On the joy of discovery

A Publishers Weekly profile of Hagfish noted that you were building a spreadsheet of under-published women. Do you still use that document?

Naomi Huffman: We do.

Julia Ringo: I want to see how many cells we’re up to… [*scrolls on her screen*] We’ve got 124 names on there.

Is this something you share to organize thoughts and ideas?

Naomi: It’s a place to keep track of everyone that we’re learning about and also a place to record what books of each writer we’ve been able to track down, when they were originally published, and whether or not we’ve been able to get a copy and then read them. It’s a very encouraging document. Every time I open it, I’m reminded how much work there is for Hagfish to do. For a while I had this fear that there was going to be this finite amount of forgotten writers that we could draw from, but instead the opposite is proven to be true.

Do you want to talk to me a little bit more about your decision to go independent?

Naomi: My background is actually in independent publishing. I spent three years at FSG and I really enjoyed that time and I learned a lot, and I think I worked with some of the smartest people I’ll ever work with. I also found the experience to be frustrating in a lot of ways that have to do with the mechanics of publishing. Chiefly, I was very aware of how distant I was from the reader when I was working at FSG. You don’t have a lot of opportunities to interact with booksellers or readers directly. Such an important part of publishing is staying close to the reader. When you’re in independent publishing, there are so few middlemen.

Julia: I had largely been in the corporate side of publishing except for my first job, which was working for PGW, which is a distributor under the same umbrella as our current distributor now. It’s such a thrill still to email directly with our readers and with booksellers. It’s incredibly personal. The stakes are obviously so high for us now, but we also are so much more empowered. We get to make decisions about how many books we publish a year. We get to keep the list exactly as small as we want, to try and avoid the burnout that plagues publishing at every level. We get to decide what our books look like and how to manage marketing and publicity in our own time. That’s all quite intoxicating. It’s hard to imagine now going back to a life where I don’t have that level of say over my time.

Naomi: Another thing that I now find very satisfying is feeling like I have more control over the economy of the press. We’re making more informed decisions about how to publish books and how to get them in the hands of people that we know will like them than I think we were able to do at FSG. I didn’t always know what we were devoting to each book and how much money we needed to make from each book to continue the act of publishing them. Through a lot of trial and error, Julia and I are getting a pretty solid grasp on the economy of each of our books, and the economy of our project overall. Especially in an age where the real value of books and literature is in question, I find it to be a really soothing exercise or a soothing way to think about books.

How much of your job is creative versus business-minded? Do you find that there’s overlap between the two?

Julia: We’re learning a lot about the business as we go, trying to take a lot of lessons from our mistakes and our successes, and also ask a lot of advice from people who know more than we do. There are also pieces that directly incorporate what you could call both creativity and business or marketing. I’ve always liked writing cover copy or writing our tip sheets for our distributors in our sales meetings. That has to involve our sense of how and where the book will sell, in addition to the pleasures of writing a short description of a book that means a lot to us.

Naomi: Julia and I both tend to be pretty moderate when it comes to risk-taking, especially since it’s our own money tied up in this project. Neither of us is very reckless. We have pretty sharp money instincts. The business stuff that’s been difficult for us is literally starting the business. What do you need to report to the state? What do you need to report to the city? How do you pay taxes? It’s the bureaucratic aspects that I feel most daunted by. Owning your own business, the admin work is sometimes mind-numbing and we do a good job of each of us balancing it.

How do you protect yourself emotionally when you have a different stake in the projects that you’re working on?

Naomi: I definitely feel more emotionally invested in the work that we do now than I’ve ever done at any other part in my career. When you are investing in it financially and with all of your time—until very recently, Julia and I were both keeping all of the books that we published in our own living space—it’s a difficult thing to protect. The thing that I war with the most is protecting my own writing time.

Julia: I always felt a lot of a strong duty to the writers that I worked with at FSG, and those relationships were very meaningful to me. The level of responsibility is much higher now. Not to position ourselves as the sole saviors of these writers, but we take really seriously our opportunity to work with their writing and do what we can for them. It does weigh on us. The mechanics of the publishing world are such that there’s often a sort of narrow window of time for a release to grab readers’ attention. In many ways, we want to work against that. We want to push past that brief release window when everyone gets excited and instead build a longevity for these writers and for these books. That takes a really sustained effort. It’s not just up through pub day; we’re making a really long commitment to these writers.

As anyone who runs a small business can probably attest, it’s easy for the work to bleed into your other hours and it can be challenging to find that separation. It’s being a little bit disciplined about your hours and trying to create some boundaries with writers or with yourself, and deciding when you need to step away from the computer and your email. Naomi and I try to respect each other’s time by messaging through the Google chat function rather than texting. We try to keep that as the signal that this is a work communication and we’ll get to it when we’re prepared to.

How do you nurture your curiosity?

Julia: I feel like it’s what keeps us moving forward: that excitement that sparks when you read a name you haven’t encountered before, and start to read about a book that sounds like exactly what we’re looking for. There’s that sense of discovery for many editors, even if they’re reading through submissions coming from agents, but the additional layer of a distance of time helps these encounters feel especially loaded, especially thrilling.

Naomi: I feel so grateful to get to do what we do, to get to own our own project in the first place, and to get to pursue work through that project that is so interesting and compelling to us. To get to work and print in this time feels super special and super rare. I’m always excited about it. If anything, I feel like I drive my partner crazy talking about it all the time. I think about it when I’m going to sleep; I think about it when I wake up. But it’s for the most part such a lovely thing to be thinking about all the time.

I feel like young people are lacking that element of curiosity in their life. It’s something that we’re losing because everything is so accessible to us now.

Naomi: The very existence and popularity of AI supports exactly what you’re saying. I have a very big distrust of the internet—or at least, I have a big distrust of information that is easily available, and I think everyone should. It’s very healthy to have that distrust. It feels so satisfying to find something out on your own after much effort, that maybe no one else is looking for. That’s such a piece of what’s satisfying about the work that we do.

Julia: And there’s so much out there. There are things that are not on the internet. There are things that are not saved, but they can still be found. They can still be discovered, recovered. Maybe that’s a certain sense of hope or optimism that comes from an earlier generation or more pre-internet, preserved from that time.

Naomi: Julia and I are also two people who are very allergic to social media, which I think has also corrupted people’s ideas of the real value of research and the real value of finding things out on your own. Social media is constantly trying to tell you that the most popular and loud and attention-seeking person or thing or idea is the best thing you can experience—or at least is the most important thing to experience simply because everyone else is paying attention to it also. That’s just another thing that we reject and that Hagfish rejects outright. Not to sound too pleased with ourselves! It’s very fun to do this kind of work and really insist on our own taste and to trust that as well.

It seems like people are trying to inure themselves from a discomfort that is a natural part of life. You can’t avoid that forever. And if you do, then what’s the point?

Naomi: I’ve been thinking about that a lot. A lot of what I find very worthwhile are pursuits that are full of friction. Whether that’s the way that you live in a city, or the way that you work with your coworker, or the way that you choose to build your taste, I think friction is really important. This notion that everything is supposed to get more and more convenient simply because it can is really poisonous to the development of taste and the work of making art. I find that very, very frustrating.

In terms of developing your own taste—especially your taste in books, but also in all forms of art—how did that come about for both of you?

Julia: When you read a lot of things you don’t like, you follow your instincts to what you do. You have to risk embarrassment as well. You have to risk liking something that other people don’t like and standing up for that, and figuring out what draws you to it… In terms of how my own taste formed, when I was young, I thought that any book that was really long was worth reading. I thought that those books were the most important and that was mostly what I sought out—and the classics, things that had this imprimatur of time-tested importance. Then I took a class on modernism and post-modernism and read Don DeLillo for the first time. That was my realization that something published slightly more recently could also be really profound. More recently, working in publishing shaped my taste in terms of the places that I worked. First working at that distributor, I found myself reading across a wide swath of the various small presses that the distributor was working with at the time, which was an amazing education and introduced me to a lot of presses that I hadn’t been familiar with before. It hadn’t really occurred to me before: to seek out a publisher as I would a record label.

Naomi: I count myself really lucky that before I worked at an independent press, I worked at an alt-weekly in Chicago and was the literary editor there. The very philosophy behind an alt-weekly is to cover news that is not mainstream and is hyper-local, and also has a liberal political bent, and [is about] seeing the world or the city through a very artistic lens. That job really informed the way that I thought about literature in Chicago and literary events in Chicago. That perspective was useful when I started working at the indies in Chicago. I definitely worked with people who saw themselves as working against the rest of the publishing industry. I think when you leave New York, it’s really easy to feel that way. A lot of our discussions at the small presses that I worked at were about what Chicago literature was, what the history of Chicago literature was, and then, more broadly, what made a Midwestern book, what made a Midwestern author.

My taste has been built largely on the satisfaction in finding something that speaks directly to you, then the chance to tell everyone else about this great thing that you discovered and loved. That always felt like the real pleasure of reading to me. I read in isolation a lot as a kid. I didn’t have parents who read. The province of reading, the isolation of it, has always been really appealing to me as a very personal act and as an act of personal discovery.

I had the very, very fortunate opportunity to work with a music critic, Jessica Hopper, when I was in my mid-20s. We were publishing a book of her music criticism, and this was at Featherproof Books. Jessica taught me, “This is what a feminist lens is.” Jessica is also a self-taught feminist scholar. She didn’t go to college and has really managed a career in music criticism since she was 15 years old. Becoming her friend and reading all of her work and working with her to produce a couple of books, I’ve been so grateful for that experience and for her friendship. She’s on our advisory board at Hagfish actually, so it really feels like our working relationship has come full circle.

Julia: I love what Naomi was saying about the privacy of reading, but there’s also this way it can be a communal activity, and you can talk with your friends or the other readers you connect with in real life after you finish reading. Or you force them to read the book too, and then you can both talk about it and continue to shape your ideas about it. Those readers, like Jessica, can be in your mind as you’re reading something and you can start to think, “How would she react to this? I can’t wait to hear how she’d react to this.” Reading can be part of this ongoing conversation between the people who are meaningful or influential in your life.