Each Thursday, we turn the reins over to authors who have published a book within the last year or who have one forthcoming in the next year in order to interview one another. But, there’s a twist—they don’t know each other ahead of time. This interview took place between Peg Alford Pursell and Melissa Duclos over the course of about two weeks via a digital document that they used to ask and answer questions. As authors, they found much common ground, including publishing with small presses and their work to foster literary community. They agreed that they could have continued the discussion for many more pages. We have the privilege of reading their conversation here.

Peg Alford Pursell: Tell me about your novel, Besotted. When will it be published, and by whom? How did you find your publisher, after despairing that it wouldn’t be published– can you share the journey of its publication?

Melissa Duclos: My debut novel, Besotted, comes out in March 2019 from 7.13 Books, a Brooklyn-based small press that publishes debut literary fiction. There was a point—after I’d spent a few years submitting various drafts of the novel to over a hundred agents—that I accepted it wouldn’t be published. It was a hard realization, but I decided I was done revising: it was the best book I could write, and I had to accept that I couldn’t find an agent who thought it would sell. I wrote my essay “Breaking Up With My Book” as a way to find some closure and move on to new projects.

A couple of years later a friend encouraged me to submit it to small presses. Without much hope, I sent it out to two, and three months later it was accepted. The hard part, then, was going back to revise the novel after having set it aside for a couple of years. I got great feedback from my editor and my writing group, and I drew on my recent experience going through a divorce to get a better handle on how to portray the breakup at the heart of the novel. It’s a much stronger novel than it was two years ago, and though it took a total of 13 years between when I first started the book and when it was accepted for publication, I’m not sure I could’ve gotten here any faster.

PAP: You write that “Until my divorce, I didn’t know what it felt like to be someone else’s mistake. I finally understood that I had to break my character, so she would be able to put herself back together again.” How does your experience with the book not quite working until you yourself went through the trauma of the divorce affect your ideas about one’s ability to fully inhabit one’s character? I suppose I’m wondering if you believe you might have to live a certain experience to be able to fully bring it to life with a character on the page.

MD: I don’t believe you need to experience something before you can write about it. While I understand the old adage “write what you know,” I think there is a lot of emotional truth you can draw on as you try to inhabit a character, so it’s possible to portray their experiences without sharing them. That said, there was something missing from my character in my earlier drafts of the book. I was writing from the perspective of a woman whose relationship very abruptly ended, but I didn’t convey her grief or confusion. I didn’t know how to render her pain, or I was afraid of it. Going through a divorce (and writing about it), has enabled me to put that kind of pain on the page.

The novel I’m working on now opens with a kidnapping—something as a mother I hope never to experience. I’m nervous to write about it from the missing boy’s mother’s perspective, because I know that to get it right I’m going to have to open myself up to feeling what she does. But I know I have to do it for the sake of the story. That’s what I didn’t understand—or didn’t know how to do—when I first started Besotted.

I’m curious to hear more about your path to publication. Show Her a Flower, A Birth, A Shadow came out in September 2017 and your second book A Girl Goes Into the Forest is forthcoming in July 2019. Was there any overlap in your writing of the two books? How would you compare the experience finding a publisher for each book?

PAP: A slight correction: The first edition of Show Her a Flower came out with ELJ Editions in March 2017, sold out in July, and was given new life with a second edition in September by WTAW Press. ELJ Editions went out of business three weeks after publishing the first edition. In many ways, finding the publisher for each book—A Girl Goes Into the Forest will be published by Dzanc Books in July 2019—was similar, in that I looked for publishers I thought my books would be a good match for. Which publishers’ catalogues could I see my book fitting into? Did they share certain sensibilities or predilections? To answer those questions meant to read the publishers’ books, the kind of research I delight in doing. I also spoke to authors who’d had books come out with my publishers. How happy were they with their experiences?

I sent each book to a small, focused handful of publishers, and was fortunate to have offers to select from in each case. I was less confident that I’d made the best choice with my first book, but that’s likely to be expected. In the case of my new book, I knew immediately after talking on the phone with my publisher that I wanted to work with her. Her enthusiasm, coupled with her insightful, intelligent comments about A Girl Goes Into the Forest utterly thrilled me.

In terms of overlap into writing the books, yes, there was, just as there is overlap with two other manuscripts I’m currently working on (and have been working on for a number of years). I’m always writing; I write daily. I’m always revising. It’s what I do.

MD: I struggle in my own life to balance the time I spend writing and revising, and the time I spend cultivating a community or otherwise being engaged with the larger world of literature. You founded Why There Are Words, an award-winning literary reading series in the Bay Area in 2010 that has since spread to five other cities, so I’m sure you can relate to this need for balance. How do you manage it? Why did you found the reading series and what has it added to your life as a writer?

PAP: I do struggle to give attention to everything I need and want to—and I definitely don’t think there is any such thing as balance! Sometimes the reading series receives the bulk of my time in a day, sometimes the press, sometimes my creative work, sometimes my family. Yet, somehow I manage. I’m careful to do my own creative work first each day, regardless of how little time I might be able to give it (sometimes only twenty minutes). But I know that it’s essential to privilege it if I’m to feel good about my other lit and community-building activities. I want to enjoy those activities, not resent them for taking time away from writing. I also want to acknowledge the great interns and branch organizers of the reading series, without whom I couldn’t manage.

I began Why There Are Words when I first moved to California from across the country because I wanted to get to know writers in the area of my new home. Too, I was struggling with keeping at my writing and wanted the inspiration of observing others persist and succeed in getting their work out there. I never envisioned the series growing as it has locally, let alone branching out nationally.

Tell me about Magnify: Small Presses, Bigger. When did you start the newsletter, and what is the impetus behind starting it? What is the involvement or role of Another Read Through, and how did the collaboration (right word? partnership?) come to be?

MD: Magnify is a monthly newsletter I launched on September 15 that highlights reviews of small press books and provides a bit of an inside look at publishing with a small press. I started the the newsletter in part to promote my own novel. Beyond that, though, I wanted to find a way to highlight the wonderful writing coming out of these many presses that often go under the radar. By summarizing and linking to reviews of these books, I’m also able to highlight venues that publish reviews of small press books, which I hope will be a service to both writers and readers. Finally, I know from my experiences submitting my book to small presses that it takes a lot of time and energy. It sounds like from what you’ve said about your own process of finding your publishers, you understand what I mean. Small press catalogues each reflect a specific aesthetic, and to submit effectively, you have to do a lot of reading to make sure you’re sending your book to a press that’s a good fit. I’m hoping that the newsletter can also be a resource for writers who want to submit to small presses.

I asked Elisa Saphier, the owner of Another Read Through—an independent bookstore here in Portland—to partner with me for the newsletter because I wanted to include the perspective a book seller. I also have immense respect for the work Elisa does supporting local writers and cultivating a community around her store, and I hoped the newsletter could bring attention to that work, and encourage readers to order the books from Elisa. Her bookstore ships anywhere, and I include links to order all the books I mention from her.

As the founder and director of Why There Are Words Press I’m sure you have a lot to add about small press publishing. What was your motivation for starting the press? What has been most rewarding about it for you so far?

PAP: I’d been thinking about starting WTAW Press for a number of years, a desire that grew as I watched many extraordinarily talented colleagues and friends struggle to get their beautiful, important books published, books that deserved a readership, that would deeply affect readers’ lives. I believe that small presses are really the heroes/heroines of publishing. They’re making books available that the big five won’t because corporate publishes are necessarily focused on the bottom line. Nearly everything I read that truly affects me has been published by a small press. I took my time in founding WTAW Press, mainly because I wanted to be sure that I could do it the way I believe it should be done, fully supporting the books and the authors while operating on a shoestring budget. I spent a long time researching and talking with other publishers first, before taking the plunge.

The main rewards for me are helping authors shape their manuscripts through the editorial process to be the best that they can be; matching those manuscripts with the beautiful work of my designers; and experiencing the joy along with the authors of their books receiving awards, accolades, and attention.

Your turn! Tell me about your experience with your publisher, so far. What’s been the most exciting part of the process? The most angsty? Do you have nerves about this being your debut?

MD: My experiences so far with Leland Cheuk, the publisher of 7.13 Books, has been very positive. I knew the book needed work, and I certainly don’t shy away from revision, but at the point that I’d submitted it to Leland I didn’t really know how to fix it. Nothing in his feedback was very prescriptive, and he demonstrated a lot of trust in me to do what I thought best, but his comments helped me see the book in a new light. Once we moved into copy-editing, I felt similarly about his line edits: he trusted my writing, but saw my tendencies clearly and called attention to things that weren’t working. (For example, apparently, I never use contractions when I write! It’s not something I was aware of, but after he pointed it out I realized that my sentences sometimes sounded overly formal.)

So far, I’m not nervous about the book coming out, though I’m sure the nerves will come once I start sending galleys out. Right now, I feel proud of the work and excited to be able to share it with readers. And I’m very happy to be working with an independent press, both because I completely agree with you that that’s where most interesting and innovating fiction is being published right now, and because I’ve learned so much about the publishing process. Leland is very candid about how the business works, and what I as an author can do to promote my work; I’m grateful for the lessons and sure there will be more to come.

Can you share a bit more about your forthcoming book? I read the brief title story, “A Girl Goes Into the Forest” in Waxwing Literary Journal and was struck by the beauty of the language. For example, you write, “The moon rose. White and tiny, smeared into the fork of a naked branch overhead. Wind chattered like teeth through the trees, their trunks containing hundreds of years of memory.” Here’s a seemingly ordinary image—the moon over the trees—described in a way that stopped me short. Is this what readers can expect from the rest of the book?

PAP: Thank you for the kind words! A Girl Goes Into the Forest is a collection that includes stories of a traditional length and those that are quite short and some that blur the edge between prose and poem. The 78 stories limn the mythos of the American girl (think Tom Petty: “well she was an American girl raised on promises”), addressing archetypes of gender and culture. The title story introduces the collection, which is subsequently structured into nine parts, each introduced with a line from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.”

My editor has helped me to sharpen the language, and I’m so grateful for that: language is essential for me; the sound of what I hear is often the origin and driver for my writing. She understands the larger design of the book, with its mothers, daughters, artists, fathers, brothers, lovers, and the rich symbolic space of the forest, that place that gets you in touch with something mysterious, immense, disorienting, transcendent. With her understanding she’s helped me realize my intentions for the stories as journeys through the literal and figurative forests.

Golden Gate Bridge photo courtesy of: Jerome Dominici

Photo of the moon courtesy of: David Dibert

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Peg Alford Pursell is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 INDIES Book of the Year in Literary Fiction, and of A Girl Goes Into the Forest, forthcoming from Dzanc Books July 16, 2019. Her award-winning stories have been published in Joyland, Waxwing, Newfound, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of Why There Are Words, a national reading series, and of WTAW Press, an independent publisher of exceptional literary books. To learn more, visit: www.pegalfordpursell.com.

Melissa Duclos is the author of Besotted, forthcoming from 7.13 Books on March 13, 2019. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Bustle, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other venues, and she is the founder of Magnify: Small Presses, Bigger, a monthly newsletter celebrating small press books. She received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and lives in Portland, Ore. where she is at work on her second novel and a collection of humorous journals. Visit her at: melissa-duclos.com.