LiteraryMary was established on January 1st, 2007. For those of you unfamiliar, it is a place where writers can workshop their writing. It features honest and thorough critique as well as in-depth discussion on the techniques and processes of writing. LiteraryMary publishes an annual print journal as well as occasional electronic releases, the most recent of which is Male, Pale, and Old: 16 Outstanding Men of the Small Press. It features biographies, photos, and select pieces of sixteen male writers. We were able to locate Jenifer Wills—the mastermind behind this project—and ask her a few questions.

As co-owner and editrix of the multifaceted LiteraryMary, you’ve been involved in the small press for quite some time. For those of us who are just now embarking on our literary adventures, what would you say is the single defining characteristic of the small press? What separates it from the glamorous and illustrious and—let’s be honest—out of reach ivory tower?

I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, but I also don’t like being dishonest or sycophantic. The small press is a good and bad thing, depending on how it’s used. At its worst, it can be incestuous. Writers publish and are published by a handful of known small press writers, each using the other to keep their name relevant in the pool of people who read and participate in the small press. In this way, it can become stale. Everyone develops the same voice and employs the same style. It becomes a safe way to avoid rejection, instead of pushing the boundaries of what we’re publishing. This is one of the reasons, when we do a project like this or like the journal, I like to feature work by people who haven’t been published before. At its best, the small press does what it is supposed to do. It becomes a vehicle for those who are writing well, writing dangerously, to be heard. The small press can push and destroy the boundaries of what the ivory tower will allow, thus opening the eyes of those in the ivory tower to what is ‘good’ and ‘worth publishing’. The ivory tower is only out of reach if writers convince themselves that is so. The ivory tower is within every writer’s possibilities if they continue to sharpen their craft and keep plugging away, even in the face of the millionth rejection letter. The danger of the small press is that writers often conquer it, and grow fat there as the big fish in the little pond. They become lazy and comfortable, when in truth; the small press is only a stepping-stone in the writer’s pursuit of their dreams, be that publisher or published. Sorry, that’s not one word, but that’s a complicated question for me.

Xenith’s readers may not have the fortune of knowing that Male, Pale, and Old is actually the second project of its kind. Not quite a year ago you released another compendium of authors: Don’t Call Me Plath: 12 Outstanding Women of the Small Press. What was the inspiration for this project?

I did Don’t Call Me Plath because I noticed an attitude in the small press of ‘all these great male writers and a couple of token women that write pretty good’. However, I was noticing that there were a lot of women writing really well that weren’t getting the attention they deserved, and the handful of women who were getting attention in the small press were writing mainly with a borrowed dick. I wanted to draw attention to women whose work was leaps and bounds above those who I saw catering to what they felt men wanted to read, especially those who I knew hadn’t been published before, such as Sana Rafiq. Some of the things she writes in her blog or in the LiteraryMary newsletter absolutely astound me. She is jaw droppingly intelligent and razor sharp. However, no one had heard of her. I called the project Don’t Call Me Plath because, as a female writer myself, I have so often heard my own work compared to Plath when it is nothing like it at all. Women who write deserve acknowledgement for who they are and the unique voice they have developed, not placated with an easy, incorrect comparison. That was my aim with Plath.

Has your purpose changed at all with Male, Pale, and Old? What did you have in mind for the final project?

My purpose with Male, Pale, and Old has remained true. It started out with fewer writers than we have now, but the vision is the same. As a feminist, I see how easy it is for women to get caught up in this anger, making men into the easy enemy when that is just not the case. There are many bad men out there, but there are many bad women too. There are many bad people. Blaming men for all our troubles is too easy. There is no solution in it, either. White men, especially, get a bum rap in this society. I address this some in the intro to the project, but it’s a question I’ve wrestled with a lot in women’s studies courses. Just because a man is a white male does not mean he’s automatically had advantages others have not. Even white men face tremendous struggles in life. There are burdens carried only by men that women would never want to carry. What I mean is that we all have our struggles. I prefer to be in it together than separated. I prefer to celebrate what is good in everyone rather than concentrating on what others have had that I have not. Therefore, this project, in my own little way, was created to celebrate men and their unique voices, to illustrate their stories, their experiences and how these experiences enrich the world we all live in.

The collection features a variety of writers, all from different backgrounds and disciplines. Speaking strictly as an editor, what would you say you admire in the writers featured in Male, Pale, and Old? What do you see as a writer’s greatest strengths?

I admire their skill. Each of them does what they do in a different way, but none less skillfully than the other does. I admire their sincerity and their sense of humor. I admire their dedication. I see these things as their greatest strengths. Skill, sincerity, sense of humor, dedication. Each of these men possesses it.

LiteraryMary also publishes an annual print journal. How would you describe your own personal experience with managing a publication from its inception to its distribution? Is there anything that surprised you?

Jenifer Wills

Conversely, how would you describe the process of publishing Male, Pale, and Old?

For me, the online supplements are more personal. I get to know each writer, where as with the journal, it is just about the writing. I see their photographs, family members, books they’ve published, art or scribbling. These things contain so much of their personality. I converse with them one-on-one to figure out what they want, what they need, what they want to draw attention to and sometimes to haggle over a photograph of their face, which for some reason the men are less likely to want to show than the women. It’s a more artful process, because there are more than just the words on a page. What I am seeking to project is personality. It takes a lot longer and I could not ever afford to publish it in print.

Here’s a question that all young writers might like to have answered. When reading for the journal, do you have any rules? Is there anything that makes or breaks a submission? What turns you off? What gets you hot?

This time around, we’ve been looking for things that are fresh. Anything that reads stale and safe is out. We want to read a piece and go ‘Wow, now this is different’. Nothing is going in of which we are less than thrilled. However, that doesn’t mean we want to read things that aren’t written well. Pieces should be tight. Spelling, punctuation, grammar – those things are a big deal to us. If a piece is full of spelling mistakes, we assume the writer probably doesn’t take it very seriously and so neither do we. If a piece could have been improved with some device or another that a writer just didn’t employ, we figure they aren’t quite ready.

Earlier I asked you to eloquently encapsulate the spirit of the small press. Now that you’ve described it, is there anywhere you’d like to see it go? Is there anything missing?

Again, risking biting the hand that feeds, I would like to see the small press go anywhere besides where it’s stuck now. I would like to see small press writers challenge themselves, go where they haven’t yet, tread water that they feel isn’t safe. I would like to see small press writers read beyond what everyone else is reading and expand their capabilities. I’d like to see the small press work to publish writers besides the ones who have been carrying their journals for years now. I would like to see true growth, incorporating things we haven’t seen in a long time, maybe even the dreaded (gasp!) form poem or rhyme! What the small press has been missing as far as I’m concerned is freshness, excitement, newness, danger. Everyone reads and knows Bukowski like the back of their hand, everyone writes at least somewhat like Bukowski. A writer may incorporate a technique here or there, a device Bukowski wouldn’t have used, but the subject matter is dishearteningly similar. We’ve all been writing the same poem or story for years now. I think that’s why I haven’t been writing much lately. I want to work my way out of that trap. Until I’m inspired to do so, I just won’t write much. I’d rather write nothing than to keep banging out the same mediocre poem repeatedly.

Just so you know, I know a few poets who do form like nobody’s business.

Laughing. If you’ve got some form for me, sweet cheeks, send it on over to the journal. I’d love to publish it.

That’s why you’re the best. But again regarding the small press–does LiteraryMary have any upcoming publications or plans to help facilitate this transformation?

Everything LiteraryMary does is aimed at accomplishing this goal. We might not always accomplish it, but we are trying. It’s how we run the website. It’s why we closed and reopened it with a quarter of the members we had upon closing. It’s how we go about choosing submissions that will make it into the journal. It hasn’t always made us appear as the nicest guys on the internet, but that is not our goal.

If you had to sum up your existence as an editor in a haiku, what would you tell us?

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Male, Pale, and Old is available for download here.

Jenifer Wills lives with four incredible kids, two arrogant cats, and one very special man in an apartment that is way too small in Portland, Oregon. She is happy.

Yes, the term art stems from artifice, fiction is by definition false, and poetry is a construct of words, but readers—those lovers of the fabricated—almost always favor that which treads closest to fact; and by fact I mean the transpired, the suffered, the believed and dreamed, the considered and caressed, the undergone, the breathed, and all else sincere. We look for that which condenses and presents the human experience in text: underneath the vehicles of plot and character, metaphor and symbol, there is the communicative pulse made easy to hear, and we’re kept alive by its rhythm.

Including myself in that life-seeking group of readers, I’m always pleased to find something that presents a little piece of life. Having read her first chapbook, Skidding Through the Mud Incognito, I am lead to believe that Jenifer Wills, editor of Literary Mary, most definitely has that eye that creates fact. Her style of poetry, reminiscent of the bold statements of Bukowski—one of her primary influences—is not at all what I would normally read, but I’m very glad I did. From the first line of the first poem, she introduces us to a life as hard, as dark, and as stunning as any in the world of fact:

The blood came when I was still young

From there we go on to feel love, loss, responsibility, fear, maturity, acceptance, and everything else felt on rough roads. In “I Said the Wrong Thing Again,” there is a sense of aching disillusionment with love, expressed simply through the fate of a pink t-shirt and some make-up. This collection is a multifaceted aria of one who has lived and lived again, hard and soft moments alike.

There are a few pieces where the focus is lost, such as in “Thoughts on Law Enforcement,” which could have been integrated more smoothly with the rest of the poems, but overall it’s strong from start to finish. The sense of reality, again, saturates each page—a world not our own but a strong and affecting copy, peppered by gloom and bound by hope.

Skidding Through the Mud Incognito is available through erbacce press:

Skidding Through the Mud Incognito