🦁 Roar Like A Lady #6 Laura Stanfill: Publisher & Diversity Champion
Talking Forest Avenue Press of Portland A Treasure Suite Of Literary Fiction
To meet inspiring women every other day is a privilege and a perk of my job as an editor here and I am, once again, honored and mesmerized by the amazing work women are doing in publishing.
Presenting to you my conversation with Publisher and official trail blazer Laura Stanfill!
1. What was at the core of your conception of Forest Avenue Press?
I really wanted to bring writers and readers together inside indie bookstores and to provide another home for quality literary work. I didn’t, back in 2012, have any idea of what I wanted to do beyond that. As a result, our mission statement has changed a few times over the years. But the core values have stayed the same, and I’ve added an important tenet I didn’t articulate back then: taking good care of our authors.
So many times, the transfer of personal work into the public sphere breaks artists’ hearts. Anything we can do as publishers to smooth that journey and be transparent about the bumps and detours will help our authors keep writing and believing in their work. And art is essential, especially in times of despair, not to mention a global pandemic. Where art meets commerce is often a pinch point in the creative process—and so my goal these days is to help my authors and those I mentor appreciate each part of the journey instead of pinning their self-worth on numbers of copies sold. That’s an imperfect way to understand what a book means. What its power is.
2. Do you believe there is something amiss in the current publishing scenario? How do you think we can begin to fix it?
There’s still so much work to be done. I heard Mira Jacob give her infamous speeches about the industry’s embedded racism in 2015—the first in a crowded New York venue where publishing professionals talked over her, and the second to a rapt audience at a PubWest conference. You can read that second speech, which is about the rude response to the first one, here. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to celebrate how far we’ve come, because it’s not enough. I’m not sure it ever will be.
I don’t know how to fix it. Talking about specific incidents, making sure newcomers to the industry are aware of the issues, and championing books written by people of color who have the lived experience to write authentic characters are all important steps everyone in publishing needs to work on. Like many others, up until recently, I used the hashtag #ownvoices to describe how I wanted novels that related to the authors’ lived experience. It’s honestly not something I knew to ask for when I first started my press but that’s become a core mandate. Earlier this year, We Need Diverse Books sent out a press release decrying how its hashtag has been co-opted by the industry, as a shortcut that minimizes individual cultural identities. So I stopped using it. Lived experience is the best I’ve come up with to use when asking authors for work that connects to their identities in a fundamental way. Sure, anyone can write a novel about characters who are different from them, because fiction allows that, but that doesn’t mean I want to publish stories that are coming from a place of othering. The best stories come from of a place of understanding and being.
I’ll add that in her debut novel, The Royal Abduls, our late author Ramiza Shamoun Koya wrote about a family self-identifying as culturally Muslim. The characters mirrored Ramiza’s lived experience as someone with a Muslim name and heritage. She, like her characters, faced racism and countless microaggressions because of her identity, even though she didn’t actively practice the religion. Ramiza’s book came out in 2020, just as she was dying of terminal cancer. Much to our frustration and surprise, even though we did our best to have our book description explain the particular kind of Muslim-ness of the characters, and even though the story is true to her lived experiences, devout readers trashed it in reviews. They didn’t like the kind of Muslim Ramiza’s characters are. Isn’t that a clarion cry for more books about Muslim characters—those practicing and those, like Ramiza’s fictional Abduls, who don’t? I wish she were still here to talk about this herself, to raise awareness and be part of this conversation. To claim space and speak with that powerful voice of hers. But we do have her book, still. I promised that to her. To keep making sure her work reaches readers.
3. Our readers are eager to discover and support small and independent press but find it difficult to navigate through it all. How do you believe we can best stand with independent publishers?
Oh, Nidhi, thank you so much for this question! Small presses can only do the work we do because of readers spending time with our books. Our titles can be harder to find than those released by New York’s few big houses, because the stories we choose to put into the world are often not on the bestseller lists or splashed around in expensive online ads. We just don’t have the budgets for those kinds of mega campaigns.
Independent booksellers and librarians are excellent guides to what’s out there; they can help you match your individual reading tastes with independent-press catalogs. Following authors on social media and seeing what they’re reading and writing can be another great way to sort through what’s available and find some favorite small presses.
As far as supporting presses, there’s a lot of emphasis on helping authors by writing reviews, but that can be exhausting after a while. It doesn’t take long before we start reaching for the same few descriptors and verbs. So if reviews aren’t your thing, share a photo or a quote from a small-press book and tag the author and publisher. Or recommend a title to a friend. Authors and publishers love to know their work is out there, being found.
4. The Main Street Writers Movement encourages writers to build genuine community on the local level, with a focus on amplifying underrepresented voices. Was there a eureka moment when you decided you wanted to host a community of fellow writers? Is there a place for participation from an international audience?
I’ve had so many eureka moments! The idea of behind Main Street came about in conversations with devastated authors and as a way to step away from the scarcity model. We shouldn’t be competing with each other; we’re all in the same situation, hoping for time that might otherwise be spent consuming faster, more visual media like movies and shows.
We should be putting out brilliant work and contributing to the cultural conversation. In 20917, my business strategist, Nikole Potulsky, encouraged me to put my thoughts into a grassroots format that anyone could adapt within their local communities. That’s where Main Street came together. As a movement, it pushes against the idea that the best work is only being done in centralized power circles, like the New York publishing hub. There are flourishing literary communities across the country; even in places that seem quiet, writers and readers can step up together to find each other and create their own literary energy. You don’t have to wait for someone else to do it. I also highly recommend reading locally as a way to understand who’s producing what kind of work in your area.
All this to say, I do think, absolutely, that there’s room for international participation. There are no requirements besides deciding you want to connect with other writers and readers and support the literary magazines, presses, and bookstores that are present in your community.
Where I’m stuck these days, during COVID times, is that while anyone can take the Main Street pledge to support their local literary scene and to shop at indie bookstores, the whole movement is built around being in person. Getting out of our individual houses and meeting up in the real world. So much of our preconceived notions and worries fall away when we’re present with other people, right? And that’s not feasible right now, at least not at the scale it was in pre-pandemic times. We’ve adapted to shopping locally online, and sharing support in other ways, but it’s also different.
5. Tell us about one book from Forest Avenue that will be the perfect introduction of the press to a new audience.
I love all of our titles so much, but I’ll share two recent ones that truly have helped me find joy during these long months of the pandemic. Joanna Rose’s second novel, A Small Crowd of Strangers, is a hefty, beautiful novel, the kind that gives me the same pleasure as dipping into books by Anne Tyler and Barbara Kingsolver. Plus there’s a dog named Bullfrog in it. Beth Kephart’s memoir in essays, Wife | Daughter | Self, has changed me as a person and helped me rewrite the idea of what a memoir can be. It’s also a great master class on the writer’s life and the process of putting a memoir together. Beth and Joanna are brilliant at the level of the sentence, too. Just brilliant.
6. Please share a new book from Forest Avenue that we can get our hands on soon.
Ari Honarvar’s debut novel, A Girl Called Rumi, just came out. Here’s a video clip of the launch at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, as filmed by CBS, where she talks about her immigration story and why she’s dedicated her life to helping refugees. Her novel is set in Iran and San Diego and it’s a wondrous tale that incorporates family dynamics, the impacts of the Iran-Iraq war, and the transformative power of storytelling. It’s been recommended by Ms. Magazine, Buzzfeed, Debutiful, and Entropy. I feel so lucky that I get to be her publisher and that our mutual friend, author Rene Denfeld, recommended Forest Avenue to Ari.
Please visit their website for purchasing your very own copies of these gems and do let me know what you think of them.