EDITOR/PUBLISHER: DANIELLE DUTTON

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life, SPRAWL (a finalist for the 2011 Believer Book Award), and Margaret the First, named a best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, Vox, Lit Hub, St. Louis Magazine, etc., and winner of a 2016 Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medal in historical fiction. She also wrote the texts for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. In 2009 she co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the backroads of Southern California, delivering books to rural desert communities. Born and raised in California, Dutton now lives in Missouri with her husband and son.

Particularly for small and independent presses, the role of editor is ambiguous, multi-faceted, diverse, often changing over time. As co-founder of Dorothy, how did you envision your role as editor? And since your 2009 launch, has the role changed?

Because the press would be mine and my husband’s, I knew being an editor in this case would mean I’d get to choose exactly those books and writers I wanted to work with and champion. That was basically the dream. I wasn’t sure it would work, and I’m regularly amazed at how well it has gone. I’m honored to be associated with every one of the books on our list.

In terms of how my role has changed over the past ten years . . . one thing is that as Marty (my husband) transitioned out of his job as Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press (where he’d worked for over a decade, and where we both still worked as Dorothy was being hatched) he began doing more of the work a publisher would do, leaving me to focus on editorial and design. But we share a lot of the duties. It’s all fairly fluid. I think in the most important ways my job hasn’t changed. Dorothy has gotten bigger (some more attention and a “backlist” to manage—though we try not to think of any books as backlist as the word seems to imply that something important is over), but in essentials we’re doing the same work we were doing in 2009 when we were starting the press in our kitchen in Illinois, only now we’re in our dining room in St. Louis. 

Actually, it occurs to me I shouldn’t speak for Marty. He’s doing a lot more now than he used to; a lot of the “burden” of our growth falls on him (the business side of the business).

As one of five publishers FLAVORWIRE lists as “changing the face of [publishing],” how do you see Dorothy within the larger publishing landscape in the United States? Do you have any interest in working with writers, editors, publishers, and/or people in publishing more broadly to effect change (i.e. the role of Amazon, the shrinking number of distributors, etc.)?

I see us as fairly outside the larger publishing landscape. We’re located in the Middle West. We’re a mom and pop shop. We’re volunteer run. We publish only two books a year. We don’t much care about sales. Well, I should clarify: we care that we do the best job we can do for each writer and book we take on, so of course we want the books to sell, because we want our writers to thrive, but financial concerns are not at all what drive our aesthetic choices. And all of this, as far as I can tell, places us on the outskirts of the larger publishing landscape. We’re publishing-landscape adjacent, maybe. Or maybe there’s a whole other landscape developing on the outskirts, a landscape of outskirtness populated by presses like Dorothy, Siglio, Deep Vellum, Wakefield, Transit Books, etc. In any case, the change we’re hoping to effect is in the work we do, in the model and aesthetics of the press itself (slow, sustainable, feminist, innovative) and in the value of the books and writers we publish and support.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, you are quoted as saying “I’m not a public activist . . . but I felt like [starting Dorothy] was a way I could address something important. I saw at Dalkey there were so many fewer books coming in by women and the list was so male-dominated. Why would a woman feel encouraged to submit? I wanted to create a space where women felt welcomed. And frankly, on a personal level, I wanted to be working and creating relationships with women. I’m drawn to the sort of transgressiveness that often seems more available to women.” Pair this with what might be the press’s mission statement: “Dorothy, a publishing project, is dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women.” In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom writes: “Our legions who have deserted represent a strand in our traditions that has always been in flight from the aesthetic: Platonic moralism and Aristotelian social science. The attack on poetry either exiles it for being destructive of social well-being or allows it sufferance if it will assume the work of social catharsis under the banners of the new multiculturalism.” Have you found Dorothy walking this line between destructiveness, social catharsis, and aesthetic exuberance?

Always we are working to find and champion books that we ourselves find cathartic, books that seem to provoke fiction or language or the world in necessary ways. Exuberance is our jam. Are we destructive? Creative destruction? If so, I suspect it’s only in as much as we represent an alternative model (i.e., slow! sustainable! feminist! innovative!) to the norm. 

In the New Yorker, Lucy Ives’ writes of your novel Margaret the First: “Dutton’s work . . . serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhaps always already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions.” Playing in the archives, teasing out the stories behind (and in) historical documents reflects in many ways the role of a publisher (in deciding to highlight particular aspects, perspectives, voices over others). As a writer in your own right, how do the two forms (publishing and writing) influence and inform each other?

It’s pretty overused, but if I were to choose one word to describe the overlap in my editing and writing impulses it would be “curatorial.” Or maybe it would be “collage”? I’ve always liked to take things that attract or puzzle me and put them in proximity—things that vary in style or history or hue but that seem to whistle louder when you put them in a pattern, or that create a pattern when you whistle them into nearness. (Now I’m kind of seeing myself as a bowerbird.) Maybe to be a reader is always to be a collector? I think it’s fair to say that I am first of all, as a writer and an editor, a reader in the world.

How did the manuscript for Event Factory first come to you? And how has your relationship with Renee Gladman evolved over the four Ravicka novels; has your editorial approach to her work changed?

In 2009 I was already an admirer of Renee’s writing when word reached me (through the grapevine) that she had an in-progress series of novels looking for a home, so I contacted her and said, basically: If you will let me publish these books I will start a press. Incredibly, she said yes. I think Renee is one of the most important writers working today. I believe in the project of her writing, which is now also the project of her drawing, and so I didn’t need to see the books before I agreed to publish the first one, and in each case (four so far) I think she’s known we would publish whatever she brought to us. Having said that, of course there’s been an editorial conversation around each book. It’s been a lot of fun working with Renee. Actually, one of my favorite stories comes from editing Event Factory. It’s been ten years, but this is what I remember: I made a list of sentences from the book in which something somehow lost me. I typed up the sentences, which in itself was a pleasing thing to do. I think I made suggestions here and there as to what I thought might “fix” my confusion, but mostly I remember typing up the sentences and sending them to her. Her response was something like: Pick any eight of these and leave them the way they are, then go ahead and do what you want to the others. I loved that. I love her relationship to language and story. There’s a singularity to Renee’s thinking-in-language, her way of moving through a sentence, and I trust that. I guess when I edit her work (and this has stayed consistent across our interactions with the Ravicka books—though I think we worked the most on Houses, which I just re-read and I have to say it is completely brilliant) I’m trying to be a good reader. I feel like my job is to let her know where a careful reader got stuck. I trust her reactions to my occasional stuckness. I don’t usually push back. 

I’m not always so light-fingered. Some of the most fun I have is when a writer and I sort of tear into things. But whatever the mode or degree of the editing, I always find it to be a weird and transformative experience.

In terms of how my relationship with Renee has changed . . . I know her a bit better. We’ve eaten together in two countries now. Last year my husband and I bought one of her drawings, and I think about her whenever I pass it. When I first contacted Renee in 2009 I’d only met her once after giving a reading at Brown, where she was a professor. I remember her in the audience nodding when I was asked why I called my writing (we were talking about my first book Attempts at a Life) fiction instead of poetry. I’d said I thought poetry already moved in so many unexpected directions, whereas it seemed to me fiction could still use some pushing against, and so it felt more exciting to say that what I wrote was a story, even if in some ways it seemed more like a poem. The very fact that people were asking why it was fiction was what excited me, I guess. And I knew from her nodding and from the work of hers I’d read that we shared some sense of what it could mean to be a fiction writer even when you didn’t know how to write fiction in the way so many people expect (don’t know how to/don’t want to). Essentially though, after ten years, I think basically I remain one of Renee’s biggest fans.