Podcast
Index for Continuance
Hosted by Index for Continuance · EN
Index for Continuance is 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.”
10episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Episode 26: Roy Scranton - “Publishing at the End of the World (No New Kaiju)”
Sep 2201:01:27Tap to summarizeJoin us for a heartening discussion of Where It’s All Going and Why There’s Not A Lot of Good Reason to Believe It’s Going to Turn Out Well. Sounds like another publishing conversation, right? Close, but this one’s about the actual end of the world. Which is also publishing, turns out.Our guest is friend of the pod and beloved apocalypse harbinger Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative, whose writing you may have encountered in the novels War Porn and I Heart Oklahoma!, such nonfiction books as Learning to Die In The Anthropocene and We’re Doomed, Now What?, and various journals and magazines. This ep is occasioned by Roy’s latest book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, just out in August 2025 from Stanford University Press, which we find to be a true fount of 21st-century publishing inspo. In the book, Roy takes our magical thinking about ecological collapse and what we think we can do about it to task, questioning progress narratives and arguing for realistic responses in the tradition of Ethical Pessimism. Ethical? Pessimism? Sounds like small press publishing to us! Why make books? Why make books at the end of the world?Along the way: suffering, time, attention, hope, nihilism, antagonism, the Serenity Prayer, Mary Shelley’s dad, AI, parasites, trolls, Michael Mann, Joseph Tainter, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney of Action Books (s/o ep. 9), Matvei Yankelevich (s/o ep. 1), Charles Bukowski and Modest Mouse, crises in our national political discourse and in higher ed, publishing's carbon footprints, three adults trying to figure out what a Wojak is, and other stuff that’s decidedly not for everyone. Buckle up, doomers.
Transcribe →Episode 25: Alicia Wright - “The Ecstatic State of Making the Point”
Sep 801:21:22Tap to summarizeJoin us as we talk to literary hero and former camp counselor Alicia Wright, editor of the magazine Annulet and Annulet Editions, and author of the just-released poetry collection You’re Called by the Same Sound, out on Third Hand Books. Annulet is a vital site for new poetry, poetics, and criticism that’s structured to be inclusive, public-facing, and non-hierarchical. In this conversation we discuss the book review as a public utility, nourishing and supporting the wildness of the mind, the value of rigor and how to cultivate it outside institutional structures, valuing your time and work, telling the difference between work and fun. Alicia illuminates the editorial ethos that informs Annulet, reflects on the quiet and independent work of editing, and on forms of dialogue and particularity. Also we try to figure out which sports metaphors could actually help us. Thanks as well to the intrepid contributing editors of Annulet.Works/writers/situations mentioned include The Explicator (dad of “the annulet”), Denver Quarterly,the Language poets, Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville, Mahmoud Darwish, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, the rise of AI, and how reviews should resist being data. Check out Annulet’s Critical Circle Workshop here and the Linkages Lectures here.
Transcribe →Episode 24: Callie Garnett - “There’s a Cheerleader Inside of Me”
Jul 2501:27:56Tap to summarizeWe spend a killer ep. 24 with Callie Garnett, poet and editorial director of fiction and memoir at Bloomsbury Publishing. (FYI Callie acquired and edited Hilary’s 2025 novel State Champ.) Callie pulls back the curtain on acquisitions at a thriving mid-sized independent, sharing some actual sales points, talking comps and their pitfalls, how publishing is a business of consensus and “getting people onboard,” pitch meetings and “speak[ing] the language of the money people,” and what it’s like answering 300 emails a day. Tons of inside knowledge gets generously shared and we also dive deep on reading itself and the modes in which we are, aren’t, should, and maybe shouldn’t be doing it. We talk sales tracks and “frontloading” in fiction, grad school vs. everything else, publishing as political work, poetry in the attention economy, and the slow collapse of the institutions of the humanities.A lot gets mentioned including the great books Outlawed by Anna North, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin (published by Dorothy, check out Index for Continuance ep. 2), and A Field of Telephones by Zach Savich (published by 53rd State Press, see ep. 19). Pick up Callie’s collection Wings in Time here. The Song Cave is edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Hilary gets mad again about how few of you have read Christian TeBordo’s Toughlahoma but hey it’s never too late.
Transcribe →Episode 23: Youssef Rakha - “Genre, Freedom, and Political Despair”
Jun 1901:30:04Tap to summarizeIn this ep Hilary talks to the writer and editor Youssef Rakha, whose novel The Dissenters is just out this spring from Graywolf. The Dissenters is Youssef’s first novel to be written in English—you may know his previous The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, translated by Paul Starkey (and which Hilary edited back in the day), and The Crocodiles, translated by Robin Moger. Shoutout to those two translators. And/or his long essay on Arab porn and his book-length essay on The Mummy. We talk about the beloved bilingual English/Arabic magazine The Sultan’s Seal—archived here—which Youssef founded and edited, and how literary work might create “less transactional communities.” We dive into the new novel and Youssef’s interest in the epistolary form and narrating nonlinearly as a means to better represent history. We talk about moving between languages, the freedom of writing a novel in English without paying attention to the industry in English, Youssef’s generational beginnings as a writer “in the twilight zone between state control and neoliberalism,” his first trip to the US, and addressing Westerners amid the genocide in Gaza. Among the writers mentioned are Arwa Salih, whose work The Stillborn is available in English, translated by Samah Selim. Finally and not finally, we consider what may be hopeful about despair.Bonus: Here’s a lovely long essay on Youssef’s work in English by the writer Madeline Beach Carey, published in Full Stop. And a heads up: The Dissenters discusses suicide and so does this episode.
Transcribe →Episode 22: Kirsty Dunlop & Maria Sledmere - “Small Presses Are Infrastructure”
Mar 23, 202501:11:28Tap to summarizeJoin 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.
Transcribe →Episode 21: Sony Ton-Aimé - “Facilitating Grace”
Nov 14, 202401:42:16Tap to summarizeIn this ep we get into “arts administration”: how to do it well, why maybe it should be called something else, and what small presses can offer literary programs of all sizes. We talk with one of the best in the field, literary organizer Sony Ton-Aimé, currently executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures and formerly director of literary arts at the Chautauqua Institution. Sony talks about how programs like these reach and activate readers and shares his insight on how to build community practices and empowering conversations between readers and writers. How do you cultivate agency in your audience? How do you create meaningful events? What does it mean to be a good host? How can organizational and curatorial work help create openness, grace, and a readiness to learn and be challenged? We try to answer it all and see what small presses can teach us.A couple books get mentioned along the way, including Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum and Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us. And we highly recommend checking out some of Sony’s recent work, for example “Awe Studies: Resisting Awe” and “A Killing Two Hundred Years in the Making: On Haiti and the Narrative of Empire.”
Transcribe →Episode 20: Noor Hindi & George Abraham - “Structures for Abundance”
Nov 14, 202401:26:20Tap to summarizeIn this episode we talk with poets Noor Hindi and George Abraham about Heaven Looks Like Us, a new anthology of Palestinian poetry they co-edited, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2025. We discuss their process and priorities for this project, which began in 2020 and continues amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Noor and George share ways they’ve framed and responded to the challenges and opportunities of anthology editing, and how they’ve grappled with anthologizing’s pitfalls of reduction, representation, canonization, and exclusion. Instead Heaven Looks Like Us is offered as a fresh site of radical connection, newness, abundance, and Palestinian futurity. Under conditions of hyper-visibility, where we see atrocity unfold in real time, what is the role of the book as a technology for interacting, knowing, and imagining deeper? We talk about it, interrogating the roles of institutions and time and money, theorizing strategies for reclaiming those resources and building new structures, amid and through the work of editing. We try to understand what that work even is. Poetry expands the question.This episode opens with George and Noor reading poems by Jen Siraganian, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (translated by Fady Joudah), and Mira Mattar. The anthology’s title comes from a poem by Fargo Tbakhi. In discussion we quote a poem by Micaela Kaibni Raen. Find George’s poetry collection Birthright here, and here’s Noor’s Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. George is executive editor of the journal Mizna. We also refer to RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers) and some previous anthologies including Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women, and Hayan Charara’s Inclined to Speak.
Transcribe →Episode 19: Kate Kremer - “Impossible and Interactive: How to Publish Plays”
Sep 16, 202401:34:43Tap to summarizeWe sit down with Kate Kremer, playwright and publisher of 53rd State Press, which now also houses 3 Hole Press and Plays Inverse, making it an essential hub of independent and radical writing for performance today. We discuss how one challenge in publishing plays could be that “nobody likes to read plays,” how to think about the relationship between text and production, publishing unproduceable plays, inciting future possibilities for the impossible, and envisioning “the page as the arena in which this event is going to unfold.” We also consider the dangers of replying to email, how financial pressures on theaters affect aesthetics, learning to write grants, getting your time devoured, the aftermath of covid, and building bridges between the literary and theater worlds. Kate offers some pretty brilliant thoughts on how success might actually mean “managing a consistent relationship with failure.”Also mentioned are the playwrights, writers, and publishers Karinne Keithley Syers, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, and Tyler Crumrine. Find more of Kate’s work here and check out this ep especially if you’re wondering how one single person could run an entire press and become her own intern.
Transcribe →Episode 18: Joe Hall - “Imperialism for Writers, or Empire in the Avant-Garde”
Sep 16, 202401:36:25Tap to summarizeEver wonder what literary orgs have to do with the state? Nonprofits with the CIA? Your own poems with military operations on the other side of the planet? Of course you do. Luckily, so does Buffalo’s own poet laureate of waste collection and public transit Joe Hall, whose recent essay “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde” is a veritable syllabus on the ways arts and culture institutions serve the aims of American empire. In the essay, Joe offers an exhaustive analysis of PEN America’s response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, documents recent protest efforts such as boycotts of the PEN America Literary Awards and PEN/Heim Translation Grants, and conducts some nonprofit forensics and close-reading of PEN America’s messaging and leadership to connect their work to a broader project of American cultural imperialism. In our discussion, we reflect on the flattening effects of institutional language and the de-politicization of the arts, money and other forms of soft power, applications of the term “avant-garde,” how imperialism is a liberal concept too, and some of the ways writers can work to resist these historic political-aesthetic dynamics and collaborate with other workers to build a more liberated future.Joe’s essay covers it all (ya gotta read those footnotes) but here are some more readings for your further reading, which specifically come up in this conversation: Ohio’s investments in Israel bonds; the killings of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer and journalist Ismail al-Ghoul; Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar’s expulsion from a PEN America event in early in 2024; Juliana Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram; PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel’s 2004 essay “Smart Power” in Foreign Affairs; Fargo Tbakhi’s “Notes On Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” at Protean Magazine.
Transcribe →Episode 17: Ryan Skrabalak - “Networks of Pleasure”
Jun 10, 202401:30:39Tap to summarizeStrap in as we spelunk some of “indie” publishing’s murkiest and most nutrient-rich depths. Zach talks with Ryan Skrabalak: poet, teacher, cheesemonger, Deadhead, cool punk, and founder of the lively and exciting Spiral Editions. Spiral is a publisher of (chap)books, cassettes, a newsletter, and other pleasure-inducing printed objects and ephemera. As such, we had natural occasion to apply our focus to literature’s corporeal commitments, interrogating the imports, joys, and challenges of creating insistently-palpable pulpable culture in an increasingly disposable digital age. We meditate on editing, curation, book production and book-as-object, tracing grooves across music and lit overlaps to elaborate on forever-ideas about DIY, self-publishing, ISBNs, professionalism, adjunctification, the non-profit-to-no-profit pipeline, fun, trust, difficulty, and other social, political, and aesthetic commitments of the press. This conversation centers the historical traditions and psycho-material realities of making books and culture as an autonomous enterprise. Just don’t say micro-press.A lot of names come up in this hour-plus because (he’ll never cop to it but we’ll assert) Ryan’s a bit of a historian. So, in the spirit of this as well as that of the fast-and-loose editorial hand, we’ll leave you with a litany: Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer; The Poetry Project; Tuumba Press, Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”; Burning Deck, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop; Angel Hair; Mimeo, Letterpress, Stitches, Papers, Printers, Toner, Rubber bands; Artbooks; Phoebe Glick’s The Afters; The Aliens; Cedar Sigo, Carlos Lara, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Mohammed Zenia; Tori Kudo, Crazy Spirit; 1080 Press; Coffee Cup News.
Transcribe →