Episode 22: Kirsty Dunlop & Maria Sledmere - “Small Presses Are Infrastructure”

Join us for a cool milestone in our first-ever transatlantic episode. We interview Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, Glasgow-based post-internet poetics prophets and editors of the heroic UK online and IRL publisher SPAM Zine & Press. The origins of this convo are in ZP’s infatuation with UK pamphlet culture, where, one day, he noticed that the unit of literary-cultural production we usually refer to as a “chapbook” here in the US tends to get called something different among small press writers and publishers in the UK—not always “chapbook” but, perhaps more frequently, “pamphlet.” While the linguistic difference between “pamphlet” and “chapbook” may seem arbitrary—and maybe is in the end, but listen, some of us have an illness called Being a Poet—we can’t help noticing that along these terminological alignments there seem to also lie some real material, aesthetic, and political differences. Emotional ones, too.

For expert help straightening this all out, we consult Kirsty and Maria, who tell us about SPAM’s origins and aims as a whimsical yet rigorous transmedial platform for on/offline poetry and performance, criticism and collaboration, excitement and experimentation. Our conversation forefronts the work of editing as cultivating the social life of literature, while we gloss the symbiosis of publishing and programming, tripping over the classic DIY, nonprofit, and post-professional perils and possibilities. We also take this opportunity to think about whether the different infrastructures that support life in our countries lead to the production of different kinds of literature, if we can tell. Put another way, what do public transit and healthcare have to do with poems? Look, all we know is we could use a just little more of what they have over there, over here. And if the recent stateside boom of new presses and mags is any indicator, we’re well on our way, but it’s bound to be different. Watch this space.

A few more UK small press pamphlet purveyors we personally love, some of whom are mentioned in the ep, but some we forgot because we get nervous: Slub Press, Broken Sleep Books, If a Leaf Falls Press, VIBE. See also: Glaswegian proto-internet poet and Scotland’s first Makar, Edwin Morgan; SPAM’s Brilliant Vibrating Interface and just a few of our personal fave, SPAM, book-objects; Ludd Gang magazine and the Poets’ Hardship Fund; Glasgow cooperative bookmaking studio and independent bookseller Good Press; Mathias Svalina’s Dream Delivery Service. Oh dang, looks like we mixed up the decades of the Mimeo Revolution! Whoopsie.