Here at the Publishing Guide, we are starting a new series called “Conversations.” Every month we will sit down with different professionals from the book publishing industry and understand all that goes on behind the curtain before a book gets to your shelf.
This series was inspired by our first interviewee, Christine Stroud, a talented poet and the editor-in-chief of Autumn House Press. Christine has published two chapbooks, The Buried Return in 2014 and Sister Suite in 2017.
Talking with Christine, I learned so much about her background and passion for poetry. Plus, we also got to touch on her role as a poetry editor.
The Publishing Guide: I think everyone will be interested first in, what made you fall in love with poetry?
Christine Stroud: I guess I’ve always loved it, even when I was young. I’ve always been a reader, and English and literature were always the subjects that I most wanted to do.
When I felt like maybe poetry was something I wanted to do, either write it or work with it. That probably happened in undergrad and college. I was forced to take a class called, Poetry of Perception, and it expanded my view of what contemporary poetry could be.
I had that moment of like oh! This is what poetry is; it excited me. Then, I started writing some myself and reading a lot more.
As far as editing poetry, I guess my love of that started in graduate school, doing workshops with other people, and I got excited about helping them.
The Publishing Guide: We’ve established that you started writing poetry when you were in college. But when did you decide you wanted to do chapbooks?
Christine Stroud: The first Chapbook, The Buried Return, came to be when I had just finished graduate school, and I had my graduate thesis, which was eighty pages. Technically, that itself could have been a full-length book, but that still had some work, so I took twenty poems that were thematically linked and that’s how I created The Buried Return.
While I sent that one out, I created another Chapbook from that same thesis. That one was a bit more about travel rather than family and loss which is the focus of The Buried Return.
Then Sister Sweet, which is a Chapbook of linked prose poems based on a fictional relationship between two sisters. I started writing it in graduate school, and I kept working on it until I had twenty or so poems again, and I felt like I had this complete little narrative.
Then, I met a woman named Michaela Grantham, who with her friend, had started, this experimental Chapbook press, Disorder Press. We started talking, and I said, ‘If you’re open to it, I might have a book that you might be interested in’. I sent it along, and they accepted it.
The Publishing Guide: As a poet, what’s one piece of advice that you would give to all amateur poets when they have an inspirational crisis, and don’t know how to focus their writing?
Christine Stroud: Stop writing for a second. When I’m having a bit of a block, things that get me excited again, are reading a poetry book that I think is really incredible or honestly reading any book I think is incredible, going to a literary event, particularly a poetry reading event and hearing what other people are doing. Going for a walk and remembering you live in a world.
At a certain point, if you are at your computer or you’re at your notebook, and it isn’t happening, sometimes it’s good to take a step back and realize what your ideal practice looks like. And what can you reasonably do? It’s about figuring out what works for you.
The Publishing Guide: With your experience as a poet yourself and as an editor, what do you think makes poets different from other types of writers?
Christine Stroud: I would say that certain attention to detail, obviously all writers have that. Also, a real consideration of language, detail and image. You have such little space in a poem to get the details right, and it is hard to get it done.
It’s interesting cause I’ve worked with fiction writers who started as poets, and you can kind of tell, there’s a sentence-level detail there. You don’t always see that with emerging fiction authors who haven’t written poetry.
I think they just have a real ear for the lyricism and the musicality of the line.
The Publishing Guide: Now that we’ve talked about your life as a poet, I want to focus on your role as an editor. So first, could you tell us a bit more about Autumn House Press?
Christine Stroud: Autumn House Press is a nonprofit independent literary publisher based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That means we’re not connected to a university at all, and we can do things like grants and get funding from National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The press was opened in 1998, as a poetry press only and then over the years expanded to fiction and non-fiction.
The Publishing Guide: Have you noticed one main difference between editing poetry compared to, let’s say, fiction books?
Christine Stroud: Poetry’s faster because there are fewer words, but I would say one of the big differences is with poets, it comes down to copy editing. If I have a poet who’s like, I just don’t write in full sentences, I’m probably more flexible with it than I am, say with a fiction writer. I think it mostly comes down to grammar issues.
The Publishing Guide: Finally, if you can tell us, what are some upcoming projects you’re excited about, whether it is from Autumn House Press, or if you are working on some poetry, we’d love to know that.
Christine Stroud: I’m excited about all of our fall titles that are coming out. Autumn House does a collaborative publishing partnership here in Pittsburgh with the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. We’re publishing through that a book called Discordant by Richard Hamilton. It’s their second collection, and it’s very political and experimental.
Also, next spring of 2024, we’re publishing a second collection by Cameron Burnett. That one’s called Murmur. It’s got these repetitions of poems about a heart murmur, so, that becomes a sort of refrain to the book in a really interesting way.
As far as you know, my work, I’m working on a full-length that is currently entitled The Island, though that might change. I’ll just say, keep an eye out and hopefully, you’ll see in the next couple of years.
Apart from all this incredible insight into her life as a poet and editor, Christine has also given us some great poetry recommendations.
