Recently, literary magazine and website Entropy interviewed Stillhouse Press Acquisitions Editor Rebecca Burke, MFA'21, about Stillhouse Press's dual mission of serving as a teaching press and uplifting voices outside of mainstream publishing, forthcoming projects, and the challenges of running a small press. Read the full interview here.
Eclectic is a good word for our aesthetic, I think. Our MFA students, undergraduates, and, increasingly, alumni are involved in the publishing process at every step, from reading and reviewing manuscripts to making decisions about what we should publish to working on the editorial teams preparing accepted manuscripts for publication. Because our students graduate, and new students come in to take over these roles, our taste in books varies a little bit every year. We try to adhere to one central aesthetic: We like books that tread off the beaten path of traditional publishing, books that big publishing wouldn’t embrace with the same enthusiasm. We want something that pushes the envelope, that doesn’t make a reader feel like they’ve picked up another book that fits into some formula that’s supposedly guaranteed to sell copies.— Rebecca Burke