Super 100th Spectacular!
Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the University of Minnesota Press podcast. We are celebrating our one hundredth podcast episode and as it happens we are doing this in the year of the University of Minnesota Press's centennial, its one hundredth year of existence. We were founded in 1925 and yes we are twice as old as Saturday Night Live and just as old as The New Yorker and The Great Gatsby, and this episode contains a mishmash of chitchats with colleagues to look back and look forward. I'm Maggie, producer of this podcast and digital marketing manager here, and I've been with the University of Minnesota Press for seventeen years. I'm very excited for you to meet some of the voices behind the press and the amazing work that we do.
Maggie:While none of my colleagues here have been here for like the full one hundred years, between us we've got far more than one hundred years of combined experience. To quote the wise Merve Emre, who incidentally appeared on this podcast episode 45, this quote is from her podcast, anniversaries are a good time to talk about continuity and change. I started at the press in 02/2008 when social media was starting to be taken seriously as like a business tool. And in my first year, I created our presences on Twitter and Facebook, we started out with zero followers as one does. And in order to gain followers, I started following presses that I admire and the people in places that those presses were following just ch ch ch.
Maggie:Inevitably, one of those followees was a literary blogger at the time who wrote a blog post that said how cool it was that the University of Minnesota Press was following them, that there's this cool symbiosis that this new social media allows, and that was the beauty of those early days on those platforms. Of course, I also considered that to them, the University of Minnesota Press is following, are they wondering who's behind the screen, maybe not so much picturing this young, curious marketer with little experience and no power, but hey, like those were good times. There was some speculation that the social media thing might be the new hand selling. And while it gets hard over time to imagine hand selling to like an audience of thousands in the same way, I still think about that when we consider new platforms to engage with, like how might we talk with audiences in a different way here and think about how while the ways we do this work are in a state of continual change, the basic premises in some ways have endured and will continue to. So now I'm going to open it up to my colleagues here, talk about an early office or career memory.
Maggie:Maybe it was your first day on the job, maybe it was your first decade on the job. What was the office culture like? Or what was something memorable you did in your first year? That sort of thing.
Pieter:Yeah, my name is Pieter Martin. I'm a senior acquisitions editor here at the press. I have been at the press since September 1998, which means I guess I'm going on my twenty seventh year. I've been at the press longer than I was alive when I first got hired, I guess, which is sort of disturbing to think about, but there you are. Yeah.
Pieter:I mean, I gosh. I'm trying to remember when I first got interviewed at the press, I remember I interviewed very, very clearly. I was interviewed by Doug, of course, the current director, and then the the previous regional trade editor, Todd Oriola, and then the several humanities editors ago, Will Murphy. And I was really excited to get into book publishing. I had pretty romantic ideas about it.
Pieter:I remember Doug saying that, you know, we're kind of like librarians and I'm like, I don't wanna be a librarian, I wanna be a book publishing. You know, I remember being, you know, asked, you know, what books I had read. I was what a couple of years out of college, not terribly well read, but I remember I love Larry Millett's Lost Twin Cities. And I remember that was like, among whatever else I was able to pitch to them. I think that was sort of something that probably must have stood out with him.
Pieter:Yeah. I mean, gosh, the early office culture. I mean, I just remember there was so much paper. Our lives were in the sense that our lives now are centrally tied to Slack. Our lives back then were centrally tied to the copier, and then all the paper we were putting in a mailboxes.
Pieter:And so it was a kind of analog world. We had red folders with copy in it. We had letters coming in the mail. Right? There's lots of things in the mail, including formal book submissions, authors sending art.
Pieter:It's kind of remarkable to think back to those days in the way in which so much of what we used to do is now strictly digital, including how we kind of communicate with each other. As an editorial assistant, one of the great rituals which felt like it went back to the nineteenth century was stamping manuscripts. So whenever manuscripts went down the hall, which meant handed over from the acquisition department to production and copy editing, the editorial assistant sat in the copy room and and just stamped a manuscript. And sometimes that was like 700 pages long stamping, stamping, stamping. All the art and, you know, the art was in the back and the text and every page was stamped.
Pieter:So it was like this little machine that would rotate one, two, three, four each time went up and down. And that was the final version that would go out. And copies of it, of course, would have the stamping number on each page. And of course, the stamper is still in our kitchen, which I think is really exciting.
Mike:Yes, the stamper. Okay, my name is Mike Stoffel. I started here at the press also in 'ninety eight, just a couple of months after Pieter. In fact, I distinctly remember applying for Pieter's job and not getting an interview. And instead I came in a couple months later for an editorial assistant position.
Mike:It was the last time I wore a suit to the office and, no, actually we did once for sort of a prank day many, many years later.
Pieter:I'll just add on real quick that after I interviewed, I was, you know, just a button down shirt and slacks. And Todd, after I got hired, Todd told me like, you know, you really should have worn a suit to the interview.
Mike:Oh, well, see. Yeah. So, you know, I wore a suit and, I remember, interviewing with the production manager, Amy Unger at the time and Laura, who was still at the press. Everybody in the production department, I got to meet them all and I sat down and I took the grueling editing test. I think I got the job partially because I had taken the editing classes that the university offers, but also because I had a psychology background as an undergraduate, so I could speak MMPI, which is something that we publish.
Mike:In the early days, I remember those manuscripts. They were stamped for page numbers, and that was the master copy. Everything was done to that copy. It was sent off to the copy editor, who in most cases would hand edit. And then that manuscript would then go to a typesetter after it was edited, and the typesetter would flow in the text and then make all of the changes that the copy editor made.
Mike:Typesetting was very expensive back in those days. And then when it got to the proofreading stage, you didn't just read through looking for mistakes, you had the manuscript and you had the proofs and you had to read them against each other to see that all of the words were there and all of the changes were made properly. And it was grueling. One of the first things I did at the press was to proofread. And the first thing I had to proofread was the tables for a MMPI book.
Mike:And it was only numbers. It was mind numbing. And it took me weeks. Just, I was like, I'd be looking at it and finally, like my brain, I could tell it had stopped working. I had to do something else so I could get it to work again, probably go make some copies at that monumental copy machine that we used.
Mike:But what else do I remember about those early days? I remember the camaraderie. There was a real fun culture. People had been there a while, popping in and out of each other's offices. Some of my best friends I met at the press and are still my best friends.
Mike:Yeah, I mean, I kind of miss those days. Those are my early memories.
Emily:I'm Emily Hamilton. I have been working at the University of Minnesota Press for twenty four years, last week, I think. I'm the associate director and marketing director. I started at the press being hired as an exhibit assistant, exhibits and marketing assistant as many people do. It's been a stepping off place for a lot of people who've been at the press.
Emily:I was interviewed by Kathryn Grimes, who was a great mentor to me and a wonderful person. When she would interview people, she would give them what she called the fuck test. She would work something into a question or a description that called for the f word and then see what people did just to make sure that they had the constitution for book publishing and all the things that might happen that might elicit a a swearing spree. Some of my earliest memories, one, you know, worldwide, one more publishing specific. I remember distinctly within, you know, a couple of months of starting, we were, like, starting to understand what online meant.
Emily:I remember this literally coming out of my mouth as we were talking about Amazon.com that it seemed like we should just make it another retail account because it's probably not gonna stick around that long. Same with last words from me. The year that I started the press was also the year that we experienced the nine eleven terrorist attack. And when that started happening that morning, there were no TVs, there was no streaming or live coverage of anything, of course. So we went up to the building office a couple of floors up and watched on this tiny little television what was going in disbelief, of course.
Emily:I would echo those early days of the press were so much fun. There was just a lot of camaraderie. And as Mike has said, I've made some of my best friends working there. Oh, and I'll say that too, within not long after I started, a distinct memory is making a huge mistake and, having to drive the exhibit booth all the way to Chicago because of a shipping error. And, yeah, those were the days when something like that seemed not only plausible, but necessary to haul six exhibit cases all the way to Chicago.
Heather:Hi, I'm Heather Skinner. I am the Publicity Director here at the press and I started way back in February. So I guess I'm what, eleven ish months away from twenty years, which just seems sort of unfathomable. But it's been great. It's been a great almost twenty years.
Heather:Gosh, one of my first memories. So my path to the press, I used to work for a new age publisher prior to my time here. The kinds of books that I worked on there were much, much, much different than what the press publishes. A former colleague of mine, Ann Wren, told me about this position being available. And at the time I had been gone from that publisher and I was working in actually television for about six months, which was the worst job move I think I ever made in my life.
Heather:Terrible. So I was quick to wanting to get out of television. And I remember my interview process being unlike any other that I think we've put any publicist since through. Or no, maybe we have. But anyway, I had to write a pitch, like, there on the spot.
Heather:I had like ten minutes. I was given just a random book from the press, was able to read the jacket copy and then was told to write a pitch. And then I had to pitch it to Emily. I had to pitch it to Doug. And that was probably the most nerve wracking part of the interview was actually meeting with Doug and having to pitch a book to him.
Heather:But I must have done okay because I got the job. Just the kind of the biggest seismic shift was to go from working for a new age publisher to working on content that I actually can relate to and that I feel like really excited and proud to promote. I get to, you know, pitch the New York Times and pitch major daily newspapers, and it's a lot more fun to write pitches for our books. I love our authors. We have so many varied voices, and it's just fun to be in this world and to have been this, at this press for as long as I have been.
Heather:Part of the thing that was also a big change was, you know, I never had to actually do media calls before. And so my first time ever going to New York and pitching the New York Times book review editor, the first book that I had to pitch was about male ejaculation. And I was never so mortified than to have to pitch that book to the New York Times book review editor. And I think I was red from, like, all you could see of my skin all the way up.
Mike:I remember that book well. I had to edit it and, I'm glad I didn't have to deal with anybody about it.
Pieter:That takes the Kathryn Grimes F word to a whole new level.
Emily:Even the transmittal meeting for that book was mortifying.
Heather:But I mean, overall, like everybody else has said, I think my earliest memories of the culture here too, is just that there have been so many people even when I joined that had been there so long. And you could tell that it was just really a place that people love to be. They love their coworkers. They love the work that they were doing. That obviously comes with these challenges all the time, but you power through and your work environment and the love of the work that keeps you coming back.
Rachel:Hi, I'm Rachel Moeller. I am the assistant production and design manager and art director here. Started just a year after Heather, so February. So I just celebrated eighteen years at the press and it's been the bulk of my publishing work life. I did work for just about six months at a legal publisher in town just before this job.
Rachel:And that was quite a culture shift coming from an office of between 11,000 people and sort of all of the bustling that that entailed. I I recall at that job for Thanksgiving, they gave everyone a free turkey. And so you would just, like, drive up in this, like, loop and, open your trunks, and they would throw a frozen turkey in your trunk. Was very strange but appreciated at that point in my life. And then starting at the press and having an office of about 30 at that point, the biggest difference I recall was just how quiet it was that the week I came in for my interview was right before the holidays.
Rachel:I think there were like seven people working at that point. The office was so quiet. And after I got hired as the production assistant, I did what I could to change that as much as possible. So I have a loud voice. I laugh very loudly.
Rachel:I like to have a good time at work while I'm working hard. In our old office, my cube was on basically the other side of the office as our director. And a couple years after I started, Doug told me, it just kind of in passing, he could tell when I was out for the day because he couldn't hear me laughing. And I was a little bit mortified and a little bit proud at the same time. Lots of great memories from early on.
Rachel:I took the production assistant job after Mike had it. So lots of great training from Mike. I don't know if he'll remember this, but my partner's name is also Mike. And one of my early passwords as Mike was training me was I like Mike. And then he had to like help me log in.
Rachel:And I'm like, well, it's not it's not you. It's it's my Mike. It's not you, Mike. And I
Mike:I remember. I
Rachel:turned like 18 shades of red. It was very embarrassing. Old password. Don't use that anymore. So lots of fun.
Rachel:I recall one of my early, nemesis was the box room. So Pieter talked a lot about how our life was really directed by the amount of paper we were moving And that was really kind of all we, not all we did, that was a lot of what we did in production. Everything was hard copy at that point. So all of the proofs we were getting from printers, I think at that point we were even ordering, Library of Congress information via actual paper. And then we were shipping proofs around.
Rachel:We were shipping manuscripts to copy editors, we were shipping them to proofreaders, we were shipping them to typesetters, to indexers and we would invariably end up with piles and piles of boxes. In this room that was just kind of off the beaten path in the office, I swear I would see people walk by and just pitch boxes in there sort of randomly without any, you know, idea of what was happening and it would become a bit of a fire hazard. Part of the production assistant's job was to manage the box room and I got so frustrated at one point that we came up with box room rules of etiquette about how people should and should not use the box room. I recall too after cleaning out the box room, we found like film from a book that had been printed like twenty years prior, very, you know, valuable film and there were all sorts of things that we unearthed. Talking about big mistakes, one of the earliest, big mistakes I made is sort of related to the paper theme.
Rachel:This was when we were copy editing everything on paper. I was supposed to make a copy and send the copy to the translator to review the copy editing and I was supposed to keep the original because that's the only copy that we had of that, of all of that copy edit work. And I forgot, got distracted, didn't make a copy, sent the original copy edited manuscript out to the translator who was already upset with production over his cover design. He lived in France and refused to return the copy editing until we changed his cover. So held it hostage and would not return the only version that we had of that copy editing until we changed his cover and design.
Rachel:So that was a big mistake on my part. Never did that again. Good learning opportunity for me. But I will say that now that we are in the digital world almost exclusively, I'm thankful that those kinds of mistakes are no longer.
Erik A.:Hi, I'm Erik Anderson. I'm a senior acquisitions editor. I started in marketing. So I started one year after Rachel, January of two thousand and eight. There was a kind of a January hiring pattern clearly.
Erik A.:And Emily interviewed me. Heather, maybe you sat in on some of the conversations too, if I recall. I too remember the silence. That was probably my first memory. My job before this had been doing outdoor education with kids at an aquarium and it was chaos all the time.
Erik A.:There were thousands of kids running around. Your coworkers were always coming into your office and they'd just been stung by jellyfish or like, Timmy's in the tide pool, or trying to wedge myself into my office chair to send an email wearing a penguin outfit or something like that. So it was just constant noise. And I remember getting to the office and it was the quietest library I'd ever been in. I remember doing things like shooting rubber bands over the wall of my cube into just random other cubes to see if I could get a response from people who I knew were okay getting hit by rubber bands.
Erik A.:One of my first tasks, I think, I was an exhibits coordinator. And one of the first things that came up was we were designing swag for that year's BEA, and it was for Dana Nelson's Bad for Democracy. And we were coming up with buttons and it was about how the presidency is bad for America. Interesting book. And I remember getting to kind of brainstorm these buttons that we were gonna print thousands of and coming up with phrases like, Hail no to the chief and Air Force none, I think was another one, or like president.
Erik A.:And then realizing that the year before the BEA swag for Anwar Machine's book on heresy was literally boxes of matches that we were shipping everywhere. So I was like, okay, these are my people. They might be quiet at work, which is good, but this is a playful, fun group. And so I really loved that. I remember the years of being an exhibits coordinator as spreadsheets and fear.
Erik A.:It was great, but it was like, what books aren't going to arrive? What book did I forget to get on the spreadsheet? And then the author's going to be mad. Will the posters arrive in time? It was just a whirl of spreadsheets and anxiety, but it was really, really fun.
Erik A.:I think my first day on the job, the very first phone call I got back in the days where people would just call you, though I still do that, felt like kind of being baptized into regional publishing. It was Bill Holm on the phone, just randomly calling because he was in desperate need of a copy of the new Spinoza because he was heading to the desert with Jim Harrison to eat hot peppers. And so I just remember having to navigate getting a copy of, as he said, the new Spinoza to him down in his little town before he left for hot pepper eating. So that kind of felt like a little bit of like a regional publishing blessing for the first day. Yeah, I too remember lots of paper.
Erik A.:I remember bubble wrap everywhere. I remember those gray cases trying desperately to fit everything in and not forget anything. I remember hours upon hours in the book rooms in the basement and getting stuck in freight elevators and waiting for the big shipping trucks to arrive on time to hopefully get the stuff out. Just a very analog experience, which was yeah, a lot of fun and a great way to learn industry really.
Maggie:Thanks everybody. So our particular place of work is unique because we get a whole batch of new people to work with all the time, which is kind of amazing. So yeah, was just thinking about like our connections to authors and to the other people we work with. This podcast sometimes can be like a mini book party for authors, you know, if we're inviting someone they know or someone they want to meet to talk about their book. And sometimes that's the first time they've talked about their book and it hits them like, oh, all these decades of research or whatever, this accumulation of all this work is now coming to something.
Maggie:And it can get kind of emotional and it can get to be a really kind of amazing experience. So I thought I would just see if we want to talk about any kind of like very rewarding experiences with authors or any rewards we see seeing something we've worked on. Like we get to see a physical accumulation of work.
Pieter:Yeah, I mean, oh, it's absolutely a incredibly rewarding part of our job seeing the physical book. Acquisitions is kind of funny in a way. I mean, I guess it's true for all of us though, because we're always working out a year, at least a year ahead, right, in terms of the projects. And so when the printed book arrives from the printer, Rachel or another production person drops it on my desk, I'm like, oh, wait. I'd almost forgotten about the book in a way because we're trying to find new manuscripts or trying to get manuscripts to deliver we can publish them again in a year.
Pieter:So there's always that funny quality. It's funny temporal kind of like where we are in space and time, I guess, not to get overly metaphysical. Projects just can vary so much. When we get the physical book and we kind of look back at the amount of work that went into that particular volume, it can vary from a book that was incredibly smooth and easy to acquire. And you kind of barely had to touch it in a way.
Pieter:I mean, because the author really knew what they're doing and they're a good writer and the reports were really favorable, that kind of thing to the opposite side of the spectrum where the book took twenty years. Wait, what do I have here? I literally sent that contract out maybe my third year as an editorial assistant at the press. That is twenty four years in the making at the very least. I mean, at least in terms of my involvement with it.
Pieter:This is the Scenic Route building Minnesota's North Shore by Arnold Alanen and magisterial, long time coming and a very exciting book that has been in my personal orbit as an editor for fourteen years, I wanna say. I wanna say I met with Arne in 2010 in Madison. Think one particular aspect of working in at least on the scholarly side of book publishing is when a book first comes out, there's kind of what the front list attention it gets. But with scholarly books, what's really rewarding I think is the ones that turn into perennials. I always call them, they're kind of like time release capsules.
Pieter:They sort of get slowly absorbed into the kind of bloodstream of intellectual thought. And then they just kind of continue to sell on and on and on. And of course, I've been working here long enough where there's certain books that just continue to sell ten or fifteen years after we've published them. Being here as long as I have and everyone else on this podcast, it's really rewarding to see those books that continue to be engaged with, continue to be taught and continue to kind of inform new generations of scholars work. And it's maybe a little bit different than how other publishers or trade publishers might operate.
Mike:In production, Pieter was talking about, you know, there's this long tail that leads up to delivering the book to production. Production is actually kind of lucky because we have a beginning and we have an end. And then marketing will, of course, has no end. I'm remembering some of the books that I really enjoyed working on. I'm a bit of a sci fi fantasy horror nerd, and we have books that touch on that.
Mike:You know, we do this Godzilla novel, and I'm a big consumer of horror novels and that sort of thing. And we have books like that, and they are so much fun to work on. But one thing I particularly enjoy is been able to sort of touch on the work of Flexible My Heroes. We publish the memoir autobiography of Samuel R. Delaney, Jr.
Mike:I got to work on that very closely, and I got to correspond with him, which was something I was aware of him when I was 12 years old. He was this base on Mount Rushmore, quite frankly, for me. And here I was writing to him and getting responses, which was great. Other books that I really enjoyed working on are like the ones that like really take off unexpectedly. I edited Fred Moten's book for us.
Mike:That book is really important and he's a big deal. I read him in the New York Times now and again. Or Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects. I worked on that one. And that also very important book.
Mike:You don't see these things coming. Maybe in acquisitions you do, but in production, it's just like, here comes some more words to start grounding them through the machine. But I take pride in having worked on those things and with those people.
Emily:Yeah. You know, marketing is somewhat unique in that we see everything and we work with every author that comes through the press. Each person in the department has a different role to play in bringing that particular author and book to readers. One of the things that I think is remarkable and it's been really rewarding and probably one of the main reasons I'm still doing this where I am is just the incredible diversity that the press publishes, whether it's topics or approaches or fields or literature or even types of books, like how they're published. We've done so many different types of experimental formats.
Emily:That's been exciting. It just continues to be exciting. You know, it's just impossible to get bored when you're constantly learning new things and meeting new people who are interesting and committed and passionate about what they're doing. I would say another aspect to it that's really special for me is when we've been able to work with authors as their career developed and really be a part of a long standing relationship where we can watch that person's work circulate in the world for a long, long time and see their career change, their writing change. One of the authors that comes to mind is Linda LeGarde Grover, who we've been publishing for many years for fiction and non creative nonfiction.
Emily:We really started off with, as these things often do, with a project that had some momentum or accolades behind it, we really didn't know what she would do next or how thing you know, how things would develop. And here we are. I don't I don't even know how many years later, maybe fifteen years later, you know, with many books and just wonderful experiences. Witnessing the longevity of what we do, you know, especially in the culture today where things just move super, super fast to see how long and how prescient some of the books have been and how influential over the years in the discourse of culture on many different levels is so rewarding. It's a special part of being a part of something for so long and sticking to the idea of the importance and value in bringing innovative new ideas and voices into the public sphere.
Emily:It is kind of like the big picture of how we show up on the rough days.
Heather:Yeah. Kind of like what Emily said, the work that we do is cyclical. Like the books are always coming, it never stops, but every book is unique and different. Part of what's enjoyable for me is when our authors get to the point where they're starting the marketing process, there's just sort of this renewed sense of excitement about like, Oh my gosh, my book is really a real thing almost. And they get excited again and they have lots of ideas.
Heather:For me as the publicity director and person in charge of lots of launch events, that's where I get to see a lot of that enthusiasm just come to reality. We've had some pretty amazing launch events over the years and they can be everything from a quieter bookstore event to something pretty grandiose at First Ave for RT Rybak's memoir. It's always a lot of fun and you can just see the author's just sort of appreciation for that moment. They're able to hold the book in their hands and sign their name in the book during the signing. I'm trying to think like Jessie Diggins, you know, during the time of the pandemic and we had to shift events to virtual, she was just a pro and able to run with it and ended up doing a workout with attendees, during her launch event.
Heather:So you got to work out with a pro Olympic athlete. All of these things have sort of come together in different ways, but it's kind of fun to see that final level of excitement, but really it's just the beginning and we keep building the excitement from there. For me, my goal is always to try to match the book to its perfect reader. As a publicist, I'm combing through author questionnaires and talking with authors and writing pitches and, essentially becoming like a cheerleader, for lack of a better term, for these books. You know, there's so many books out there, so many authors, and to sort of make yourself seen and heard in the media scape is no easy thing to do, but I still love doing it.
Heather:And when you finally do get that big hit that comes through, it's so rewarding and you're just so excited to share it with your author. For every 10 no's or no responses you get. And you might get that one or two, you know, big hit. And then it just kind of renews that excitement and like the reasoning why you're doing it. And because you're like, I know somebody's going to read that review.
Heather:I know somebody's going to see this. They're going to be excited about this book. They're gonna buy it. They're gonna talk about our author. It's just such a fulfilling line of work.
Erik A.:Yeah, I think echoing everybody else, it's almost kind of hard to answer something like this because it's such a windfall of memories and experiences and meanings. And I know early on books really felt like books and they've kind of stopped feeling like books to me and almost more like these weird artifacts that come from just really human work and connection and people's lives. There happens to be this physical entity that comes with it, but the work just ends up kind of becoming bigger than the artifact in a weird way, which I know is maybe weird, but that's from the working process. I just have so many memories. I guess the ones that I find myself just coming to really quickly are the ones that were hard, but hard and really edifying and changing ways, like personally changing ways.
Erik A.:I think about all the days walking down the street to Dudley Riggs' condo to sit at his table and edit with him. I remember his book starts with his memories of he used to be a high wire act kid, like at four years old, he would be hundreds of feet up in the air. I remember he and his wife Pauline boss lived on the Tenth Floor. Of a condo and I remember he and I walking out onto the balcony I forget how old Dudley was then early 90s, and you know walking with a cane and we were sitting staring over this precipice. I remember him being like, I could still get up on this railing and balance if I wanted to.
Erik A.:And I was like, Dudley, I was like, I believe you. He meant it. He didn't do it, but he meant it. So I just have a lot of cherished memories there. I remember for months and months and months on end, every Tuesday driving south to Bruce Kramer's condo to work with him and Cathy Wurzer on his book about ALS.
Erik A.:And then every Thursday of the same week driving north to Lino Lakes to sit with Zeke Caligiuri and work on his memoir. I just remember the kind of emotional gauntlet, but also gift of those two narratives for months and months and months on end being a part of those conversations. And you almost forget a book is involved at that point because you're just being so changed on a personal level. I mean, I remember what felt like my first big risk was taking on the Vidar Sundstol translations.
Erik A.:And then just thinking of all the great memories with Vidar of sitting with Emily and Heather after an event eating bone marrow at Surly, or I remember like being in the middle of a downpour on an off ramp outside Chicago during Heartland Fall Forum where someone had rear ended me and Veeder. And so we're standing in the pouring rain off of 55, trying to comfort this young woman who's just so afraid and we're like, it's fine. And I just remember just thinking how bizarre it was to be sitting in the downpour with Veeder or standing with Jay Weiner and working on the initial edits for Hy Berman's book at his hospital bed on the university or sitting in Cornbread Harris's kitchen with Andrea Swensson and listening to him play piano while we talked about the book. Looking over Bea
Erik A.:Ojakangas's shoulder and copying her French bread recipe in her kitchen, north of Duluth. It's an unending litany of memories that make me so grateful for this work. I forget that a book is even involved sometimes. And then sometimes I forget a book is involved by choice, but I kid, not really.
Rachel:Well, I'm not sure I want to go after Erik. Sort of wax poetic about all the lovely experiences that he has had with his authors and books over the years. I've been able to experience just a little bit of that with him and that's been amazing and kind of what I dreamed about when I entered the publishing profession. Of course, as everyone has said, you know, we've all been here long enough that we've worked on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books. And it can sort of start to feel a bit like an assembly line after a while, even though we're giving each project our attention in the moment.
Rachel:It just, they all sort of run together. And so like trying to pick out particular books over the years, as everyone has been talking has proven to be a challenge for me. So I'll say first of all, as a production person, my favorite books are those books that are on time. That's like sort of the thing that's always in the back of my head as I'm working on projects I have, I'm surrounded by calendars. I want books to look really good but I also want books to be on time and so marketing can take them and run and have fun as they sort of go out into the world.
Rachel:When I've had a particularly challenging schedule and I'm able to meet it, that feels very gratifying to me. Those are memories that definitely stick in my head. Possibly a controversial opinion, I actually really like working with first time authors. They're so involved in every point of the process. Often they're also the most gracious and the most excited about every point in the production process.
Rachel:The excitement, it's infectious. It reminds me of why the work we do is so important. I actually also enjoy complicated production books. They can definitely cause me lots of headaches, but working at the University of Minnesota Press has allowed me the opportunity, because it isn't a giant publisher, to really be on the ground and learn how to solve these problems through various cover design issues or layout printing. I've gone on photo shoots, just I've definitely like learned on the job here.
Rachel:And that has just been amazing and invaluable experience that I can't imagine getting at a lot of other places. And so really working on complicated books for the first time and figuring them out and problem solving them, those have a special place in my memory. And then just looking forward, we have started an initiative to make a lot of our ebooks accessible. How we're taking that sort of looking forward and looking for new audiences and looking to make our books available to as many people as possible. At every point along the way, we are always looking forward and we're finding ways to innovate and to be at the forefront of our field.
Rachel:And so that's just really exciting to be a part of and to be able to be a leader in as we get to later points in our career and using all the knowledge and experience that we've acquired over the years and taking that and channeling that together is just really, really exciting.
Emily:Hear, hear, Rachel. That's really wonderfully said.
Maggie:At this point in the conversation, I'd like to take a moment to thank and to welcome someone who is in fact the first person to appear on this very podcast, episode number one. Welcome.
Jason:My name is Jason Wiedemann, and I'm editorial director at the University of Minnesota Press. I have been at the press for twenty plus years. I don't recall off the top of my head exactly how many years it has been, so I just say twenty plus at this point. I am one of many press staff members who began as a student worker at the press. I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota in the late 90s, living in Minneapolis, studying English and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota.
Jason:And at the time, I was working for the Minnesota Daily, which is our campus newspaper. And I was working in the classifieds department, which doesn't even exist anymore. And my job was to take classified ads and, place them in the in the student newspaper. At the time, journalism was undergoing a radical transformation. And my career goals at the time were to work in arts journalism in particular.
Jason:And I realized that those kinds of jobs were going to be fewer and fewer as the years go on. At about that time, a really good friend of mine who is also an undergraduate had started a job as a student worker at the University of Minnesota Press. He actually pitched the position to me. It paid a little bit better than other campus jobs, and it had very flexible hours, which for a student is very, very important. I started working at the press at a point in my life where I was just starting to pay attention to the spines of books.
Jason:Who was publishing the books that were changing my perspective as a student, opening up the world to new ideas? And I began to realize that there were a group of publishers called university presses that were doing some of the most adventurous and most interesting publishing out there in the world. At the time, I was taking an undergraduate English class, and we were assigned Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory, second edition. And it kind of blew me away to discover that the university press at my home campus had published this book. That's really where I started to pay attention and really understanding how essential university presses were to publish adventurous translations, new works of theory, to publish challenging and controversial topics.
Jason:My first role as a student worker was in the marketing department. I did a lot of filing of clippings and sales reports and publicity information. What impressed me right away was the overwhelming ethos regarding the important work that we were publishing. Certainly, were conversations about sales potential, but most of the conversations we had were about the book and how deserving it was for publication. That it wasn't just about focusing on income and sales potential, but more about does this book deserve to be published?
Jason:Does this book need to be out in the world? When I graduated from the university and could no longer, you know, officially be called a student worker, I basically begged folks to keep me on in some capacity. I didn't want to leave. I worked at the front desk
Jason:for a long time
Jason:where I answered the phone. I ordered supplies and did the mail every day. I did eventually, end up leaving, the press at that time, and I worked for a commercial publisher in London for a brief period. I found the conversations at a commercial press to be really focused on, you know, income and dollars coming in the door and what books or journals should we focus on that will give us the most sales impact? I wanted to get back to nonprofit publishing, to conversations that were about the ideas, the author, the impact on readers, and not just the impact of books on a press's bottom line.
Jason:So after my short stint in commercial publishing in The United Kingdom, I moved back to Minnesota. You know, I was a temp worker at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, and I was scheduling refinances. And I hated it. It was so awful. And I remember, like, I didn't have a car.
Jason:I was biking to work and, like, someone stole my bike seat. So I had to bike to work without a seat. Like, I was so poor. And then I saw Robin in Uptown.
Maggie:Quick producer interjection. Robin was a digital projects manager and IT manager at the University of Minnesota Press for about fifteen years up until around 02/2012.
Jason:She's like an editorial assistant just put in her notice today. She's like, you should apply. And then I applied. I was an editorial assistant for several years before becoming an associate editor, where I split my time between assisting and acquiring to becoming a full time editor, and then a senior acquisitions editor. And finally, about ten years ago, becoming editorial director of the press.
Jason:I do remember the first book that I acquired, Kathleen and Christopher, and it was a collection of letters that Christopher Isherwood wrote to his mom, Kathleen. And since then, I've gone on to acquire in cinema media studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, urban studies, native and indigenous studies. Some of the most rewarding experiences I've had have been within native and indigenous studies. I'm a white resident of the state of Minnesota and grew up with a particular history of the state and how it came to be and the role of Indigenous peoples both in the past and in the present of the state. And acquiring in that area has been incredibly rewarding for me.
Jason:The press enjoys a very, very strong reputation in Native and Indigenous studies, both in terms of scholarship that we publish, but also in terms of the regional books that contribute to a deeper, more holistic, more accurate representation of what the history of our state has been and the role that native people have played in this state and its history. I feel a great sense of responsibility and trust when a native writer entrusts their words to me as an editor. We have an enormous responsibility as a press, even more so in 2025 and beyond, to seek out diverse voices, to seek out underrepresented voices, and to give those voices a space. Over the years, I have had native studies authors teach me surfing, rescue me from potential tsunami warnings, garden with me, and have me hold and and babysit their kids, from time to time.
Maggie:Yeah. Well, I've always appreciated your willingness to just kind of dive in and be curious about and be a critical thinker of new platforms and emerging platforms. I mentioned you were the first person to be on this podcast. You also I remember an early interview you did with Paul Chaat Smith in the office, and we recorded it and put it out on YouTube, and that was one of the first times we did something like that. You've always kind of embraced ways of communicating and storytelling, I think.
Jason:In some ways, I was just sort of following a general sense of adventurousness at the press. I've always been encouraged as an editor here to explore nontraditional avenues for finding authors and book projects, to expand, my networks through untraditional ways, to seek out authors not just from academic spaces, but from non academic spaces as well, from activist contexts or professional contexts. I found social media to be an amazing tool. I've had great success back in the day with using Twitter as a tool to seek out new authors writing on particular topics. But a lot of what I was doing, I think, was following the press's sort of general sense.
Jason:We've always been a press that looks not just to a core academic audience for our books, but seeks to find, you know, interested smart readers who are beyond the academy. The press has always, I think, been a leader in drawing on new technologies like podcasting, you know, like Twitter and Instagram to promote our books to a very broad audience.
Maggie:Well, you very much, Jason, again from podcast episode one and podcast episode 100, and hopefully many more to come. Next up, we will hear from two people in charge of the press one hundredth committee.
Eric L.:Hello, audio land. I'm really happy to be here with my colleague and good friend, Laura Westland. Laura, so glad to have the opportunity to speak with you today.
Laura:Eric, I'm so glad to be here.
Eric L.:We are here today kind of in our capacity as co chairs of the Centennial Planning Committee at the press. It's great to have the opportunity to work together on this project. We don't always get to work together. So that's really cool. I'm really glad to have that chance.
Laura:Yeah, and it's exciting to look through a hundred years of history at the press and just see how we've changed the vast array of what we've published and the many, many interesting people who've been involved with the press and to put it together to celebrate one hundred years.
Eric L.:Yeah, absolutely. So I thought maybe we could start talking a little bit about who we are and what our roles are at the So I'm Eric Lundgren. I'm the outreach and development manager at the press. My position, I think, is not one that necessarily every university press has. One of my primary responsibilities is raising revenue for our mission.
Eric L.:We're a nonprofit press. We're always aiming to break even. But, you know, a lot of our a lot of our books don't make money. Sometimes they have a lot of special features like color printing or for doing translation that that can get very expensive. I write grants.
Eric L.:I work on fundraising campaigns. I work with our authors to get someventions from their universities to help us publish the books as best we can and to keep our prices reasonable. That's important to a lot of people here to keep them accessible. And then in recent years too, I've been working on a lot of open access projects. We have this wonderful platform, Manifold, which allows for enhanced digital publication of scholarly monographs and allows for video, multimedia, maps, all kinds of digital enhancements to the books.
Eric L.:In addition to that, I work on some translation grants. We work with Norway, with with France, Japan are just a few examples of the translation programs that we work with. It keeps it interesting. Right? And Laura is the managing editor and has been the long time managing editor, I should say, of the press.
Eric L.:Laura, could you just tell us a little bit about what a managing editor does or what you do as a managing editor?
Laura:Sure. I have been the managing editor at the press for twenty seven years, so you are right. It is a long time that I've been in this position. I work primarily with our freelance copy editors. I also work with the authors in the writing and the editing of the manuscripts, and I work with many of my colleagues here in reviewing new projects, making plans for the books.
Laura:And, I work with the schedules of our books, which is indeed a very creative job. I tend to focus on the, what we call the trade and regional books. So more for a general audience. Our regional books can include anything from Minnesota history to, North Shore guidebooks, to cookbooks, to memoir to fiction to poetry, our local authors. That's usually how we divide it up.
Laura:But Mike and I work closely together. I will often work on the architectural history and art history books. He's a big fan of Godzilla and some of our game studies projects. We go back and forth, but that's primarily scholarly and trade and regional is how we divide it up. Well, and Eric, I'm especially grateful for the grants that you received for translation projects.
Laura:The press has always had such a strong program. We were one of the leading English translators of French literary theory for so many years with our prominent series, The Theory and, History of Literature. And we continue now to do translations of Scandinavian, contemporary Scandinavian literature, and we've translated Japanese literature. And it's really an exciting and very consistent part of our program at the press. But these books do not often sell extremely well.
Laura:So it's great to have the subsidies to make them available to people. So we always cheer when you bring in the subsidies for our translations. Thank you.
Eric L.:Thanks, Laura. I appreciate that. And I remember when I first came to the press, like one day I was walking down the street and I saw 12 elegant French women smoking cigarettes out on the steps in front of the office. And I was like, man, this place is cool. This is this is really the stuff here.
Eric L.:You know? We were having coffee the other day, and you shared the story with me of how you first came to the press, which is actually connected to translations.
Laura:Many, many people often aspire to work publishing, and there are often far fewer jobs in publishing than the people who would like to work in them. And I always emphasize to people, it can be very serendipitous how you find your publishing job. And it certainly was that way for me. I had just finished a, graduate degree, a master's in Spanish, aspiring to be a translator. And, I was in Minneapolis and I contacted the University of Minnesota Press to see if there were any opportunities for freelance editing, and my call coincided with a very large, bilingual anthology of Spanish poetry, and the managing editor of the press at that time did not have any copy editors who knew Spanish.
Laura:So my call literally came in at the exact right time, and I started freelance copy editing work for the press with that project. And that eventually led to my becoming the in house copyeditor at the press, and then a few years later, the managing editor. My Spanish translation skills brought me to the press, and I had no idea I would then stay for thirty years. The great thing about the press is how much we have changed in that time. It's really been very dynamic.
Laura:Work here has frequently changed so much both in how we work and what we publish.
Eric L.:Absolutely. My case is a bit unique in that I've worked two separate stints at the press. Pretty much out of college, I was working at a Borders bookshop. I was processing remainder books at Borders and saw a posting for the press. And I did two years at the press working as the general office assistant.
Eric L.:I worked at the front desk and answered the phone and sorted the mail and made sure we had paper. Went down to the basement every day, that was kind of my favorite part. I would get to go down to the basement and I'd take the mail down there. We had this old Pitney Bowes mail processing machine and I would run everything through there. But that was all done in the archives, which at that time were stored in the basement of the press offices.
Eric L.:While I was sorting the mail, I would kind of, you know, sometimes poke around and look at some of the old books or open up one of the files. This was now about twenty years ago, 02/2001 to 02/2003, I think was my first stint at the press. And then I went on to pursue an MFA in fiction, ended up publishing a book called The Facades with Overlook Press in 2013, and worked at libraries for about a decade, most of that time at the St. Louis Public Library, and then came back to Minneapolis in 2018. And like literally the day after I came back, there was another job posting at the University of Minnesota Press for an outreach and development manager.
Eric L.:It seemed kind of faded, so I went ahead and applied again. And the director, Doug Armato, is the same from back in 02/2001. In addition to that, a lot of the core staff, editorial staff, contracts and permissions manager, several people in production. The staff was very familiar to me when I came back fifteen years later, which is kind of remarkable. There is that dynamism, but then there's also a continuity in terms of the people and the relationships within the press.
Laura:Yeah, the stability on our staff is remarkable. It also makes it so wonderful to work together. We've done so many books together. We know how to adapt to new kinds of publishing. These long term professional relationships are so beneficial.
Laura:And, many of us really love what we're doing. We are very passionate about the books we publish and the skills we're using in our career, and it's wonderful to work in this environment. You know, Eric, you're a writer, you've been a librarian, you bring all this interesting background in other areas of bookwork to the press, as do so many of the staff, which makes this a really interesting place to work.
Eric L.:Yeah, absolutely. I do think that really says something about how people feel about the press, that they're staying for twenty five, thirty years. That continuity in a way that allows us to kind of take the chances and do edgy projects where we're you know, that are not firmly in our wheelhouse, you know, that are kind of pushing the boundaries. And and not this press has always had that kind of innovative spirit to it. Talk about change.
Eric L.:I mean, you have seen a lot of change since you started. I mean, the press was not even in its current building when you started working. It sounded kind of bleak.
Laura:Right, we were originally in a very old building on the edge of campus where the, stadium, the new stadium now stands. We have definitely upgraded our facilities at the Barrel House. Eric, when you were talking about your first position at the press, you mentioned that you had to make sure that we had paper. I will frequently not see paper until I'm holding a final printed book. You know, we don't have paper manuscripts anymore.
Laura:We edit electronically. We review the proofs electronically. Technology has definitely changed how we work and what we publish by publishing ebooks and the work on manifold that we do. And that certainly enhanced our sudden dramatic work from home change in March 2020, we were able to do that because we were able to work electronically all in our own workplaces instead of together at the press. When I started at the press thirty years ago, we were especially renowned for our theory, critical theory, literary theory.
Laura:We really were cutting edge in that way. And we also had strong programs in many academic areas, which we continue to do, but we've expanded those in a way that makes sense for the press. When we take on a new area, it has connections to what we already published. So these transitions and expansions of our list are very smooth and logical. We're keeping the identity of the press as we move into art history and architectural history, native and indigenous studies.
Laura:These all have connections to previous programs in which we've published. Often, our books are very interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary. As we've started series and sunsetted series, kind of closed them out, and started new series, it still all makes sense with the areas in which the University of Minnesota Press publishes. And a huge difference for me is how we've expanded our regional program. We do so many more books now that are for general readers, local readers.
Laura:When I first started, it would be a little hard to be able to recommend to book groups what you could read from our list, and now I can come up with very long lists of excellent press books for non academic book clubs. We really have reached out to a much broader audience, as well as maintaining our very solid scholarly base.
Eric L.:Well, for sure. I went over to, there was a launch event for Andrea Swensson's book, Deeper Blues, with legendary Minneapolis Jazz Musician, Cornbread Harris. I took my parents. They had Jimmy Jam, who's Cornbread's son. The two of them were basically reconciled through the writing of this book after, you know, being somewhat estranged for several years and seeing the two of them on stage together with Andrea at this event.
Eric L.:And feeling that you're a part of this organization that is helping to facilitate something like this is just such a heartwarming feeling. I mean, just one of the best events I've ever gone to, period. Seeing that as part of your work and feeling like you're part of that in some way is incredible. I think we've conveyed a sense of what's joyful and what keeps us in our work at the press. Do you have any projects that you especially loved working on or a moment that you're especially proud of?
Laura:Sure. One project that really stands out is the book Home, which was a collection of photographs by Minneapolis Photographer Tom Arndt. Tom came to the press with a big box of photographs that he'd taken, and he wanted to make a book. And this is part of the publishing work that I really love is everything that goes into making a book project, coming up with a great title. Tom had all these great photographs, but what do we do with them?
Laura:What kind of text does the book have? We had an excellent forward and an afterward. We had Tom comment about anecdotes, really fascinating, interesting anecdotes involved in the taking of some of these pictures. The timing was extremely serendipitous in that the Minneapolis Institute of Arts had an exhibition of Tom's photographs at the same time as the book came out. Usually the timing does not work that well.
Laura:But this also was a very special personal project for me. Tom has been a photographer here in the Twin Cities for over forty years. So a lot of his photographs from the '60s and the '70s were of the Minneapolis I remembered growing up. It was wonderful to see these photographs of Pennippin Avenue with the car dealerships and Lake Street, you know, with all the adult movie theaters, you know, this is a different time than it is now. And it was wonderful to see my memories through his photographs.
Laura:So that's a very special project for me. Eric, what about you?
Eric L.:Well, I should say, you know, I'm happy whenever we get a grant. I feel like I'm making a contribution. It makes me feel good. Or, you know, I also work on scholarly book awards as another part of my job. When an author requests nomination for an award, we put it out there and that comes back for them, I feel really good, like I've delivered something for the author.
Eric L.:So that makes me really happy too. But the one project that I'm especially proud of didn't bring in any money for our press. It was really a moment when we kind of gave some content away, and this was a very stressful time in Minneapolis history, which was in 2020 after George Floyd's murder. You know, the city was literally on fire, I think, at the time that I sort of had a sleepless night, you know, essentially drunk dialed the senior management of the press the next day, having not slept and wrote a rambling email suggesting this idea for an open access book collection on racial justice issues that eventually became the Reading for Racial Justice Project. This was a collection of ultimately about 30 books that we put on our manifold platform.
Eric L.:We made them open access, it was for a limited time, but it was that entire summer after George Floyd was murdered here in Minneapolis. For the staff who worked on that, I mean, I should say too, there was just a really reaffirming moment in terms of how quickly, it was like within a week we pretty much had this ready to go and we had permission from the twenty, twenty five authors that were initially in that collection. Our manifold specialist Terence put all those projects up. We had people in marketing publicity who were, how are we gonna frame this and stage this? And ultimately, I I think, you know, for so many of the authors that participated as well that allowed us to use their content and put it out there to help people understand that moment.
Eric L.:It was a project where we really responded to an urgent crisis in a powerful way.
Laura:It was a time when we all wanted to do something, we didn't know what to do, and there was a need to make relevant reading material available to people. People wanted it, they needed it, and we had it, and we connected with our audience. It was fabulous to be a part of that.
Eric L.:Yeah, yeah, definitely. So now we are coming up to our one hundredth year of publishing. We've been around since 1925, founded by the Regents of the University in, summer of nineteen twenty five. Our first director, Margaret Harding, one of the very first female press directors in the country. So a real legacy there, including five directors over that span of a hundred years and countless people who have really given their heart and their creativity and their intellect and have brought all those skills to this place and contributed over the time.
Eric L.:It feels really lucky to be part of this. I certainly feel a sense of responsibility to those predecessors or ancestors who had set all this up and brought us to this place.
Laura:I agree. I mean, the press has had such a strong foundation. Some of the essential books of Minnesota history, Theodore Blegen's History of Minnesota, Thomas Sadler Roberts, Histories of Minnesota. These are foundational, books of Minnesota history and natural history. The press stayed relevant throughout a century of very significant change.
Laura:We change along with that. And that has kept us a very crucial publisher for the state, for our country, and even internationally in what we work with.
Eric L.:Laura, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you today. I'm so excited to be working on some of these centennial initiatives with you. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.
Laura:Eric, thank you. It's wonderful to celebrate the University of Minnesota Press and its one hundred years.
Maggie:So far on this episode, we have spoken with people who've worked here for a good chunk of their lives, and now we are turning to some of
Maggie:the press's newer faces. When I was in my early twenties, I was working for a
Maggie:daily newspaper as a copy editor and page designer. And in times when I was looking for inspiration or to solve a layout or a design problem, would take a break at a local bookstore. Most often I would pick up a particular book and it was called Salmila Architect, and it was this beautiful quality book with gorgeous photos and layout and typography, I always came away with some new idea or a way to solve a design problem. When a job opening appeared at the press, I initially didn't put the two together like I was already familiar with some of this publisher's list, but until I started doing a little research and found this book on the press website, and that was a really cool thing to find, a really cool realization about publishing and what it can do and all that. So after I got the job I celebrated with a piece of red velvet cake at the cafe and by buying the copy of the book.
Maggie:So anyway, with that, I'd like to open this up to my colleagues if you would tell us a bit about how you heard about the press or what you knew about university publishing prior to working here.
Emma:Sure. Hi. So my name is Emma Saks. I've been at the press, I think I just hit three years a couple weeks ago. Before this, however, I came to the press as a student, an undergrad at the U of M, and I was a student editorial assistant for two years and then graduated, worked at some other positions, and found my way back to the press.
Emma:During undergrad, I was getting degrees in both English and gender studies and sometimes felt this fracture of having to choose between one or the other. Is it social justice or is it books? And over my time interning at Coffee House Press, which is also local, and doing my student work at the U of M Press, I found that the University of Minnesota Press really blended those priorities so beautifully and that I didn't feel I had to choose between social justice and literature. Obviously, I could work with authors that are social justice minded and writing about progressive topics and new genres and new forms. That's really what drew me to the press initially as a student and helped me gain that experience and what brought me back many years later.
Anthony:So I'm Anthony. I'm the journalist manager. I've been at the press for two and a half years now. Before I got this job, I was getting my PhD at Indiana University. So the way I heard about the press was by reading a lot of books that the press was putting out during my PhD program.
Anthony:So I focused a lot on cinema studies, and the history of gender and sexuality, which are obviously strengths of the press. I remember quoting at length, Sheila Lyman's book on Edith Wharton and collecting, James Cahill's book on zoological surrealism. My adviser, Joan Hawkins, let out a book in February with the press cutting edge, so I knew about it through her, obviously, and what she told me about it. And then through my own work as well, I actually had a paper accepted by one of our journals, The Moving Image, before I joined the press. So it was this kind of odd thing where I got that accepted, got the job offer here, took over as journals manager, and then produced my own article for the moving image.
Anthony:I promise Devon accepted that before I got here, there was no conflict of interest, but that was just a fun little quirk. This job was really kind of about staying in this world of academic thought for me that I was already enmeshed in during my PhD study and kind of supporting that research, but in a non faculty role when I decided to transition out of that kind of part of academia.
Carina:Hi, my name is Carina Bolanos Lewen, and I am the marketing and exhibits assistant here at the press. I've also just come up on three years, And I was really seeking out Minnesota at the point of my job application. It was later 2021. And I had worked at my undergrad institution at their press, which was tiny, and a really great introduction to UP publishing. But I also had majored in a science in society or science and technology studies program where I was encountering Minnesota books.
Carina:And I remember going to a lecture by Jesse LaCavalier on his book, The Rule of Logistics, and using Deborah Cowen's Deadly Life of Logistics for research projects, and otherwise just noticing, Minnesota. They're doing cool stuff. If the fact that I majored in science technology studies as an undergrad is an indication, I, like Emma, had a lot of kind of competing interests and still do at all times academically and otherwise. And I was simultaneously doing internships in communications at nonprofit organizations. So when finally I refreshed the jobs page at Minnesota and there was a marketing assistant position, it felt like it aligned really beautifully.
Carina:At the time, I was living in Seattle and I had visited the Twin Cities only once. I remember at that time thinking, maybe there'll be some reason for me to live here at some point in my life. I just got a kind of good vibe from it. And so the fact that that all of that worked out for me still feels kind of wild. In the exhibits role, I get to work with all realms on our list, and I get to encounter our works out there in the world at conferences.
Carina:I can think about having, like, communications experience outside of publishing per se and being like, but how do I do marketing in a way that feels like it is for good? And for products that I do actually feel enthusiastic about, we can forget that our books are products. And I think that marketing often feels like a misnomer in this context where I'm genuinely trying to be like, hey, look at this awesome thing.
Alena:Hi. I'm Alena Rivas, a publicity associate. So I am the publicist for the press's scholarly titles. And I also work with award submissions for our trade titles. So I get to essentially touch every book that we make, which is pretty exciting.
Alena:When I had first graduated from my grad program in publishing from Portland State University, I had never even heard of the University of Minnesota Press. I had come from a very small regional trade publisher and I was an editorial. So to go to a university press was not initially what I had intended. I saw an opening for a publicity associate with the University of Minnesota Press, and I thought, as I looked at the job description, I thought, I know how to do all of those things. So maybe I should just, you know, apply and see what happens.
Alena:I then found that it very much aligned with my values and my interests as a regional publisher, as a publisher that is very socially conscious and famous for the various programs that we publish from indigenous studies and, you know, cinema and media studies. And we just we have a long backlist of incredible titles in all the humanities. But what I didn't know at the time was that we also do trade and regional general interest books, cookbooks, children's books. And I didn't know university presses do that. The move to Minnesota was a big change, and, I felt very fortunate that the team here at the press have been so wonderful.
Alena:We've been working together cohesively and on my end, at least, very happily, for the past, year and four months.
Zack:Yeah. Hi. My name is Zack Stewart. I'm the journals production specialist. So I handle typesetting for our journal titles as well as, some other things like producing, promotional materials for some of our editorial teams and new miscellaneous web graphics, that sort of thing.
Zack:Always something fun and interesting going on in the journals department. I will have been here two years this coming spring. I was fresh out of graduate school with, an MFA in graphic design. When I joined, I was, you know, digging through a lot of job listings in design and just really feeling kind of dismayed at how it felt like there were so few opportunities to use design in a way that that really felt like it was doing good in the world. I was very fortunate that at that time, the press was sort of getting to expand its journals program.
Zack:And at that point, much like Alena, I hadn't I wasn't really particularly familiar with the press. So I I started started digging into it, I was really amazed at just the the breadth of the titles in terms of its its, books publishing. And also, I was really fascinated by the wide range of subjects of the journals, which the press publishes. Like, for instance, we have, you know, the moving image, which I believe Anthony alluded to earlier, which is a lot of cinema studies, but we also have a a number of titles in indigenous studies and area studies. One of my personal favorites, we also have Nicodemia as well, which is sort of cultural and anime studies.
Zack:And we also have our recently acquired, Markers, which is going to be publishing, hopefully by the time that you're hearing this, which is, the Association, for Gravestone Studies. They have this this really fascinating journal of delving into to gravestone studies, And it's it's just really amazing. This variety of of things that the University of Minnesota publishes. And it felt like a place where I could really use my design skills to help put, you know, something powerful and something good out into the world.
Eliza:Hi, my name is Eliza Edwards, and I am the production assistant for the University of Minnesota Press. And my connection to the press actually stems from my childhood. So when I was huddling around my childhood living room in St. Paul, Minnesota, there was a bookshelf that is built in for old 1920s house, which is one of the only bookshelves in my home that reaches all the way to the floor. So when I was young, I sort of had access with my tiny little hands to all of these treasures that were on this bookshelf.
Eliza:Many of those books from my earliest memories of picking things up and flipping through pages that I didn't quite understand were actually University of Minnesota Press books. So my mother is a public historian, and my father is an earth sciences professor here at the university. Between the two of them, they had sort of a master collection of things related to local Minasertan history. My family has a long term connection to Owl Royal National Park that stretches back several generations. All of those aspects of their lives sort of intertwined to give me as a really young child this foundation in university publishing that I didn't quite realize was there.
Eliza:And like Emma, I also participated in a Coffeehouse Press internship after graduated from college. I was part of the spring twenty twenty cohort, which ran into quite a few complications as March 2020 rolled around, of course, as many of our lives, especially in the publishing industry and also across the board just became upended and people had to re envision their relationships with their trade. And I was also at the time working at the university in the libraries and archives system. So I worked as an archives assistant at the Cheddar Collection and GLBT Studies, which is the university's LGBT history archives. So the university was a familiar territory for me.
Eliza:And so it was a natural switch to eventually reach towards publishing. I have been here for about three years at this point. Corinna and I were a couple of the first hires after the hiring freeze that was pandemic related. So we entered the publishing world at a time of great chaos, as many of this cohort of new hires has. It's been a fascinating time to be able to put our skills to the test and engage in a world that is so quickly changing alongside our colleagues who have so much institutional memory to offer to the work that we do.
Maggie:Thank you. That was wonderful. And there's a lot of things that surprise people even in a predictable publishing environment. But for most, if not all of you, having started after we made a lot of changes during COVID, it brings that whole idea of surprise and change in publishing a new perspective. So yeah, I'd just like to invite you if you want to talk about something that maybe has been the most surprising thing about your job or something particularly rewarding.
Emma:Yeah, so there have been many rewarding aspects of my role as an editorial assistant, specifically under the editor Eric Anderson. He works primarily on our trade and regional list. Something I found surprising that an academic publisher does such a wide range of titles such as memoir, fiction, non fiction, poetry, cookbooks, children's books, and I found that really rewarding to be able to work on such a variety of titles with a variety of authors and really build relationships with them. And just seeing that in real time, being able to work on a title such as a picture book and see the whole new process for what goes on, it's very different than, you know, a novel or a poetry book. Being able to go to the book launch at the indie bookstore just down the street and talk to the community, talk to the authors, and see it out in the world in a kid's hands is really rewarding.
Emma:I also appreciate that although I do work on the trade and regional titles, I get to see the impact of our larger list of books locally, nationally, and internationally. I often think of the press as I'm traveling abroad to visit my brother in London and I'm at the bookstores and I'm seeing U of M press titles highlighted halfway across the world, that I'm seeing those on the shelves, the booksellers are recommending them, and that feels really powerful and rewarding and be able to feel like, wow. I'm a I'm a part of something.
Anthony:So I would say, you know, working with the journals, we don't do the editorial acceptance, but we work a lot more on production once we bring an association on board. So it's always interesting to see the way that editors will bring us projects that speak to each other. We've released a couple of special we're in the process of releasing special issues on Palestine from both critical ethnic studies and NAIS right now, as well as just seeing, like, authors pop up around the journals that they're not assigned to. Like, I know Terry McCarty, who is one of the co authors of JAIE, just, popped up. I think it was in the newest issue of Maccazes, our review, that we're putting into production.
Anthony:So it's always kind of, like, fun to see how the journals talk to each other, I guess, because we're not really a part of the acceptance process, and that's always a fun surprise to see that. And, you know, they tell us sometimes too. Like, Zach referenced markers. And when we were talking about acquiring them, they talked to us a lot about the Vernacular Architecture Forum, who publishes buildings and landscapes with us. One of the most fun parts is kind of the redesign, I would say, of any journal and taking a journal aboard and kind of reworking it and giving them the first cover.
Anthony:And usually, they're pretty happy about what we send to them, and they're pretty excited about moving forward with it.
Carina:Yeah. I guess I'll speak to being hired from out of state. I was very generously granted six months of remote work to start off my time at UMP, which spared me relocating from Seattle to Minnesota in November and deferred it to May. That's an example of the type of conscientiousness that I would actually continue to find in my team and leadership here. I remain really impressed by how welcomed I felt working remotely and joining a group of people who have been here for the most part for a lot longer, right, than everyone who's in this call.
Carina:It's so impressive, the work that each of my colleagues brings and the skills that they've honed, the ways that they have come to cooperate with each other and generate new ideas and support each other in that, especially in marketing. There is this kind of rigor when it comes to working with existing systems, but also continuing to kind of question that really exists at the level of our work each day in addition to the kind of editorial priorities that we have. But I'll also say that I felt really lucky. I got to join a press that, like Emma, has this immense trade and regional program, which I didn't know about coming from more coastal zones beforehand. What a welcome to a new place.
Carina:Getting to get situated via our books was just such a nice kind of bonus. I was both surprised and felt like, I have to learn about this side of the program, but also I have to learn about the place where I now live. And so doing that deep dive was really helpful to me.
Alena:So I was new to scholarly publicity. I knew what publicity was. I knew how to write a pitch, and I knew how to, you know, do market research to place a book. I knew the skills that required. I just didn't really know the procedure.
Alena:And it turned out that my role was actually relatively new as well. So when I came in, I learned how to build a media list of journals, which I was not really that familiar with in the beginning. There are so many journals and I, yeah, so, you know, kind of getting that foundational knowledge first, I was very supported and I was also encouraged to forge my own path in this role and make it what I wanted it to be. I'm making it a priority to get the most coverage for every book that I possibly can. My first big hit, which will always be near and dear to my heart, is having a Publisher's Weekly review of Yves Dunbar's book, Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction.
Alena:That's gonna just be like, I want that on my headstone and then maybe it can be in markers, a story about it. We have so much to offer. Our authors are amazing. Their work is so important. I just feel very fortunate to get the chance to share these books with as a wide of an audience as possible.
Zack:So as the typesetter for our journals, I'm typically kind of about the last person in our production pipeline to get all the materials for the issue as I start putting it together. So it's always surprising and exciting to see what sort of content is going in these issues. NAIS, which is the the journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, they're putting together, an a special issue on Palestine, which I just recently, you know, finished typesetting and sending off to the editorial team. That was really fascinating to get to put together and sort of, you know, I I get kind of a chance to sort of read through it a little bit while I'm typesetting everything. So, The Moving Image recently put out a special issue commemorating history of 16 millimeter film.
Zack:We recently acquired the International Journal of Surrealism, and there have been multiple fascinating issues. So it's really a privilege, and it's just plain exciting to see what sort of content is gonna come through. It feels like anything could happen at any time. It's also very satisfying to get to put together some of these special issues or, like, when whenever there's an issue of a journal, you can tell that the the editors are, like, especially excited for it. It's really satisfying to be able to put that together.
Zack:And also on the other end with our newer acquisitions, when we get to sort of go through this redesign process, it's like Christmas morning. Right? They they get super excited when, you know, we present like, here's the new interior that we've commissioned or, you know, here's the design for the new cover. It's so exciting to be able to find new ways to present their content. It really is a privilege to be able to work with with such exciting editorial teams and be able to present engaging, exciting, and even, you know, groundbreaking content.
Eliza:There are so many things that are surprising about my job that it's definitely hard to narrow it down to a select few. To step into the world of production for the first time is definitely to be tasked with learning an entirely new language. And I think that's something that I underestimated stepping into this position in particular, because I had a lot of context for various aspects of literary, scholarly, local history sorts of worlds. But to be able to engage in the production side of this process was something that I was doing for the first time. Even the words that I'm using on a daily basis or the considerations of the things that I'm thinking about are things that I had never before considered as just a casual reader of content.
Eliza:Paper stock and spine bulk and just the various aspects of what takes a book from a raw manuscript into the creation process of birthing it into a physical object that you can hold in your hands. And of course, I mean, these days, there's a lot of knitting together of digital and physical worlds in positions like ours. The satisfaction of picking up a physical book and bringing to it a deeper understanding of these vibrant webs of collaborators that bring their all to these titles is something that brings to me so much perspective to the world that we live in and the ways that we knowledge share with each other. But this position overall has, number one thing, transformed the way that I interact with bookstores. When I find myself going into a bookstore these days, the first thing that I do when I pick up a book is read the copyright page, which is certainly not something that I gave any attention to in my previous life.
Eliza:And be able to look on a bookshelf and identify when there's two separate printings of the same book on the shelf side by side because the paper stock has changed and the books are now different sizes, for example. There's all of these sort of secret little things that are sometimes inconsequential and sometimes very impactful that I start to notice in my everyday life, which has been a really joyful process. There are just so many moments of synchronicity in this job. In my previous life as an archivist, I was working really heavily with the initial stages of book projects for our researchers, working directly with the raw materials that were helping them conceptualize their book projects before they even started writing something down on a page. And now I find myself at the complete opposite end of that process, to the point where there are books that I was able to work on as the production assistant for our department that I had actually been a part of the initial research process when I was working at archives at the university with the Treader collection.
Eliza:Working in the front end, I never got to see the accomplishments years down the line of what my researchers were getting up to down in the caverns of the University of Minnesota archives. And to be able to participate in taking all of the things that they have analyzed and brought together in these sort of beautiful quilts that they then present to us to turn into objects. It's just such a rewarding process. And I feel very lucky to be able to have seen sort of both ends of that. I would love to give a shout out to our backlist because a huge part of my position is also working with our reprints program.
Eliza:And given the one hundredth anniversary that we're celebrating this year, it's really special in my position to be able to work with the thousands of books that we have in print. For all of us to have a hand in tending to this beautiful garden of these thousands of books that the University of Minnesota Press published over the years is really humbling work, it's something that I'm always grateful to be a part of.
Maggie:We've heard a lot today about the press's history, its present, its reach, and contributions to scholarship, literature, education, the state of Minnesota, and the world of publishing. The press wouldn't be what it is today without its leadership and the strategic thinking of its upper management, some of whom we heard from earlier, many of whom have been with the press for a long time through monumental societal and industry changes. And with that, I'd like to welcome two very special guests here.
Doug:Hey. I'm Doug Armato. I'm director of the University of Minnesota Press.
Susan:I'm Susan Doerr, and I'm associate director at the University of Minnesota Press.
Doug:So Susan, we've worked together for a long time.
Susan:We sure have. I think we've worked together now at the press for twenty years. You've been here longer than that, but I joined twenty years ago this summer. It's been quite a journey.
Doug:Well, remember when we first talked about your joining the press, I had had sort of a standard executive assistant who did clerical things and kept me organized or attempted to keep me organized. And when she left and the position was open, we talked about the position. And I just had a sense then in talking to you that there were so many different things you could do and, you've done most of them and a few things I wasn't expecting.
Susan:There were some things I wasn't expecting either. I had worked for a few different publishing companies here in the Twin Cities prior to joining Minnesota. And I'd also been a bookseller. As I recall, you wanted to expand our journals program. We had a couple of journals at the time, wanted to expand our fundraising and outreach.
Susan:The marketing department was in transformation. And I was at that time, a marketing director for a book distribution company. So I had some experience with that. I remember my first day on the job, you basically said, okay, here are the things we want to do. Jump in.
Susan:I just started on something. And I think I started with fundraising subsidy activities. One of the very first grant applications that I ever wrote was here at the University of Minnesota Press. And it was in 02/2005 for a book called Transgender Rights, which introduced legal issues and civil rights issues for transgender people to a broader audience. It felt like really important work.
Susan:We got that grant. I was so pleased to have been a part of making that book come into the world. I'm both heartened that it's still in print, but also really sad that it's more relevant than ever and needed more than ever today. Doug, I'm curious, you came to us from another university press, you've been at Johns Hopkins University Press. What was your path into Minnesota?
Doug:Well, when I was at Hopkins and I was at Hopkins for ten years, I was the manager of the book publishing division. I was having a casual conversation with the editor in chief one one night after work, and I said, you know, if I was actually allowed to have sabbaticals, I would take a year off and read all those books that University of Minnesota Press is bringing out, all those cultural theory books. And he looked at me like I was insane, but I was absolutely dead serious. It's like, wow, that would just be, you know, so much fun to work in a program like that. That sort of carried over when you talked about transgender rights.
Doug:It was that same feeling that it wasn't just a book. It was going to potentially change things, or that was really needed. And I think that's been so much at the core of what we've tried to do here over the years. A lot of scholarly presses pick the areas they publish, and then they just find the books in those areas that fit. With us, it's just kind of different because we're always looking for the books that will change things.
Doug:We're used to shaking stuff up a bit.
Susan:One of the things that we always come back to is that our books complicate arguments. I mean, they advance them too, but they make people think in new directions and harder sometimes. That's really hard in a sound bite culture. You need to think carefully and thoughtfully about the arguments. It's hard to get, you know, a three word distillation or a one liner or even a tagline when what it's doing is saying, this is actually more complex than you've been discussing.
Susan:So here, read this argument and go back and do the work, which I find really exciting, but it's also really tough. Not everyone wants to do that.
Doug:Yeah. You get the sense that there's an urge out there, and especially lately, for simple solutions to very complex problems. And we're about the opposite thing. We're all about complex solutions to really important problems, You know, the things that you feel like should be simpler than they are, and we're always trying to find those nuances. And the phrase that often comes into my head related to that, we don't really solve the problems, we sort of identify the problems, and we also identify the problems with the solutions to those problems.
Doug:Because anything you do in society always will create new complexities and new problems. So the list can just keep moving that way by just sort of analyzing the kinds of problems that arise from too hasty solutions.
Susan:The metaphor I always have, being someone who likes to do fiber art and I'm learning how to knit, it's like our books make a tapestry of the culture in which we live. They weave together these arguments and sometimes the colors don't align. Like you've got a crazy green over here and a crazy pink over there, and they don't really match, but they're all part of that same tapestry of our community. And whenever we talk about list, we say it just somehow makes sense, these books coming together in our catalog. And I'm really curious for you, Doug, what are some of the books that you really think about in your time here at the press that really stand out for you?
Doug:There's such a broad variety of them because it is in its own way such a complicated list. I mean, there's books all over the place in a lot of ways. But I've learned from so many of them. I mean, the books I've worked on, there's a book we published called Against Purity, which was exactly against the idea that you could come up with a morally acceptable way to behave. And I was saying no, because every decision you make complicates something else.
Doug:Just the world is too complex a place. That book almost seemed like defining a list in a lot of ways, of, you know, thinking in a complicated way. And so I'm always interested in those books that bring that about. But you know, the other thing I really love is there's five editors here. I'm sort of a part time editor.
Doug:And they're constantly bringing books that just kind of amaze or surprise me, or things that I hadn't thought about. You can just sort of feel the list developing. And Jason Weidemann, you know, our colleague, at one point started bringing books about like guts. I mean, about the diversity of life that exists within our bodies. You know, we're used to thinking about biodiversity and we think about, oh yeah, there's trees, there's animals, there's ants, there's insects, and it's like, well, there's also bacteria, you know, and bacteria have their own way of looking at the world as well.
Doug:So that's sort of the kind of book when it comes, I just think, wow, you know, of course. One year at a scholar convention, a scholar came up to the booth and was looking around the stuff we published recently and said, I don't know exactly why this list hangs together, but it does. There's something in common all these books have. And it's like, well, that's exactly how we kind of work. You know, we're always looking for something a little bit new that builds, you know, what you called a tapestry.
Susan:One of the areas that has been interesting to work on because I have worked with our journals program, We started a journal called Mechademia about the fan arts and anime culture and manga. And in my prior job, I had worked with publishers of anime and manga. Well, guess manga because anime is TV. It was really fascinating to see scholarly study of something that I had worked in, the real materials in a prior job. And it's kind of fun for those of us who've worked at several publishing companies to see the linkages between the presses that we work at.
Susan:There's always threads. You know, another question I wanted to ask you, Doug, because we are a book publisher, but we're university press. And one of the things we talk about is university presses being special or having a niche within the publishing community. You know, you've had a long career at several presses. You've been the president of the association of university presses.
Susan:What would you say distinguishes university presses from other publishers?
Doug:I think a lot of it is this will sound glib, but it's being driven by something other than money. Our commitment is to advance scholarship and to in fact be almost like the R and D for society as a whole, that we're constantly looking at society and saying, does this make sense? Can this be different? Is there another way of doing this? I've had so many experiences over the years of working in University Press Publishing where someone has said, you know, wow, I went to 50 publishers with this book, and no one wanted to publish it.
Doug:None of them thought there was an audience for it. And my sense is sometimes that's exactly the reason you publish the book, because there isn't an obvious audience and you want to build that audience. Or you just have a sense that a book will stand out for that reason. I've worked with authors when we talked early on about a project, one in particular called Alien Phenomenology by the games theorist Ian Bogost. When he was first telling me about it, I was literally just staring into, like, open space while I was in the phone thinking, what is he talking about?
Doug:What is he getting at? But I thought, well, you know, this this is really interesting. Right after he signed the contract, we had a phone conversation. He said, you know, I have no idea if this book is gonna sell at all, whether anyone will wanna read this book. And I said, me neither.
Doug:That was where we went. That book ended up being a success, but also creating a little subfield of object oriented ontology. And when I presented it to the Salesforce at one of our sales meetings, and they too were just sort of looking at me like, what? Know, objects have like their own life, their own like psychic life. And it's like, oh, yeah, totally.
Doug:So it's getting that reaction is just always a lot of fun. There is a certain restlessness that I really like about the way we publish at the University of Minnesota Press. You know, an important part of the press is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a test that we've been involved in publishing since the early 50s, psychological diagnostic testing. It became the dominant test in its area, you know, assessment in its area, so that's really great. And honestly, we could have just treated it like an annuity and just had year after year it bring in, you know, a good little surplus that would, you know, help keep things moving and served a good audience.
Doug:But at one point a couple of the researchers just sort of said, you know, this could be better. I was really proud that we accepted that and just of said, well, let's try and do that. Let's change it up. Let's conduct new research. Let's see if there's a way to, you know, improve this instrument and modernize it.
Doug:Because it was really dated, it hadn't been updated in like fifty years or so. We bought ourselves as an operation, in a way a lot of grief, because people didn't really want it to change. It had built its own area. But we thought, no, you know, we're convinced by this. This seems like a better way to do it.
Doug:And it's been a big success. The new version is, you know, rapidly gaining a terrific reputation. And, so I think we did the right thing.
Susan:That's one of the things about the press. You know, we're part of the Research and Innovation Office here at the University of Minnesota. You know, something else that I think has been really fascinating in my time at the press is that we've gotten into the ebook and digital publishing world since 02/2005 or 02/2006, and it's evolved into even publishing in new forms. So, you know, back in 02/2006, we were making PDFs and then we began to make e pubs right around, what, 2010, '20 '11. And we've been publishing that and people, that's what people can buy as our eBooks now in the bookstore market and read in the library market.
Susan:But I think it was in 2015 or 2016, the Mellon Foundation did a call for project proposals. We put forward a project to create a digital publishing platform to help bring university presses in alignment with digital humanities projects that scholars were doing that were multimedia and multimodal, and beyond just a book. That developed into our publishing platform Manifold that now is like a web based digital publishing platform that can do more dynamic projects. And it's been really fun and exciting to see our team grow both in their skills, but also change the nature of the projects that we publish and the things that we can do with the affordances of the web.
Doug:Yeah, I'm very proud of what we've done with digital publishing, and just feeling like we've sort of done it almost in a theoretical way. We sort of built it up from an idea. We didn't do what everyone else was doing. We tried to conceptualize and think it through almost like, you know, a form of cultural or social theory, you know, just like, what should this be?
Susan:I remember when we were looking at ways to get into the short book publishing space around 2018, '20 '19, where university presses were asking, how can we publish shorter forms? You and I had a lot of conversations about what that could be. Do we do a chapter of a book? Do we do essays? And Forerunners was the series that came out of those discussions.
Susan:And it was an idea. It was to publish in that gray literature space where scholars really didn't have a home for formal publication of those works. They could start a blog or write a paper, but there was no real university press path for that. And Forerunners has been an incredible success. So that's been an exciting little series too that came from an idea.
Doug:Yeah, it was definitely an idea to have books that were the first word on a topic instead of the last. I mean, tendency of university presses is, okay, this is all you need to know about this. And then forward, was always like, this might be something worth thinking about. You know, it's just a different take on it. They've opened up a lot of areas of discussion and done really well.
Doug:I mean, you and I, Susan, talked about having worked together for quite a while. But actually, the whole management team here has been really stable. A lot of us have been here together for, you know, over twenty years, almost like a family and a stranger. What's it sort of like having this kind of continuity?
Susan:Oh my gosh, we know each other really well, which like family is good and bad. One of the things that's been really rewarding for me is just watching people go through their life changes. We've seen people get married. We've seen people get divorced. We've seen people have kids.
Susan:We've seen their kids go off to college. We're seeing each other through the whole phase of our lives, through illness and death. Just really knowing people that well is something that I don't think is as common in today's working world as it perhaps once was. I also think that that stood us in good stead during the COVID pandemic when everybody had to go home. We had such a strong foundation of connection with one another, that even though we were distant physically, we had a lot of trust and we had a lot of experience to understand the decisions we were making during a really difficult time.
Susan:We have tremendous respect for each other. And that all goes into the books that we acquire too. We let people take chances on things that maybe in another publishing house, we would say, oh, it's probably not a good financial decision. And maybe it becomes a good financial decision because we trusted each other enough to take those risks.
Doug:Yeah. I think there was a lot of design in that. The way the press itself functions as a kind of theory. It should be a place where people really came together around what we were publishing. We really wanted to avoid the sense which runs through a lot of publishing houses of this department is in charge of this, you know, this person, you know, makes the decisions.
Doug:You didn't wanna get that sense of it being like this constant sparring for domination or winning an argument or anything like that. I mean, you know, we really wanted it to be like a circle of friends, you know, just sort of figuring out the best way to this. And I'm really proud when I listen to some of the other talks that are part of this Centennial podcast. It really comes through that everyone remembers like fun. They remember having like good times.
Doug:That's what we really try and encourage. Giving the designers, you know, a lot of investment and a lot of say over what the books look like. Giving the marketing department a lot of time to sort of figuring out, you know, where a book connects and how it should be positioned vis a vis other books. It's like all the way of everyone being engaged in their work. And, know, it's frankly just a fun place to work.
Susan:You know, what I remember, another person you've heard in this podcast, Rachel Moeller, in our production department, her laugh would just echo across the entire office, and it happened a lot. And it just lifted your spirits. It's like, well, what hygiene for the meeting up to now? And, for years, people would go to thrift shops and try to find paintings for less than $5 and just randomly hang them in people's offices or around the office. The thing that always struck me was how long it would take for people to notice that the painting had changed.
Susan:There was a six fingered character holding a Rubik's cube in one of them.
Doug:There was the backwards centaur.
Susan:Oh, the backwards centaur. Yeah. That one was creepy. I remember one year we did a scavenger hunt just around where our office is located in Downtown Minneapolis. People got really sweaty running really hard to try to be the first to collect all the things.
Susan:Our group has always had a lot of fun together.
Doug:Yeah. And I think it does come out in the work we do, that creative approach. It's not really an anything goes approach because there's always people here to sort of pull it back and say, no, that like that, but I don't think that's gonna work on the bookstore shelves really well. But I also think the ability to have a little bit of play, it brings out a lot of creativity in the program, which I think keeps it lively and unexpected. That's been a great element of our success over these years.
Doug:Here in the physical office, it's kind of eerie, but I can walk up through the ranks of all the books we've published in the press library and like remember like every book. And they're mostly good memories, not a %, but they're mostly like really, really good memories.
Susan:When I looked down our shelves, the kinds of things I remember are little weird quirks like, oh, we received funding from this foundation for that book or the argument over the cover.
Doug:Yeah, there's a large element of reading the room. It's been a little bit different since, you know, we went into hybrid mode. We do have a culture of going with everyone else's enthusiasm sometimes, you know, and you say, well, this person's enthusiastic. Maybe they're right. Being director and being in a lot of meetings, scanning the Zoom screen, or just trying to read the room and say, who's looking at this point like they'd really rather not do this book?
Doug:Like who isn't excited? Where should we be adjusting things to get that excitement back? Because we don't actually publish in the grand scheme of things a lot of books. It's about 100 a year, a little bit over 100 a year. You know, you just want to make every one count.
Doug:You want someone to feel enthusiastic about every one of them.
Susan:I remember when Erik Anderson, before he was an editor, was in the sales and marketing department. He was finding projects and bringing them forward for consideration for publishing. And we were publishing some of them. And I thought that was really cool. Book ideas could really come from anywhere on the team.
Susan:I remember one season, we kept not choosing our production director's favorite covers. And in protest, he had them all printed up and framed them and used them to decorate his wall. All his favorite rejects went on his office wall one season. And I thought that's the best protest. They were great covers, some of them, but they just weren't the ones that were going to make it for those titles for different reasons.
Doug:That's a sign of the thing in general that we try and tease things out and make these collective decisions so that the decision science isn't something that the head of the design effort chose. It's like things that other people gravitated towards. And that happens a lot. I mean, it certainly happens with me all the time. Sometimes there'll be like a title of a book, it's like, let me guess so.
Doug:It's sort of part of the fun that you just go with other people's instincts a lot. I've been proven wrong so many times in the best way possible. We see a book succeed that I was very tepid on, but there was enthusiasm there. Sometimes it comes from unexpected corners, and that makes a big difference to me. We try and distribute the decision making to a large group of people.
Doug:Sometimes chaos really takes us a long way here. I think I do drive some of my colleagues crazy with my sort of tendency towards finding the chaotic thread in our successes. We had a big success last year, really a tremendous success with the first translation of the original Godzilla novel. And I just kept at opportune moments reminding people that the translator had done three books that lost us money, before this one that made us a lot of money. And I said, that's exactly how it's supposed to work.
Doug:That we did those books because we thought they were important. And a lot of other university presses I've worked at, or presses I've been to, they always say, no, we look at each book on its own, and we see what its contribution is to the bottom line, and we try and not publish that kind of book again if it doesn't make us money. And it's like, no, you're shorting yourself because something else is going to come out of that relationship that has the potential to be a big financial success or an award winner. It's kind of a funny business that way. It just works in a lot of subtleties.
Doug:And it isn't always a clear path towards what's going to be a success and what isn't.
Susan:There have been so many times over the years when we're looking at new projects. We have a meeting every couple of weeks called New Projects, and we look at the books that are under consideration by our editors and talk about them. Many times over the years, you know, an editor has said, this book is important or it fits our list for this reason, but really, we're looking two or three books down by this writer, and this will help us get started. And so we're going to nurture this writer in the early part of their career because we want to be with them in the later part of their career because the editor saw something.
Doug:You think of an author like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who's Dean of Arts and Sciences at Arizona State. He invented the field of monster studies. I mean, literally came out of his inspiration. And he's published like 10 books with us, he's an amazing scholar. But we actually acquired that book long before I was here when he was a graduate student.
Doug:We took a chance on it and published it and got behind it. And it was first an underground success, then went on from that to really help define a field. And he's published with us ever since. But it really took those prior staffers here to sort of look at that and say, this is cool. We should do this.
Susan:I think that publishing is a profession with a certain special set of skills that our team brings. It's kind of an invisible thing. You see the book and you see the author, but there is a whole set of people, maybe 50 of them, maybe 20 of them, but there's a lot of people that touch a book between the author and the reader.
Doug:One of the things I love hearing the most, and I hear it all the time, is it's just so great to publish with you guys. Everyone was just so involved and engaged. And that just doesn't happen to a lot of publishers. And we've been really lucky for the people we have working here who bring a lot of their own creativity into these projects. This press has really succeeded on the collective creativity and commitment of all the people who work here.
Doug:It's a tremendous thing to be able to take some responsibility for.
Susan:Well, for the hundred years that the press has been around, we've published some pretty great books. In 1928, I think it was, we published a book called From Prunes to Pancakes, which was about dental hygiene. We've come a long way. But what's in our future?
Doug:Funny you should say that because, you know this, but for a long time I was the editor for digital culture at the press. And it was specifically because I wanted, you know, as director to be able to look into the immediate future and see what was coming at us. I mean, it was really just a self protective activity. You know, I do feel that with a lot of the trends in higher education and in books right now, you know, what's going to happen is that at one time there was that old saying, you know, publish or perish, that all academics had to publish, that there was this imperative. And I think that's really fading.
Doug:I think what you're going to get is that we're going to be here for people who really want to write. There's a lot of people who had to write their sort of required tenure books, their first academic books, and didn't enjoy it and didn't like it. And you know, it was painful to them. It took them much longer than they wanted it to. But then there's other authors who just are always ready to go on another project, and they're always excited.
Doug:And I think that that's the future of the work we do. Being here for the people who really want to write, really want to be involved in the community of authorship, who are just really jazzed by seeing that object that came out of their long hours of research and thinking. I think we're going to turn a little bit more towards being oppressed, not just for the good scholarship, but for the committed scholarly writer.
Susan:I think the joy of seeing the actual physical book, every time one passes through my hands, I'm just like, oh, here it is. It's present to see this beautiful object. I think that's going to persist that object, especially as I see what's happening digitally in our world. Ebooks are a fair, very precarious medium that can be easily erased and they can be easily distributed, but they can be easily disappeared as well. I see print persisting for a very long time, and we're here for it.
Susan:I'm excited to be a part of that.
Doug:We need to be here for it. I mean, I think that's really what it comes down to, for the authors, but also for the readers and the students, and the customers, it's being part of that ecology. We'll keep changing with the markets, the times, and market demands. And when there's a new digital format out there, we'll participate in it. We'll get it out there.
Doug:But I do think, yeah, keeping this print object going, something people can hold in their hands and see on their shelves and can become a tangible part of their lives, it's important.
Susan:It's foundational to who we are, isn't it? We're publishers, but we're readers first.
Doug:Yeah.
Maggie:I want to thank everyone I work with for giving up their time and energy to talk with each other today. I want to thank everyone out there listening for your interest and attention and support for the press. Thank you. As part of our one hundredth anniversary, we have more special content and events to come, all of which will be updated at z.umn.edu/ump100. Thanks again and we look forward to many more wonderful years to come.