CALYX is a nonprofit literary publisher that is
committed to publishing works of feminist, literary, social, and artistic integrity and to
keeping books in print. Founded to publish CALYX Journal in 1976, CALYX expanded in 1986
with the introduction of CALYX Books and currently has 30 books in print and has published
the work of 2,400 women artists and writers. Editorial decisions are made on the
basis of quality rather than salability. CALYX publishes work by women from many walks of
life, including women of color, older women, working-class women, young women, lesbians,
and those whose voices are underrepresented. Awards include a 1998 Pushcart Prize,
the 1996 Oregon Governor’s Arts Award, and the 1996 Bumbershoot Best Literary Journal
Award.
In 1993, Jerome Gold interviewed Margarita Donnelly, one of
the founders of CALYX for his collection of interviews, Publishing Lives. |
. . . you got involved with Calyx in '76, right?
But I also started Women's Press down in Eugene in '69. During the war. When I
became a feminist. And it's still going strong. We set it up as a collective
and when those of us who started it all petered out, it was successful and it kept going.
When you got involved with publishing, you were an activist.
You were a radical activist. And publishing was an expression of that?
Well, with Women's Press it was, yes. That was how I got into Women's Press.
And then later, when we started Calyx—that was quite a bit later. That was a
good eight years later. It was '76, so... By then I had mellowed and then what
we were about was that women weren't getting published at the rate they should be, and
that the kind of work that we like to see, we hadn't seen.
The same idea, the same purpose or mission, continues with
Calyx today?
Yeah, except it's literary. Women's Press wasn't literary. It was just a
radical newspaper.
Could you do what you're doing if you didn't get grants?
No. We never had any money. Calyx is a real miracle; we started it with no
money. Absolutely nothing. Nobody that started Calyx had any money.
There were four of us and none of us had any money. We all worked. We started
with a small grant from the Women's Resource Fund in Portland. They gave us eight
hundred dollars. We got the first issue out that way. So we had funding from
the beginning. And we've really relied on that over the years. I think it would be
very hard to start a press like we did without money. I mean ours is really
different. When you look at all the feminist presses, there's been this real
interesting, different sort of thing. We're one of the few that's collectivized,
where decisions are not made on the basis of one or two people reading everything and
deciding. We have an open collective that does the decision-making of what we
publish, and it's a very different attitude.
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So a manuscript comes in. How is it decided whether or
not to accept it?
Well, there's about eight of us reading these things, and two people have to read
everything at least once. Two of the eight. And two people read it and say yea
or nay, hold or not, on the first reading level. One person can hold. It takes
two people to return it, to say no, we don't want to consider it any further. Then,
when it gets held, everybody reads the "whole." I mean, we do it through
consensus.
How long does that take?
We're speeding it up in the journal, but it is slow. It can take six months. We're
trying to keep it at three to four for final decisions and we're averaging about four
right now. But it can take six. . . For the books it takes us a whole year. We
just lost two manuscripts this year 'cause we were too slow. We finally accepted 'em
and found out the authors had given 'em to somebody else and hadn't told us. So
we're trying to speed the books up. We hope it will never be longer than a
year. And that we can get through the first readings in the first four months of the
year.
On the author-publisher relationship.
. . . the relationship between author and publisher is set up for conflict.
It's an adversarial relationship. . . You know, our idea was not to be that
way, and we hope not to be that way, but it's a problem because authors, even the most
educated, surprise me with their naiveté. The people I would think would be the
most sophisticated, the most understanding of what it is we do for them, have a total
misunderstanding of what's involved. . . Although writers have been incredibly
generous with us. And we have pretty good relationships with most of our authors.
[What is] your long-range plan; it includes long-range goals?
Our plan was interesting because when we got into Advancement we realized how
overextended we were.
I don't know what you mean by "being in
Advancement."
NEA Advancement is a special program that twenty-five presses have been through so far. .
. it's a unique process where they provide arts consultants to help an organization grow.
. . The consultants came in and took one look at us and showed us how overextended
we were. So we consolidated. So instead of trying to get bigger, we're getting
smaller in terms of what we're doing. So our long-range plan basically is to
maintain the quality of what we do and to not try to do too many books a year, but to do
them well.
One of the things that we do is we not only publish books but we keep
them in print. Which is really rare. We're committed to keeping a book in
print as long as we can possibly sustain it economically. That's why we have to keep
looking for support. When we went through Advancement we realized that on the
journals we lose about twenty-five cents on each sale, and on the books it's somewhere
around thirty-five cents on each book. That was when we realized that there's no way
we're ever going to break even on the books we produce, 'cause we put so much into them. .
. I know there have been people who thought there was some wealth behind Calyx and
who have no comprehension that there wasn't, that there was just a lot of ingenuity, a lot
of guts, a lot of care, a tremendous amount of commitment.
Known for a commitment to nurturing
and publishing developing writers, many writers published first or early in their careers
by CALYX have become nationally recognized and acclaimed.
Visit their website at http://www.proaxis.com/~calyx/ |
