Gina Frangello is the author of the short story collection Slut Lullabies, and the critically acclaimed My Sisters

Continent. A longtime advocate of indie publishing, she has served as editor of the literary magazine Other Voices and co-founded its book imprint Other Voices Books, where she serves as executive editor. She also edits the fiction section of the online literary outlets The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown. This Chicago literary luminary stopped by to answer a few questions about the state of the publishing industry, creative writing programs, and the intersection of feminism and literature. Youve talked extensively about the current state of the publishing industry and the ever narrowing scope of work being put out by the big six, and mentioned how in today, someone as profound as Milan Kundera would most likely publishing The Unbearable Lightness of Being with an indie house. As an independent publisher, does this excite you? On one hand, you could potentially be publishing the next Kundera, but on the other, an author with his vision might not reach the full audience he/she deserves.

The answer is yes and no, of course. On the one hand, I want to back up and say that I think there have always been phenomenal, supremely talented writers who have not broken into the "mainstream" publishing establishment, and who have been championed by smaller publishersthis is not a new development. But yes, I do think the trade market has become more homogenized even than it was in, say, the 1990s, and that the simultaneous explosion in indie publishing has created a kind of perfect storm where many writers who don't deal in "tight story arcs," for example, end up at the indies. And clearly that's very exciting not just for the editor/publisher who may have ac-

cess to a much larger pool of (perhaps much greater) talent than small publishing ever has in its history . . . well, of course it's also very problematic that some of the best writers of their generations may have print runs of 1,000 books and no marketing budget and are being distributed solely online or through Print on Demand or some such . . . no matter how passionate and committed an editor may be, without any money (and here I even mean that they editors ourselves are often not paid, and therefore have day/other jobs that also demand a great deal of our timethat even being an indie publisher is often a labor of love done, by necessity, in one's "spare" time), there's no way you can get all your writers the attention you think they deserve. Even if you don't give a shit about things like big advances or being embraced by the corporate Big Six of publishing even if you embrace being more "fringe," most writers do want readers to be able to know about them and have access to their work. Other Voices Books has good distribution (Consortium) as indies go . . . but wow, distribution is a huge struggle in indie publishing. The world of online networking, from book blogs to Facebook to literary communities like The Rumpus or The Nervous Breakdown, has changed dramatically a writer's ability to get "noticed" without the kind of budget it takes to place an ad for a book in the New Yorker. However . . . well, clearly it's common sense that without money, with overworked and small staffs, with irregular distribution . . . a lot of potential Kunderas are lost in the ether. You have to really hope that cream rises. You have to hope that if 500 people read the next Kundera, they will be so out of their head excited about it that they'll blog and talk and pass the book on and never shut up about it, until another 500 read that writer, and then those people will continue to build the buzz and word of mouth until that

number quadruples. But of course, it doesn't always happen that way. So really, you have to be in it for the love of itfor the communityas an indie publisher. If you're in it because you think you're going to make literary rock stars, you'll be disappointed very quickly; you won't last in the business.

In almost all of the interviews that Ive read of you, your feminism is upfront. In what ways has feminism impacted your career as a writer and publisher? Have you faced any particular obstacles because of it?

I'd say my work as a writer has faced a lot more challenges because of its sexual content than because of its feminist content . . . or particularly maybe even because of the way these two things intersect. My work is, in my view, very feminist . . . but it's not terribly politically correct. I think this has been a challenge at times, an obstacle, sure. Probably much less so as a publisher than as a writer . . . as a publisher I've been able to set my own perimeters, whereas as a writer I've obviously more been in the same position as all writers, in terms of actually needing to find editors/publishers who connect with my work/vision and who are willing to take a chance on it, time-wise and financially. A lot (oh god, a LOT) of publishers used to tell me that my work was "too dark." They said things like that they kept having to put my work down and leave the room because it was so disturbing. I never had anyone refuse to publish me for being a feminist . . . but I have had many people decline publishing my work because of how sexually graphic or "troubling" it was, and I think the precise intersection between feminism and that dark content that was a factor to some extent.

It drives me out of my mind how few younger women writers (or young women in general) embrace the term feminist. There is still the weird concept that feminism means humorless people who hate sex and don't want to do anything except live in a co-op wearing sensible sandals and going to political marchesnot that there's anything wrong with political marches. Feminism is both a very broad and very simple word. On its simplest level, it means nothing more, really, than a belief in the equality of the sexes and the necessity of women and girls having the same chances and opportunities as their male counterparts. It's not such a scary concept. And it's also common sense that such a simple tenet of life would include a lot of diversity among the people who support it. Feminists can't all be lumped under one umbrella in terms of personality traits or sexual expressions or how it manifests in literary work. I'd also like to add here that Other Voices Books doesn't have any particularly women-centered agenda, nor do either of my other publishing ventures, The Nervous Breakdown or The Rumpus, both of which I have editorial roles at. I've never had any greater difficulty, because of my feminist views, in terms of interacting with or collaborating with male writers or editors. I would consider manyprobably mostof my male colleagues feminists in terms of their actions and presence in the world, but men too seldom self-identify that way.

Once I started college and began sending my work out, I came face to face with the hard realities of living life as a writer. One of the things that inspired a bit of hope for me was the seemingly endless possibilities of publishing through blogs, online lit mags, and ebooks. As a publisher, does the

medium the work is published in matter to you, or is it the quality of the writing itself. Going off that, has a writers web presence ever convinced you to read their work?

This is another question without a black and white answerfar from it. There's no absolute anymore that says a print magazine is "superior," in terms of prestige, to an online magazine . . . it depends entirely on the venue itself. Even years ago, before the explosion of online literary communities, online magazines like The Barcelona Review had attained a reputation on par with some of the top print magazines. But nowadays, many print magazines can seem almost like dinosaurs. With regard to what I said about distribution aboveI mean, even a highly successful print magazine can't compete, audience wise, with numbers like you can find somewhere like The Rumpus, which I think gets about 400,000 readers monthly. But again, it's not an easy dichotomy. If it were then print publishing would be "dead." The fact is that print magazines are often more rigorously edited than online magazines, because online venues change content so frequently that it would be literally impossible to go through the same level of editing/selecting as a magazine that maybe comes out twice a year . . . if you're refreshing content every day or every week, you would need a staff of hundreds of people in order for each "issue" (change-over) to have the same level of attention as a single issue of a print magazine. So you have trade-offs. In my work at The Nervous Breakdown, for example, where I'm the Fiction editor, we feature a new writer every week and also run a flurry of original short fictionI may also handle some book reviews and interviews in the same week-period, and I run two ongoing columns. Things move fast. You may be

on the home page for a few days. But what you get in exchange for that speed of light is a pretty huge audience. Almost 700 contributing writers, and a readership in the hundreds of thousands. When I edited Other Voices magazine . . . well, that was almost like the slow food movement, you know? We published 36 or so writers per year. It is not an exaggeration to say that I made many of my closest friends of my adult life through editing their work at OV, or by having them work with me in the trenches editing. It was like a small family. An issue took four or five months, minimum, to build and put out. I worked maybe 20-30 hours per week on the magazine. The people who read us loved usI got sweet handwritten notes all the time, and we made many "Best of" lists and had stories in Pushcart and Best American Short Stories of the Century. It was all very rewarding. But at the end of the day, the print run of the magazine, the number of copies we printed at the printer for each issue, based on subscriptions was only 2,000. We were giving 5 months of our lives to be read by 2,000 people, is what I'm saying. I never regretted that. But as a writer or an editor, it can be difficult to "judge" the online literary community when there are venues out there that, by putting your story up on their site, can give half a million people instant access to your work. Online and print magazines both encompass an extreme range. There is no reason at all to publish in, say, a friend's casually distributed zine or on his/her website except for the "fun" of it. Editors are overloaded and overworked and there is more "good" work out there already than we can deal with. When an author sends us a series of 10 links to stories on his or her own blog or in the small literary ventures of the author's friendsprojects we've never heard ofwe're not going to click every link and "investigate" the writer. This may sound cruel but we just don't need to do that. We are turning

people away by the dozens (or hundreds) every day. We're always hungry for a new discoverythat's what fuels editors, who are absurdly underpaid. But nobody could be hungry enough to read every link sent by an unknown person. Within three days, we'd be so busy we couldn't even find time to go to the bathroom anymore if we pursued everything like that. But at the end of the day, if you get a story published in the New Yorker, you have a book deal in less than 20 minutes. This happened to two friends of mine in the last year. Anyone who considers print media "dead" should keep that in mind. There are still very clear, very old-school channels into trade publishing, into earning money as a writer, and very few of them are as "set" as having a piece published and well received, by a longstanding venerable print magazine that pays its writers and that is still read by pretty much everyone in the industry.

In your interview with The Big Other, you spoke about writing not being a viable profession for some, and about the difficulty in making a living teaching writing. As a writer and a teacher, how do you feel about creative writing programs, both at the undergraduate and graduate level? Under what circumstances would you advise someone to enroll in one?

You know from my interviews that I grew up very poorbelow the poverty line when I started college. I was at college on loans and grants. I did not major in creative writing as an undergrad. The formula was pretty clear to me: when I graduated, I needed to make a stable income. Certainly it is not impossible to find gainful employment af-

ter majoring in creative writingI mean, writing is an asset to every field. Many creative writing majors go on to advertising or to textbook editing or get certified to teach high school English. But very fewand by this I'm guessing less than 1%of people who graduate with creative writing degrees in this country go on in any immediate (next year or two?) sense to earn money from their own fiction writing (much less the poetry majors). This is just a fact. It was not a fact my own life felt able to accommodate. I not only had grown up poor and had loan debt, but my parents were going to eventually be my financial burden, and I needed a profession that would enable me to care for them in their old age. So I got a masters in psychology and I practiced as a therapist for a few years, intending to pursue my doctorate and open a private practice. Starting to write what would become my first novel, My Sister's Continent, pretty much derailed that plan. I began writing so much that I constantly called in sick to work. I stayed up all night writing. I couldn't do anything but write. I decided to go back to grad school for creative writing. I went to UIC, and got involved with Other Voices magazine. And I never looked back. Until selling my third book of fiction to Algonquin over the summer, the most money I had EVER made in a single year based on all my editing, teaching and writing combined was 25K. CRAZY, right? I work probably 60-70 hours per week. I edit at two of the most popular online literary communities in the country and run a book press whose titles have consistently won awards like IPPYs, Lambdas, International Book Awards, Southern California Bookseller Association Awards . . . I teach at two large universities, and I had, prior to selling my third novel, already published two books of fiction. I also have 3 kids and at times I've had to hire childcareand pay for itin order to work

these various jobs. So I guess let me repeat: 25K per year. That's a great salary if you're 25 years old and live with 3 roommates and aren't married and don't want kids or to buy a house. When you're 40, that's not a good salary. Plenty of people who never went to college make a lot more than that. I have two master's degrees and two published books and . . . yeah, teach at good universities, have been an editor for more than 15 years. You see my point. People need to go into this with their eyes wide open. If they have family money, or a stable spouse with a "more typical" day job, or something like that, well then maybe it's not an issue. My husband works, and that's really enabled me to do what I do. I could NOT raise three kids and financially help my parents on my income. Writers can pursue tenure at a university, and that can offer financial security. But tenure is hard to get for anyone, and if you're unwilling to move wherever it happens to be available (as is definitely the case for me), it can be almost impossible to chase. You have to be honest with yourself. You have to ask whether you will still want this even if it means you can't have many of the things your peers with more conventional careers will have. If those are only "material" things, then maybe the answer hopefully--is a relatively easy "yes." But it's not just material rewards. It's also a matter of whether you'll attain the success you're hoping for. It's a risky industry. Many talented, hard-working writers toil for 20 years without getting a book deal. It's important to believe that you will be the exception to things like that and to have faith in your goals . . . but it's equally important to ask yourself whether you'd still be doing this if you never

get a book out. If you never attain critical success, much less fame. If you never earn any money on your craft. In my opinion, if the answer is yesif you're in this for love, no matter the consequencesthen there is nowhere more fun and exhilarating and that helps your craft morethan being in a creative writing program, surrounded by like-minded peers and professors. It's fun as hell. You learn an enormous amount. You have to be in it for the experience. If you think the program will offer you a job paying 45K with health insurance, or a first book deal at the age of 23 . . . well, then you're here for the wrong reasons. You need to re-evaluate. The reason to write is that you can't be happy doing anything else. That you will write, no matter what else you were supposed to be doing. That is, probably, in my view, the only real reason to write. Or at least the best reason. If you can do something else and have a great lifeby all means get busy. But this life . . . well, it's the best life going, for people who want to be in it, who need to be in it, warts and all.