Interview with Emilie Buchwald

June 20, 2001

Flagstaff, Arizona

"You can sing with the choir, but if you're going to be a soloist, you have to have the voice."

Emilie is the editor-in-chief of Milkweed Editions a non profit literary publishing house which sponsors a series called "World as Home" and another called "Credo." The Credo series, edited by Scott Slovic of the University of Nevada, lets nature writers speak in their own voices about issues they are passionate about. It includes pieces from Anne Zwinger, Rick Bass, Alison Hawthorn Deming and John Nichols.

Emilie was at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment meetings to hear one of her authors Jannisse Ray (author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood), and to support Milkweed's booth. She took some time out to talk to me about what she sees as important as a publisher, how she works with her writers, and what she believes are the ways in which writing changes the world.

You can access information about Milkweed Press, The World as Home, from each of these links.

 

EB: The books that Milkweed publishes, to me, should be the books in which the writing is superb, the writers have something important to say, and that make a contribution that is in some way larger than the individual.

LVG: My doctoral work is on developing a philosophy of place and Road Scholars is where I try out and see if that philosophy works. And it does. I have the most wonderful people in my program. They're willing to go to Emily Dickinson's house, sit under her oak tree and spend an afternoon arguing over what is poetry.

EB: It's ideal.

LVG: I don't make a dime. Of course it's ideal.

EB: It's like nonprofit literary publishing.

LVG: It's good and noble and I wouldn't do anything else. Part of my original plan was to link authors to the philosophy, but it's really hard to get them logistically. So my only solution has been to use the internet and interview people. So I put their words on the Road Scholars site, put the stories of the trips on them, and have people connect to each other. I've been seeking out people who spoke to the same ideas.

EB: Have you been on our "World as Home" website?

LVG: I have. Now tell me what has made you choose your focus at Milkweed?

EB: Our nonfiction focus has become "The World as Home." We publish in the areas of education, gender studies, writing, and then we published a few books about the natural world. Paul Gruchow's books. A wonderful book by Annick Smith called Homestead. I think you'd love it. It's a beautiful book.

A couple of years ago we decided that we really needed to focus our nonfiction in one area, and that's the one I happen to be passionate about. And I also think from the standpoint of our mission, which is to make a humane impact on society, I thought we could really contribute in that area. I think some of the most exciting and more exciting thinking is coming out of the people who are looking at our relationship with the natural world. We really rolled it out in 1999. So it's only been two years that it's been a program, but a lot is out.

LVG: The momentum has been enormous.

EB: If you look at the catalog you'll see we're doing Ten Years of Wild Earth. We have some very fine anthologies as well as books by individual writers. I'm excited about both of those things. The individual writers, because most of us are inspired by the words of one individual writing. But for teachers and courses, the anthologies are wonderful.

LVG: I teach an elderhostel course in Wilderness and Imagination and it was so much fun trying to sort out what would be the right readings for them. Where they were coming from, versus where my Road Scholars students were coming from are really two very different ends of life. The same ideology -

EB: Anne Zwinger, who is in her 70s, has written a wonderful Credo about what's really important to her. You should pick that one up. It's fascinating to get the perspectives of people who are young and idealistic and burning to accomplish, then people who are a little older, who have butted their heads against the system and understand the difficulties of that.

The Rick Bass Credo speaks to how do you justify what you do. He talks about practicing both art and activism in his Credo. It's called Brown Dog of the Yak. And the yak really is a metaphor. He talks about the idea that if you're a writer, you want to be writing, practicing your art, and activism is this sledge that you drag behind you, but he says it's much more important to him to save a mountain or a forest. So he goes back and forth. You really have to do both. And then there are people looking back who are looking at a lifetime's worth of work and seeing what that has meant. That is interesting in terms of what Anne Zwinger has to say.

LVG: She would be a good choice for them. I found that in teaching philosophy of place, the idea of who you are is where you are in your life's path, really resonates. Doing that with people in their 70s and 80s where we could map their lives as they told their story while someone else drew it for them -

EB: That's great. What a fascinating idea.

LVG: I've found that working with both populations are wonderful because the same things work with both. I don't know if it's true for people in the middle-

EB: I don't know. I think they're so busy doing and getting ahead and bumping against the wall. But that's what we're here to do.

LVG: I'm actually hoping to link the Elderhostel people to the younger Road Scholars ones during one of my courses in the spring.

EB: You might find that they'll link up with some terrific relationships.

LVG: Both groups are open to the other's presence. It's rare to find anyone who wants to learn on their own time. It's the uniting force for all of them.

EB: Already a self-selected group. It's really powerful.

LVG: I was thinking about what Jannisse Ray was saying last night over the idea of publishing your book is the first time you feel the power of your voice. As the person who is behind the publishing of that, how do you feel?

EB: The biggest thrill possible is to find a unique voice. Because, you know, as you start reading so many of us are bludgeoned into a conformity of writing. And every now and again you'll come across someone who is his or her own person. And to me, that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for that voice that has something to say that in a sense can't be silenced. It will find a way. Whatever I can do to help make that process work, I'm thrilled to do.

The editing process with Jannisse was so much fun. So much happened. She is very courageous. We threw out a lot of the manuscript. She had to agree to take the second half of her book and say that we're going to do something else.When I asked her what's important to her, and she said, 'Telling the story of the long leaf pine" so, we weaved that story into the personal memoir. A lot of that had to be written. A lot of the memoir was there. There was no ending to it, so I asked her to write the piece where she leaves her home and has to go to college. That's all new writing.

I also love the fact that she has such a lyric voice. I mean, she sings! I wanted to get across as much of that lyricism on the page. So there are some lovely little bravura pieces that she writes as individual essays that can be woven in. That to me is the most fun that an editor can have.

LVG: How does that process happen for you? Do you stumble across them, do they find you?

EB: We get between two and three thousand manuscripts a year. Years ago, I read it all. But thank goodness I don't now. The instruction to the readers is to send forward anything that's well written, no matter what the subject. Because the writing to us is the most important thing. So I end up with between two and three hundred manuscripts that I read. Those of us who are compulsive and voracious readers, I've read enough to be listening for the voice. Almost anything else doesn't matter because we can make it work. That's what I'm looking for. It doesn't happen, unfortunately, very often. I don't think it's because people don't have good stories to tell.

But it's more that some people have natural singing voices, or a great gift for playing the piano, and some people have the ability with words that can be developed. You can work with it, but if it isn't there, it's tough. You can work with it to an extent. You can sing with the choir, but if you're going to be a soloist, you have to have the voice.

LVG: I always tell the people that I work with that they each have a gift. Some can run a 5 minute mile and I can't. Never could, never will.

EB: Exactly

LVG: You seem to find the right songbirds in the field. There are a handfull of really radiant people and it shows through their writing.

EB: You know, a Paul Gruchow, when you hear a spirit like that, and you hear him reflecting on not only his life, which is always fun, but also the life of the communities around them - Grassroots is - oh-

LVG: My favorite.

EB: Mine, too.

LVG: "Naming What We Love" is one of the most perfect essays ever written. He says it all there and no more.

EB: Exactly. When you find someone who has that to tell, you want to get it out there and you want to make it available. That's the fun of publishing. Knowing that you can take this voice and you can make it available for others to hear, enjoy, and get something from that might last them their whole lives. Most of us, don't even know what we've been influenced by.

You start reading when you're very little and your stories are told to you and you've taken them in. You take in the philosophy that's within them and sometimes it becomes a part of you that you're not even aware of. Sometimes it's not good! It's detrimental to you and it holds you back. So when you hear things that encourage you and I mean that very literally as things that give you courage, they are spirits on the road, on the journey.

LVG: How much washes back to you?

EB: Sometimes people will say that they really enjoy our books. That's what washes back to us. And everybody who works there, we have a marvelous group of people. The people who work there care about what they do. It's very enjoyable to work together. It's a group of people who have fun together. We get a lot out of just working there every day in that environment. Of course to get wonderful reviews is great, and the awards, but having a reader come and say "I loved that book" is what we get back. You made me really happy-

LVG: I read everything and I'm a shameless buyer in used book stores. I live near New York so I frequent the Strand-

EB: Oh, I love the Strand

LVG: Well I've reached the point where I will buy anything that has Milkweed on the spine-

EB: Well, I want to make sure that there isn't a book that we put out that doesn't have something worthwhile in it. Because there's no sense just printing a book. Especially because every book is a capital investment. It's public money, we're a nonprofit, so it better be worth it.

LVG: How does Milkweed function as nonprofit publishing house?

EB: We're one of the largest. The largest, Beacon, is funded by the Unitarian church, so they have an unlimited pocket. I'd say we're the third or fourth largest. About 70 percent is from book sales and the rest from grants and contributions. So we're always looking for money. That's the hard part. We're always saying, how can we make this work? How can we keep things going? And even when you get to be a large literary nonprofit, you're always worrying about money. I hate it!

EB: For us, the question isn't are we going to publish it even if it won't sell many copies, but how can we get the money to insure that we can publish it. If you are a mission-driven literary nonprofit you're never going to have the marketing department telling you that you can't publish, because we're editorially driven. Marketing's job is to say "how can we get people to know about this book?" How do we make them interested and how do we get them to single this book out to realize that it is different from books that they thing are alike, but are not.

LVG: What do you do to get your books out? They seem to stand out.

EB: One of the things we do from the beginning is pay a lot of attention to design. That's one of the things I take a great interest in. It was my minor for my doctorate, art history, and I want the books to look beautiful on the outside and on the inside. Every type face, everything has to be congruent.

LVG: They are very distinctive. I think about the cover of Boundary Waters-

EB: Isn't it just beautiful? It starts with design. And then marketing immediately begins with an author questionnaire - tell us immediately anyone you've ever met who might be able to help us get this book out into the world. So we send out maybe 150 galleys to reviewers all over the world. Every book we publish gets reviewed. Jannisse's book has been reviewed by every major paper in the country. So it's a very conscious decision to make sure. We don't have the money for a lot of advertising so we have to focus on making sure that the books get reviewed. And then we submit them for awards. We tour some writers as inexpensively as possible.

Because they're distributed through Publisher's Group West and they are the largest independent distribution company in the country, their sales reps take the books to every store and the chains, too, although they often send them back. Some of the people run them on the local level are great book people. They're selling our books across the country, so when the reviews come out, they're in the stores. We tell our authors that their books will be out there. It's tremendously important to have placement of books. We send writers to meetings and encourage them to talk.

LVG: That's how I discovered Paul Gruchow here (ASLE meetings) two years ago-

EB: That's right! He's a gem. He ought to be a national hero. The people who make 22 million dollars for being left-handed pitchers, well you know, our sense of what's important is so skewed.

LVG: His writing resonates for the right reasons. He's saying the things you can't say because you don't have the words for it.

EB: You can feel them.

LVG: They're poets, they give voice to the human experience with the natural world or just being human. I think it's wonderful. I've been really interested in the idea of home as wilderness and wilderness as refuge. It was good to come across Jannisse who wrote about the idea of her home being her wild place and nature being a much safer place.

EB: Exactly. That's probably true for many-

LVG: Some of the writers seem to be avoiding home and going into the wild and others are looking for a home in nature. I'm interested in this field to see where it's going to go and if it's going to be explored. It keeps showing up. I think Paul's writing has a lot of that. He's so grounded in home and talking about family, the farm, and nature that you get that idea that he finds the spiritual through home.

EB: There's a little essay Rosewood County. We almost called the book Rosewood County - but we thought it would be better to stick to something simpler. One of my daughters chose to take Grassroots into the delivery room with her. Then she got much too busy to read. I thought it was fascinating that she would want that book as a companion.

LVG: As an editor, because Jannisse's book is the same, that the book is such a holistic unit and you can't separate it out into parts. That must be part of the editor's craft. How do you get to see that?

EB: That's a question I have never been able to answer because when I read a manuscript I think it's because, first of all, I'm looking for the architecture and what is the loose board, or what's the pillar that's not holding up its part of the building. Should the building be reconstructed? So the very first thing is the structure of the manuscript as a whole. And that's why I rarely take collections that are a miscellany. Because unless I can find less of a way to make it less of a miscellany and more interesting as a collection, I'd just as soon let someone else publish it. But it's first of all, thinking of and then talking with the author about what he or she was after when this was written. Why did you address this? Why did you not address this which could have come after than. It's looking at it and thinking that when it's done, it should appear seamless and this is the only way it could have been, and what could we do to make it happen.

We took a risk with Jannisse's book by interrupting the memoir. But after a while, I thought that both of these strands would weave together and people would see that the story of this life and the story of this ecosystem are the same. There are different structures for different manuscripts. Only then, after that part of it is solved and the author and I feel good about it, then you can get to the fun of line editing because (laughing) God is in the details. That's the next part. That's fun, too. It can be as short as a few months or as long as a few years in working on a manuscript.

One of the books that I am most proud that Milkweed's publishing is a book called Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, by Carol Bly. It's reading and thinking about ethics. Carol is a fiction writer and an essayist. We've published her fiction and a couple of her books about writing. Her idea, is that the social sciences, especially social work, has over the course of the 20th century uncovered techniques in social work that say how do you make better human beings. How do you spot what allows a society to become evil. She took these ideas, the most relevant ideas, and looks at them through the lens of literature. There's a chapter about the ideas. She took various ideas and then through the lens of literature and compiled an anthology. So she would analyze a poem by Donald Hall and talk about the ideas that reverberate through it. There's a wonderful chapter called "Genuine Jerks and Genuine Jerk Organizations." (laughing) She talks about evil in the herd and what happens as a result of that. It's an amazing book.

Because she had a very complex idea, it went through several drafts and it took several years until there was a final manuscript. It's such a rich book. It's used in ethics classes, and in the humanities and social studies. Her comment is that many writers, when they sit down, think that they have leave their ethics and politics behind and write about the most facile subjects - the book she wrote before that is called "Bad Government and Silly Literature" and the way that they go together. The larger book grew out of the preoccupation with that question that in a great deal of English classes, the aesthetic is what's most important, not the ethics, and so she said there's no reason why you can't have both. Don't leave those things at the door when you sit down to write.

We did a book called Transforming a Rape Culture and that's another book that's used in classes around the country. I was one of three editors who worked on that book. What we wanted to come up with was a book that was not descriptive but prescriptive of the cultural values underlying what allows for violence against women and what allows it to continue. To examine what lies underneath. It begins with where are we, what practices to think about, what are our hopes for the future. Many of the essays are literary and are by people like Louise Erdrich. There's wonderful writing in it and good thinking as well. We are a literary press, but activism is important to us, too.

LVG: It's hard to find places for interdisciplinary people to find places to put their work out. Or you're the lone person in your field. From your point of view when you have people like a Lewis Hyde or a Paul Shepard what do you do?

EB: I think it's hard because the bookstores are so category bound. Their way of thinking is pigeon holes. Sometimes, on the back of our books, we'll put two or three categories and let them choose…

LVG: What books were influential for you that shaped you?

EB: I'm a voracious reader. One of the things that helped me is that I've been a writer, I spent almost ten years teaching literature at a university. I think teaching literature was really helpful to me. It helped me to think about what's valuable enough to put between covers. What's valuable enough to put on a library shelf. So the books I was teaching, I thought, should this book be in the course? Or a book like Passage to India, which I've read so many times because I was forced to teach it. What a brilliant book. There's such insight in that writing. What always thrilled me was voice. Finding someone who you could listen to and know from a million other voices. So distinctive and people who were passionate about what they had to say. Learning how to make those distinctions as a teacher, helped me to know how to make those same distinctions as a publisher. It was a very good learning experience.