Index for Continuance

a new podcast on small free culture & how to keep making it

Hello. A friend of mine, who is almost 4 years old, sometimes accuses me of “always saying hello.” Fair. I do love hello. Today I’m sharing the first two episodes of a new podcast, made with brilliant comrade Zach Peckham & the CSU Poetry Center. Both eps start with me saying “hello” in a fashion painfully typical to me such that my husband, when he first listened, got startled and thought I was behind him.

Hi, podcast. Hi, world. We thought we’d gather a series of conversations about small press publishing, living, and dreaming. An occasion to talk to people whose work we’ve long admired and relied on, and to think collectively into the challenging futures of people and books. I’m excited to share these first two conversations, with Matvei Yankelevich and Danielle Dutton. More are coming. Links & info below. If you listen, say hi?

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Index for Continuance

A podcast about small press publishing, politics, & practice. Hosted by Hilary Plum & Zach Peckham.

Index for Continuance celebrates the book as a technology for collaboration, hope, and radical engagement. We host conversations with editors, writers, publishers, critics, booksellers, and organizers involved in independent, small press, DIY, and community literary work. We hope to build an archive of grassroots knowledge that serves the future of publishing. Join us to share old and new ways to make small, free culture in a big-tech, climate-destabilized world.

Thanks to Silk Duck for the use of our theme song, “Frustration.”

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Episode 1: Matvei Yankelevich - “The New Obsolescence”

In our first episode, we talk to Matvei Yankelevich, poet, translator, critic, editor, and publisher. You may know him as a founding member of the editorial collective Ugly Duckling Presse, current publisher of Winter Editions, and editor at World Poetry Books. His recent work includes the chapbook Dead Winter from Fonograf Editions and the co-translation, with Eugene Ostashevsky, of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, from NYRB Books.

Our discussion explores Matvei’s four-part essay series, first published on Harriet in 2020: here’s part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. Along the way we discuss professionalization in the writing world, money and how small presses do and don’t get it, the struggles and beauties of collectivization, the autonomy of the small press vs. the compromises of capital, amateurism, middle age, antagonism in the market, moving forward with obsolescence.

Listen here.

Episode 2: Danielle Dutton - “Women Talking About Women Publishing Women (Mostly)”

In this episode, Hilary talks to the writer Danielle Dutton, who is co-founder, editor, and designer of Dorothy, a publishing project. Subjects include feminist structures and practices in publishing, the patriarchies of the oughts, social media, new books by Amina Cain and Giada Scodallero, the meanings of “small,” success and going on, moving the books out of your basement.

In the conversation we celebrate Danielle’s early books Attempts at a Life and SPRAWL—find all her work here, and you’ll want to read this recent story.

(We mention a profile of the writer Nell Zink that appeared in the New Yorker, and its manner of describing small presses. The profile in question is this one, but actually the New Yorker used this same move twice.)

Listen here.