by Gardiner Brown
A couple of weeks ago, I drove out to the East Side to meet with Callie Collins and Jill Meyers, co-directors of A Strange Object press, one of Austin’s newest small, independent publishers. A Strange Object is run out of a thoughtfully-furnished one-room office, their signature red backward-slash painted on one wall, the opposite one lined with boxes of their published books, among them their upcoming collection, Our Secret Life in the Movies. As of right now, A Strange Object has two books out, both collections of short fiction: Three Scenarios In Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce and Misadventure by Nicholas Grider.
Sitting at the long, wooden table that occupies the middle of the space, Meyers, Collins, and I talked about the writing that has inspired them as editors, what drew them towards creating their own small press in Austin, and their upcoming project, an e-magazine called Covered With Fur.
Writing Barn: So what is the idea behind Covered With Fur?
Callie Collins: Covered With Fur is something we’ve been ruminating for a long time. It will be both fiction and non-fiction. And it’s a very simple design. It’s really reader-friendly. And so it will be a monthly piece of fiction and a weekly piece of non-fiction. It launches this fall, and we’re really excited about it. We’ve got a lot of different kinds of stuff. We’ve got a photo essay going up early, these kinds of micro-essays, these interviews, there’s a woman who’s writing about gems. It’s all sorts of stuff, but it’s centered around the idea of strange objects and curiosity.
WB: So, I know you aren’t taking submissions for full-length books right now, but are you taking submissions for Covered With Fur?
CC: We’re not open right now. We’ve haven’t actually ever opened up, not for book-length submissions. We’ve opened for the magazine and we’ll definitely be open for the magazine on a regular schedule. For the books, we’re talking about when that might open up and how it will happen. For now, we’re still going out to authors we have relationships with, from the magazine or through other connections, and we also have a really good group of agents sending us stuff. So we’re not totally sure when we’ll be open or on what schedule, but it’s something we’re always talking about.
WB: Did y’all grow up in Austin?
CC: I did, yeah.
Jill Meyers: I did not. I grew up in Texas, but not Austin.
WB: So how did y’all meet?
JM: We met at the literary magazine American Short Fiction years ago. I was editor, and Callie began as an intern and returned as an editorial fellow, and then stepped up to become associate editor. We worked on that magazine for a long time together.
WB: So, with that background, are you mostly looking for short fiction, or are you looking for novels, too?
JM: We are definitely looking for novel-length pieces. That’s our focus right now. Both Callie and I are really passionate about the short story and really believe in short story collections and get excited about them, and so I think A Strange Object will continue to publish those, but we’re looking to do a mix of story collections, novels, and other pieces that may be a little harder to define.
WB: I know Covered With Fur will have non-fiction, but are you looking to publish nonfiction outside of that, too?
CC: We are. We’re looking to publish book-length nonfiction at some point in the future.
WB: Alright, so you have a quote on the website that I’m really interested in: “We believe in the subtle art of subtraction. We’re pressing mute on the noise of publishing and increasing the signal and the strange.” I was wondering how you would expand on that, or what you might have been thinking when you came up with that.
JM: One thing that’s extraordinarily important for us, perhaps most important, is to put out really great books, books that we stand behind and believe in. For us, the way we see that working and are able to give the attention they deserve is to keep a very small list, and to focus on those books and focus on the writers that we’re working with. We really believe in a sort of boutique approach, a very small-press approach where we’re giving a lot of care to these books and these writers. That just means that we’ll have a small, very curated list.
WB: What are the things that have really inspired you, the things you’ve read that have inspired A Strange Object’s aesthetic?
CC: We worked together on the magazine for a long time, and there were a bunch of stories we published there that I still think of all the time. I love Susan Steinberg. She had a book that came out recently called Spectacle, and she does things with short fiction that I didn’t know could be done. She uses a lot of repetition; it’s sometimes almost chant-like. She has an incredible voice, and she’s someone I think about a lot.
JM: For me, the guiding spirit of the press, or the place where the press got its start, is Donald Barthelme. Not necessarily his stories. I’m not looking for those stories set now, but I’m looking for stories that are fiction like that, that’s incredibly humane, funny, tender, playful, and, if possible, stylistically innovative. All of those things together which he managed to do with such a light touch. I think he’s one of the spirit guides. In terms of other contemporaries, there’s a favorite writer of mine, A. L. Kennedy, who’s from Scotland, [who] I think writes brutally honest and really challenging fiction. And she can be quite funny; she’s a part-time comedian. I’m looking for an element of humor in my editing.
WB: Austin has a fairly large literary community. How have y’all felt entering that in what is a somewhat new way for you?
JM: It’s a community that’s getting larger, but I feel is very warm and open to new ideas and projects. When we were launching the press, I felt that we were embraced and the idea was embraced. It was extraordinarily welcoming.
CC: It’s just a very inclusive community.. It’s just very supportive and fervent. People care a lot.
WB: What is the small press movement for y’all, not speaking for the movement as a whole, of course, but for your part in it?
CC: I love a lot of the work that comes from the Big Five [publishers], and I think they have the resources to put out some really amazing stuff, but I think with a small press you can brand, you can kind of say that “this is what we care about.” We really like the idea of having a community who knows what we’re about and will take chances with us. I don’t think you can spot a Harper Collins book very easily, but you can spot a Tin House book fairly easily. It’s an identity that’s kind of impossible to build with bigger houses. That’s a lot of it for me, the taste-maker stuff. Being a really specific filter for readers.
JM: And I think, with that, being a champion for the writers we publish. I feel a lot of small presses play this role, and I certainly feel that A Strange Object is playing this role, of being supportive of the writer, certainly through the book, but then also for the rest of that writer’s career, really doing what you can to get that writer out in front of new audiences and expose as many people as you can to that person’s work.
You can visit A Strange Object at their website here. Their next book, Our Secret Life in the Movies by Michael McGriff and J. M. Tyree comes out this fall. Collins and Meyers say its a strange book, but a really easy one to fall into. It’s a book that could either be read as a series of flash fiction or as a fragmented novel.