Scenes: MadHat Press: An Interview with Marc Vincenz

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• ScenesMadHat Press: An Interview with Marc Vincenz

Could you briefly describe your press's history?

The late Carol Novack and I conceived MadHat Press in 2010 as a print offshoot of the online journal Mad Hatters' Review (which had been going for nearly eight years prior). The first title we signed was by the poet, novelist, and anthropologist Hugh Fox, a few months before his passing. Unfortunately, neither Hugh nor Carol ever got to see any MadHat books in print. In a bizarre and tragic turn of events, Carol also died suddenly shortly after Christmas in Hendersonville, North Carolina. In the beginning, we were unsure whether we could continue.

Some months later, the shock wave subsided. At the time I was living in Iceland, and it seemed a daunting task to work from the other side of the Atlantic with our authors and our press based in the US. As it turned out, working virtually, with fellow editors across the globe, Iceland proved to be an ideal starting point: it slipped right into the time zone between Europe and the US, but more importantly, those sprawling lunar landscapes gave us a non-gravitational view on literature, an alien eye. Without that wavering somewhere on the unknown horizon, I doubt MadHat Press would have come into being.

Hugh's poetry collection, Primate Fox, and the two chapbooks from MadHat's first and only chapbook competition (selected by the ever-effervescent C. A. Conrad) were released in early 2012. Since then, Mad-Hat Press has published over 150 titles, the latest of which are Wang Ping's The River Within; Maxine Chernoff's selected poems, Light and Clay; and Peter Johnson's collected prose poems, While the Untertaker Sleeps.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Carol's personal vision was wild, whacky, experimental, eclectic, and collaborative. We have done our best to continue her tradition, publishing work that stretches imaginative and structural boundaries. Although we [End Page 154] began predominantly as a poetry press, we have since expanded into fiction, and, more recently, criticism. Generally speaking, we lean toward passionate, lyrical, and explosive work, well crafted and somewhat cerebral. We lean toward the experimental: linguistically, sonically, imagistically; narratives that are not necessary linear; literary work that stands the test of time.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

Any reader who craves fresh, original literary works.

Insofar as getting the word out is concerned, we participate in AWP, the New Orleans Poetry Festival, the Brooklyn Book Fair, and other regional conferences and exhibitions every year, hold readings and book events as often as we can—something is going on virtually every month. We try to develop close relationships with independent bookstores, and we work very hard to get our authors' books noticed across the web and also in more high-profile review venues like American Book Review.

We spread the word through social networking, and many of our authors are very active in promoting themselves—which, of course, for a small press, is essential; nothing new here. Once again, it's a long and slow haul, but I do believe the effect is cumulative both for the author and for the press.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

Well, as you know, there are a whole slew of small presses out there publishing three to five titles a year. Some fizzle out in just a few years. Publishing, particularly small-press publishing, is extremely hard work and requires Olympic endurance, bulldog tenacity, and elephantine persistence—even more so when your focus is on groundbreaking works of art, often with limited commercial appeal. You need to be extremely flexible and creative to reach an audience, and all that takes time—years and years, in fact. I can't claim that we have even scratched the surface. As publishers go, we are very young.

There are many reputable and well-intended small-press publishers out there; however, most of them can take on only a very limited number of titles per year; furthermore, more of the larger publishing houses are shedding their more challenging literary titles. In the last few years, several...