If you run a small press you’ve got to be a jack of all trades!”

The first issue of Molly Bloom was entirely made up of writers that Aidan had invited to submit poems to him, but the proportion of solicited to unsolicited works that he publishes is changing with time. The website says that he’s open to submissions, and he’s slowly getting more and more sent to him without having to ask otherwise. He says that the next issue he publishes will be the first to be entirely made up of work that he came across in this way. Because it’s not about money, he can just take what he likes, and what fits the magazine — he says he does get some submissions that are well-written that he doesn’t take just because he can’t see the point in what they’re doing.

Galley Beggar used to have manuscript submissions open online, but Eloise says that it was too overwhelming — they’d be sent around 200 manuscripts a week. They had to find a third reader, but even then it was just too much to get through. So they’ll move to a system where they have short reading windows — that way they can still receive unsolicited manuscripts, but it’ll be easier to manage. They’ve got a book upcoming from a UoK alumnus (Gonzalo! A former writer of this blog!) who was shortlisted for their recent short story prize, and they’re working closely with another writer from the shortlist too. They only publish work that they love — they need to have a lot of passion and interest to get through the process. “We know it when it arrives,” Eloise says. This passion hopefully follows the book through the whole process — Eloise says that independent publishing isn’t likely to make a lot of money, but they do get attention from people who really care about the work. Larger publishers are great too, but they’re up against a lot — smaller presses can maybe take more risks. Aidan says that poetry publishing has now often moved to PoD, but Eloise says that Galley Beggar use litho printing and have books stored in a warehouse; this is a key difference between poetry and fiction. It’s good to have a number of books printed at once — better margins, and the books are readily available if they’re suddenly needed.

The best part, for Aidan, is when he receives a great new poem by someone he hadn’t heard of before (although he stresses that it’s also good to get poetry from people he does know!); he doesn’t like reading a lot of the poetry that’s out there, but he does like the poetry that gets sent to Molly Bloom.

Eloise’s favourite part of the process is watching a book come together over the editorial process — and then hopefully receiving good reviews, and awards nominations! So many of their authors have previously been rejected from bigger presses for commercial reasons, so it’s really great to see them selling well.

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Max Porter

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Max Porter is Senior Editor at Granta Books, and a novelist in his own right. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, his first novel, was published by Faber in 2015, and recently won the 2016 Dylan Thomas Prize.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max told us, is structured as a triptych; it’s split into sections for the dad, the boys, and the crow. His first reading was from a section about the dad, and then he jumped around in the book, giving us a sense of all of the different voices.

It hadn’t started out in three sections originally, but he thinks it’s great to do hybrid forms. He loves collage, and he loves the journey, moving between different forms — more than he necessarily loves what the specific forms are. It’s that journey, that hybridity that really gives his book its energy, its shape. He thinks it’s important to acknowledge the pressures on writers — and so this, too, is reflected in the book’s form. It’s fragmentary; much of it was written in emails to himself (“too stingy for Word!”) and he describes the process of finding out how to write it as “adjusting the noise level”. “Not being prose, not being poetry. That was important.”

He’d originally wanted the third main role in the book to be a character from the Odyssey, and to function as a take-down of the happiness industry, but he was obsessed with Ted Hughes, and the crow in his poetry. He saw a big crow in his garden — it landed there and barked at him, like it was an audition. And so in the book he announces himself; that he’s the crow. The crow has held a lot of symbolic weight for thousands of years — all of this adds to it. This intertextuality — both with Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and with a wider tradition through Crow — adds to the hybridity of the novel. It’s not a coincidence that Max describes the tension between the different sections and types of writing in the book as a ‘journey’ — although the book is short, there is a lot of energy there, and depth. The book sparks off against itself.

When writing, he didn’t want to share anything until it was done. He carved out some kind of space when working on it — no internet. A kind of ritual. If in doubt, he draws. He writes in a lot of sketchbooks, doodles on receipts. He’s aware of the dangers of writing under economic imperative, and when he spoke to us he didn’t currently have a new project; he doesn’t want to write just the money. Writing under contract seems frightening — he doesn’t know how to do it. He’s drawing again. Sketches and plots. There are lots of people writing books! And the reception of his first one is making him consider what he wants to do next. He might write a libretto as a way of trying to avoid second book syndrome. It wouldn’t work if he tried to force something; he needs a form/structure, a way of laying it all out that really fits with what he’s writing or he gets confused and throws it all away. But, he says — never destroy your notebooks! He says there’s a danger when writing a debut novel that it’ll be the culmination of all of your life’s work; you need to make sure you don’t use everything up.

He reads about 15 books a week for his job. But he doesn’t publish poetry for work, and so he can read poetry as a way of cleaning out his head. Working in publishing has taught him a lot about the process. But publishing doesn’t have much influence on his writing. He doesn’t think his writers at Granta related to his novel as a threat, or to do with their own work at all. And his manuscript was quite clean — the grammar and spelling were pretty tight. These are the places where the two spheres interact with each other — not with the heart of the work itself. He loved the way the book was typeset at Faber — so deft and insightful. They cared about the little things he wanted to do — very good attention to detail. It’s about the intrusion into a physical space… there needs to be a lot of white space in the book, room for readers to consider this. But there was a point where he had to stop thinking about his own book as a publisher — he had to affect a kind of naïveté, because he didn’t want to be complicit in his own publishing process as someone other than the writer.

There’s a model of writing — where plots and characters are laid out on post-its, with the writer in complete control, a kind of god of the story — that Max distrusts. He tried so hard to create a character who isn’t based on anyone; to make it vivid, he had to know everything about him. He’d speak to him, to find out if he’d be uncomfortable with something. He was tearfully upset about a scene with the boys, and they responded by putting Crow in the oven. There are things like this to do with the writing process that he used to roll his eyes at that he feels now. He’s not a god as a writer — he doesn’t like that idea.

Amy asked if he thought his book was a sign that the publishing world was becoming more accepting of hybridity. He says that he hopes so — and that he also likes to turn the tables and say that it’s 100 years since Ulysses, and it’s weird that in that tie the novel has become solidified as this thing that has so few rough edges. He doesn’t want it to be too hard to read, but he doesn’t want to be too keen to please. He likes exactitude and simplicity — like in the best children’s books. “Really, words form me.” He likes to read Louis Zukovsky and thrillers — reading wildly and without snobbery. In our contemporary algorithmic world, as he describes it, there’s this idea that people read like robots. He doesn’t like it — it’s not how people read. We shouldn’t close ourselves off; art shouldn’t exist only inside discrete categories.

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