ON (not) WORKING: A grvlnd ntrvw WITH CLEVELAND PRESS CO-FOUNDERS BRENDAN JOYCE & KEVIN LATIMER
This interview was conducted in fall of 2020 by Zach Peckham of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center; Grieveland is a project and indie press co-created by Kevin Latimer and Brendan Joyce. The title of this interview comes from its iconic file name (see image above).
Zach Pecham: Hello boys. How’s your quar?
Kevin Latimer: (laughs) I think it depends on the time of the day. I think I’ve reserved 11am to 4pm for being ok and getting work done. And 4pm to 4am for anxiety.
Brendan Joyce: Could you repeat the question? I’m sorry, I just had to switch from earbuds to speaker.
Z: Oh that’s fine. I was asking how your quarantine’s going. How ya doin?
B: It’s good. I’ve become a sort of mixed quarantiner, where I have a good enough pod that I still don’t feel super quarantined, but I do feel quarantined in terms of public space, ya know? I still see people, which is cool, like Kevin and my girlfriend and my mom, but I don’t go anywhere. Other than like the grocery store. So that’s been weird. Month 7, let’s do five more! It’ll be fun.
Z: (laughs) Yeah fuck it. Let’s make it a year.
B: Yeah fuck it!
Z: Are you guys working jobs out in the world right now?
K: No, I don’t wanna work again.
B: No.
K: I think I’m just doing Grieveland stuff and applying for school, stuff like that. No more customer service for me.
B: Yeah part of what’s weird here is we were both on unemployment all summer, which ruled, and then didn’t. So part of Grieveland is just trying to fill in that gap. But at the same time, I don’t wanna fucking go back to a restaurant job. Hell no. And if this is a way to do that, that’d be fun. I worked the Census a little bit, and then there were hate crimes, so I stopped.
Z: Wait, what?
B: A woman was assaulted in Lakewood by a white supremacist. And then people kept sicking their dogs on me. So I was like, alright, I’m just not. But yeah, no more work. Aren’t you working at a wine store?
Z: Yeah. I mean, I have my GA-ship at the Poetry Center, and then I work at this wine store like 20 hours a week. Which was a bar job when I started, with a little bit of retail, but now it’s like this high end retail job with no bar. It’s still a service job, but with no tips anymore, which feels pretty bad. I’ve discovered it’s also a job that kind of requires me to be a professional alcoholic, which isn’t really healthy for me. I already have to be careful I think. So yeah, work is shitty. I’m glad we got that out of the way.
How’s your press doing? It sounds like things were precipitated by unemployment a bit, but was it kind of gurgling around before that?
K: We have three books out, and we just announced our fourth. Jamie’s book is coming out in December, so we’ll do four books this year. I think for Brendan and I... when did we meet, Brendan?
Purchase How To Be A Good Girl from Grieveland!
B: We met a little bit more than a year ago. I think August or July of 2019.
K: Right, and when we first met we just talked about maybe doing a magazine or a journal. And then in March or April we had this idea of Grieveland, to make it a press. But we’ve been talking about it in some shape or form since we met.
Z: Is it just you two?
K: Primarily it’s me and Brendan. Angelo Maneage, who we all know, who is a friend of this podcast and the Poetry Center, is our designer. But it’s really just us two and sometimes him.
B: And Jamie obviously.
Z: I don’t want to compare it to past projects too much, but I always heard Barnhouse referred to as a collective. Do you feel like Grieveland shares that same social ideation, or is it different as a press—not that presses aren’t social things—? *cracks a seltzer*
K: It’s sort of both and neither. I always envisioned Barnhouse as this weird thing because there were twelve people involved from the outset, so we always had this idea of collective input for anything we did, which sort of just became its own big unwieldy monster. But I think for Grieveland, for me and Brendan, we are communists who are poor and unemployed, and are really focused on getting the most money in writers’ hands. Barnhouse was really just for me and my friends and the community, whereas Grieveland is for giving opportunities to writers. It’s explicitly for that purpose, whereas the other just happened to be what it was.
B: A big part of it, also, is that last year I wrote a book called Character Limit on Twitter and then released it digital only, and it sold well, which I didn’t think was possible. It created a weird situation where I had a self-published digital book that had no production costs, and folks were actually buying it. The conversation me and Kevin started having was, “how do we collectivize this”, “how do we get this model to more people”, and make it available to more people especially because traditional publishing contracts have such low royalties, understandably, since costs are so high and distribution is so expensive. We wondered, what’s another way we could do direct sales, and actually get folks in print, because we know that more people want that anyway. There is definitely an impetus to collectivize this thing. Kevin and I let our own books be the first experiments, which worked.
Purchase Character Limit from Grieveland!
Z: I’ve heard a bit about your model, that you pay your authors 80%. I’m curious about the mechanics of that, how you get authors paid, and maybe how that’s been going?
B: The model so far is working. We were just talking about it before this call, but sales have been incredible. Kevin and I have both sold at least a single print run. Kevin’s about to go into his third for Zoetrope. I also was dumb and released two books in one day, because I wanted Character Limit to go into print but I also had another full manuscript I’d been working on for the last year that I wanted to release. Numbers-wise it’s all working out. The real question is going to be on the distribution side of things, but we’re already in bookstores in Cleveland. I think we’ll slowly work through the state, then see where else we can go.
K: We do pay all of our authors 80%. And that’s 80% on cover, not net price. It’s been kind of wild because we started this back in April and sales have been really good. I think more important, though, is how many people are coming to understand the realities of the publishing industry, and seeing that there’s something better out there.
Purchase Zoetrope (in me, not disasters) from Grieveland!
Z: Before you had any sales, at the very beginning, how did you get the ball rolling? Were you paying for production out of pocket?
K+B: Yes. (laughs)
K: Brendan and I currently don’t pay ourselves unless we sell books, so a lot of it is just the labor that we put in. But I think we’re at a point now where we don’t need to do that anymore. We’re finally in a good place. It’s weird to say “finally” after only 4 months, but it’s been a long 4 months of experimenting.
B: To get back to the question of the press as a social thing, the entire life of Grieveland is inside of quarantine. We’ve been simultaneously freed up and constricted by that. There are fewer people involved, but at the same time, through social media, we can reach a lot more people and everybody—er, not everybody—but a lot of people are locked up in their houses right now and trying to figure out new cool stuff to be a part of.
K: (aside) That cool stuff is at Grieveland.com!
B: Haha. Yeah, it is. But yes, we used unemployment money to pay for that first print run. Those Trump bucks.
Z: Yes! Great. That’s what I was asking.
K: It’s kind of weird. We use 48 Hour Books in Akron. Our turnaround for books is like 4 or 5 days from proof to printing. We’re lucky in that we can get books out pretty quickly. Brendan, are you smoking on camera?
B: Am I not allowed to?
Z: I’m gonna report this.
K: If you can do that, I’ll be back.
(Kevin leaves) (laughs) (Kevin returns with cigarette)
Z: So your first 3 books were your own projects, and you’ve got this fourth one coming from Jamie. What do you envision as Grieveland’s ongoing process for getting books made by folks you don’t necessarily already know personally? Will you ever do an open reading period, for instance?
B: When we were starting Grieveland, in like May, I asked Jamie if she was interested in working on something with us. I knew she had this smaller project she was doing, and that’s grown into this book that we’re super excited about. We talked to her and Matt Mitchell, because those are some folks we knew had projects going. In the first year it’s hard, because we didn’t want to fuck up someone’s book. And we wanted the ability to experiment at first. At the same time, I do have a relationship with Jamie Hood. She’s also unemployed, and a restaurant worker in New York. I thought maybe Kevin and I could do our books first, and then hers, and then we’d figure out open reading periods, submissions, etc. There have been a lot of conversations about how submissions work and how small presses work, and I didn’t want to be like, OK, we’re gonna try this new thing now, and we don’t know how to do it yet...
K: ... so give us your money (laughs)!
B: Right, like we weren’t gonna charge a reading fee. Again, part of this project is just surviving the winter. We had to focus on that first I think.
K: Somewhere in the future, once we figure things out, we’ll have an open submission process. We’re looking for poetry primarily, but poetry means a lot of things, investigating things means a lot of things. Also we just wanna work with people we fuck with, like every other press in the history of America does. So opening submissions, yes, but also we want to give people we know a chance who maybe wouldn’t have one through traditional publishing models.
Purchase Love & Solidarity from Grieveland!
Z: To that end, I’m curious if there’s any kind of editorial thru-line or vision for the press in terms of aesthetics or content, or if it has to do with factors that are maybe more contextual to the work—not that they are necessarily separable.
K: I think we’re still developing that. It’s interesting. Brendan and I have completely different aesthetics in terms of the work we like to read, and I think that shows in our books. I’m very cautious about saying the word political, because I don’t think that’s what we’re looking for; people who survive in a capitalist society (like we all have), the things we talk about tend to be political. But I think it has to be more contextualized in the work itself. Something you know when you see it.
B: Yeah, we’re still developing what we want to put out. But there is something, and this might be fucked up to say, but I don’t want to put work out by people who are employed.
K: We won’t be putting work out by people who are white either.
B: No white people, no employed people.
K: I don’t know if you can say that.
B: Me neither, but I know those were the two things we were talking about at the beginning. Although the unemployed part is just out of practice. We don’t have work. This is a condition of mass unemployment in this country right now. As far as aesthetically, we want to maintain a huge variance between work. My work, Jamie’s work, and Kevin’s work are all incredibly different, and we love that. We don’t want to be a press that puts out five books in a year and they’re indistinguishable. That’s pretty tiresome, especially when you’re talking about writing from a range of experiences and class positions, power positions. We all might be tired of that in the literary world.
Z: I imagine the very upfront model of the press might attract work that necessarily aligns with the ethics of that model, in one way or another. My reading of Grieveland up to this point is that as an organization, there’s a pretty explicitly anti-capitalist stance to the press. I want to ask a question that’s kind of out there, that I have trouble answering myself, but I’m curious if you think there’s such a thing as an anti-capitalist aesthetic.
B: There’s an issue here that’s just an inherent contradiction. Which is that there’s no such thing as an anti-capitalist firm. If you start a press, you are the smallest unit of capitalism that can exist, but you are that basic unit. I don’t want to jump out and say, “yeah we’re this anti-capitalist model,” which a lot of folks will do, and I don’t think that can be true as long as we’re selling books. We can’t afford to not sell books. In terms of the work, I’m a communist. I write poetry that’s about that and interrogates that and tries to figure that out a little bit better, but if we’re talking about unemployed workers in the United States right now, they might want to write about, I don’t know, fucking frogs or something, and I’m down with that. I don’t need the frogs to overthrow the scorpion class in every work they produce. What I’m more interested in is getting work and money to first book writers, and getting press and recognition for them too, in a time when it’s wilder than ever to start out. Because there’s a thousand presses and they cost an insane amount of money to submit to, and you could be sitting on work for years. One thing I would also really like to do is start trying to find older writers with first books, because I think that’s another gap we could start working on.
K: Brendan and I are communists. I think that’s as much as we can say about the political alignment of the process. We’re communists who want to give people a chance to sell books, because we have to.
Z: Do you want to talk about the name, Grieveland, a little bit? I was thinking about the different connotations of grief in here, grief as in sadness or loss, and then grieve as in grievance, which implies injustice and carries an angrier emotive tone, and obviously that’s wrapped up in the rhyme with Cleveland. How does this all connect to a certain sense of place?
K: I think it’s only right that Brendan talks about this one.
B: OK, well, @grieveland was my Twitter handle for a while, and it was also the working title for a manuscript I’d been working on that got scrapped, and then appeared a bit in Character Limit in some lines. Me and Kevin are both from the near west side of Cleveland and grew up here. And right now, we’re experiencing this mass death scenario in the United States. I like the way you frame the question with the relationship between grief and grievance. I have a scrap of a poem in Love & Solidarity explicitly about that relationship: between grief and grievance, grieve. A huge part of the political context of Cleveland is obviously colonization, but then afterwards, and now, it’s this musical chairs between white flight and gentrification. To be writing about place in Cleveland is to often be writing about a place that no longer exists. That’s kind of half an idea, half an answer. But the other thing is, to politicize that remembrance is to engage in that act of grievance. Jamie Hood is not from Cleveland. We’re not only publishing writers from Cleveland. But if there’s anything, I think maybe that relationship speaks to the aesthetic we’re looking for in manuscripts going forward. That might be the thing that connects all of these works. But we’ll only figure that out by improvising.
K: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Not only in terms of an aesthetic thread, but also in terms of how we want to approach our operation as a press. I grew up in Cleveland and spent most of my life in Cleveland. Maybe this isn’t true for you, Brendan. I know, Zach, you’re from fancy Massachusetts or New Hampshire or whatever. The name is really cool because it fits us on multiple levels, from location to the types of work we’re looking for.
lol
Z: Speaking of fancy Massachusetts, when I quit my job and moved here for the NEOMFA, it was a pretty common reaction from folks to be surprised my girlfriend and I were moving to Cleveland, of all places. It was like, what? Why would you do that? I even have friends from elsewhere in the Midwest who love to shit on it, and there’s that YouTube video with the song that says Cleveland’s main export is depression, etc. All that seems to smack of some weird encoded classism and racism, and most of the shock and surprise comes from people who haven’t actually spent any time here, have maybe only heard whatever manages to make national news. Knowing Grieveland has aspirations beyond this city, alongside all the nominative connotations, what do you make of all that Cleveland shaming from elsewhere? Do you think about it much? Is it part of the press too?
K: I don’t know, Brendan, do we have any “Rust Belt Grit” in Grieveland?
B: (laughs) There’s so much historical context to why people shit on Cleveland, as a de-industrialized, majority black city. At the same time, the overcompensating response from the Cleveland business class is to rebrand everything with “Cleveland” in the name.
Z: Dude, yes! I’ve never lived anywhere where people just wear the name of their city on their shirts so much, not even with a sports team attached. Is that what that is?
B: There’s a fantastic book called Derelict Paradise by Daniel Kerr that I would suggest everybody read who lives here. It’s about homelessness and the people who have profited off it in Cleveland from 1877-2007. There’s a part in the book about the 1980s, where they’re rebranding the city in the middle of the Reagan Recession, and they’re specifically doing it to redevelop the central business district into a playground for the management class. There’s a line where they say, “in Cleveland we can make a spectacle of ourselves all summer long.” For us, as a press, I don’t really give a shit. I think not liking a place is absurd. But I guess there is some absurdity to it, because no one has an emotional response to Cleveland outside of Cleveland.
Z: Yeah it always seems like the shirts that say Cleveland are repping a very specific Cleveland.
K: Exactly.
Z: Alright, last thing. What’s next?
K: We’re talking to a few more authors about books, waiting for those to come together. In terms of Brendan and I, we’re a business now. Learning sustainable practices as we have more books come out and try to make this thing run will be the priority. We’ll go from four books to seven books in the next year. How do we manage all that with inventory and space and distribution?
B: Right, and without getting a grant or having a fellowship to back us up. Just doing it together. But also on our own. We also have the NO RSVP reading series. We’d been missing all these great Zoom readings because we’d forget to register, but there are so many great opportunities to see poets read right now, which you don’t normally get. The NO RSVP readings are static and freely available on the Grieveland site. Kevin puts them together. We have one up there now with Tom Snarsky and Fargo Tbakhi, with more forthcoming, as often as possible.
Grieveland’s RSVP is an online reading series available 24/7 at https://www.grieveland.com/
K: That’s the part of this that’s kind of beautiful. We can do whatever we want. If we have an idea it’s like yeah, maybe we can try this thing.
Brendan Joyce & Kevin Latimer are the co-organizers of Grieveland, a small press that publishes books of poetry in Cleveland, Ohio. Their fourth book, how to be a good girl by Jamie Hood, is due out in December. Find all of their books, as well as the NO RSVP reading series, on their website at grieveland.com.
Zach Peckham studies poetry in the NEOMFA and works at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.