Boston Independent Activist Publishing: A History

I am going to jump back at some point soon to do a deeper dive on this other press based in the South End, but I did want to put it down here first. I'm seeing this blog as a kind of placeholder and space to draft things, though I don't want to be tedious. I want to hold myself accountable. I hear Substack can be useful for such writing, but I also hear they platform some deeply problematic and offensive material. I also had Ghost recommended to me. I worry about making people sign up for my writing, even at no cost. We'll see if I migrate over at some point. Happy to hear from folks about these options. As for the placeholder... One of the first presses that piqued my interest, after thinking about the South End Press coming out of my own neighborhood - most obviously, given that they used the neighborhood's name right in their own - was the New England Free Press . They were in a slightly earlier period, publishing pamphlets and more from 1967-1981, jumping around the...

I have lived in the South End of Boston since 2003, with one year off (2008-2009, moved to East Boston). I have lived in the same apartment since 2009.  Like every urban neighborhood, everyone has nostalgia for a past, some of it real and some of it imagined. South End has a deep history, going back to its formation in the mid-19th century, when the city filled in the South Bay to create it. (While this history may seem far back, it arises more often than you might think, as when there is a drought and locals worry about the wood pilings under their buildings drying up and getting damaged.) It has hosted a number of demographic groups, based around ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and more. There was overlap, which gets confusing to some folks. I am quite certain there were complicated politics. I could provide a history here but I will only give the biggest overview, to get us to the period that interests me so much (the 1970s and the neighborhood's political publishing scen...

I am jumping out of the South End to Watertown - Watertown?! - to start a section on Persephone Press , a lesbian-feminist collective that published books from 1976-1983, when it was sold, interestingly, to Beacon Press. (I have to wonder if my former boss and mentor Joanne Wyckoff was involved in this deal as I believe she was at Beacon Press at that time and involved in a lot of their amazing feminist publishing - not to mention famously buying paperback rights to Octavia Butler's Kindred , which is unrelated but she should get credit!). I'm interested in Persephone Press as it was a collective, like South End Press, and I'm really drawn to that model, with the full understanding that there are serious challenges with it (as one can see in the short life of this important publisher).  This press should not be mixed up with the still-thriving Persephone Books in the UK, whose beautiful newsletter I still get after i stopped into their former store-front years ago in Londo...

The way I envision doing this blog for now is focusing on different presses across different posts, which is to say that I will focus on the South End Press now but return to it in other posts, rather than covering all of it in one post. That is where I see the blog as specifically useful as a platform, rather than a book manuscript which needs more cohesion (says the book editor). This will ultimately stitch together, I hope, but I want to put things out as I research and write them up, so it may have the stops-and-starts of research; the meandering path; the return to, the course correction, the reversals? We'll see. I'm also going to feel free to include autobiography without being self-indulgent. I moved to the South End after living in Boston for a bit under two years, and I really didn't know much about the neighborhood. I knew it had a reputation for being gay, and I was moving with a male partner. I had lived in London for three years and the South End's roots i...

 I haven't blogged in many years. I kept an old blog somewhat anonymously, with a colleague, back when we were all nervous about printed books becoming obsolete. The blog ended up tracking, in real time, how that fear got tamed, as we realized that there is enough interest in books to sustain multiple formats, with some readers even moving between formats for the same text. In keeping that blog going for a couple of years, including for a year when I stepped out of publishing (because $$) and got a job that did not have enough work for me, to keep me busy, I became committed to keeping up with the industry. In addition to calming my nerves about the end of the printed book, it also strengthened my interest in and support for independent publishing.  I am using this term to mean presses that are not owned by corporate entities. Many of them are non-profit, though I do not believe that alone determines their eligibility for this category. Some are very tiny and may have short li...