Pleasure as a Means of Active Survival: Interview with Gap Riot Press
Gap Riot Press is a neat little women-run feminist press that publishes experimental, visual, innovative, and genre-blurring work by primarily Canadian poets that push the limits of poetry. Gap Riot is run in conversation and collaboration. Gap Riot believes in big ideas and small runs, in inexpensive chapbooks with hand-made touches, in royalty payments and spreading the wealth, in the meaningful merger of generosity and accountability. Gap Riot loves the weird and the wonderful and takes quite a bit of pleasure in poetry. #mindthegap #jointheriot
Kate Siklosi lives, writes, and thinks in Dish With One Spoon Territory / Toronto. She is the curator of the Small Press Map of Canada, has published five chapbooks of poetry, and her work has also been featured in various magazines and small press publications across North America, Europe, and the UK.
Dani Spinosa is a poet of digital and print media, an on-again-off-again precarious professor, and the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory. She has published several chapbooks of poetry, several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry, one long scholarly book, and one pink poetry book.
In this interview, Sarah and Manahil chat with Kate and Dani about Gap Riot, pleasure, and publication.
To learn more about Gap Riot, check out their website, gapriotpress.com, and follow them on Twitter @gapriotpress and Facebook.
Canthius: Hi Kate and Dani! It’s so great to chat with you. To start out, what does pleasure mean to you?
Gap Riot: In the Bikini Kill song “I Like Fucking,” Kathleen Hanna says “I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe.” For us, that’s the thing that defines the pleasurable. It’s different from desire, different from satiation or joy.
Canthius: What do you see as the difference between pleasure, desire, joy, and satiation?
Gap Riot: The borders between are blurry, for sure. And they all feel great, especially in the moment. But there’s the rub: it seems that pleasure and satiation are more like triggered responses from external stimuli, and are immediate and fleeting, whereas joy and desire are cultivated conditions that are more sustained.
Canthius: What feels pleasurable to publish?
Gap Riot: Anything that gets our hands dirty. Silk screening. Hand-stitching. Huddling in the printing section of a Staples cutting out poems while other customers watch, confused. Touching textured cardstock in David’s printing garage. Sitting in a coffee shop with Rasiqra Revulva tying brightly-coloured ribbons around poetry chapbooks. We take a lot of pleasure out of the physical end of our publishing.
Canthius: You’ve described your press as a “labour of love”. How do pleasure, fatigue and labour figure in your work? Do you have any recommendations for new presses on how to navigate all the work?
Gap Riot: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR - haha just joking but also not really. This one is both easy and tough for us - easy because we’re freakin besties and we get to do this work together. Tough because although we love it, it is a heckin lot of work, especially when we both work full time jobs and are ambitious AF in our own rights. So we are continually balancing the work, and we do it without taking it or ourselves too seriously.
For new presses, we always say take a good long look in that mirror, girl, and be honest with yrself about what you’re capable of doing while still loving the work…for us that was setting ourselves up in such a way that we could work with a printer, for instance, which isn’t the most cost-effective way of doing things, but we like supporting others and we like bringing them into the work. And honestly, it also one less thing for us to worry about so we can focus on publishing more books and supporting more rad authors.
Canthius: You describe Gap Riot as “anarchist at heart and communal by nature.” How do you decide on which works fit this vision of Gap Riot?
Gap Riot: We go with what moves us, challenges us, and feels necessary and urgent. We like stuff that brings the world in, and speaks—through either form, content, or both—to the collective. So we are really into collaborative works in all the senses of that term. We love Ellen Chang-Richardson and Isa He’s collaborative writing and illustration in snap, pop, performance. We love Terese Mason Pierre soliciting Mia Carnevale’s cover art for Manifest. We love Alexei Perry Cox working with and through Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” in Revolution/ Re: Evolution.
In terms of the straight up decision making process, we constantly joke that we never really disagree with each other, but it’s true! Maybe it’s the gaps between our teeth—they’re like little portals to this idyllic communal Xanadu where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. We both have a common feeeeeeling in our bellies about what Gap Riot is and looks like, and when a submission comes in that speaks to that vision, we just kind of know. We also get a literal heck ton of submissions, so it’s always difficult to not publish people that do fit in with our vision, but alas, we have to balance publishing everyone with our limited resources and time.
Canthius: Terese Mason Pierre’s chapbook, Manifest, is a work of speculative poetry. How does the fantastical intersect with the literary?
Gap Riot: How doesn’t it?! Doesn’t everything literary begin with at least a glimmer of fantasy?
Canthius: Ashley Hynd’s chapbook, Entropy, is a suite of break-up poems. How can reading about heartbreak be a form of pleasure?
Gap Riot: Well, we’ve all been there, and it can be difficult to put into words just how shitty heartbreak feels. But, as Hynd’s work demonstrates, language and poetry has a way of playing with the indescribable, of breaking it apart and open and reveling in its pieces. Her use of white space, and the arrangement of fragments on the page, for example, recalls the fragmented feeling of heartbreak while also playing with its affect to explore a new means of feeling it through.
snap, pop, performance by Ellen Chang-Richardson and illustrated by Isa He
Canthius: How do you work with your authors, especially for the works that are more experimental? We absolutely loved Ellen Chang-Richardson’s chap, snap, pop, performance. Is publishing experimental forms different from more traditional forms?
Gap Riot: We like to be as collaborative as possible with our authors—this is their work after all, and we just want to make it shine (quite literally as in the case of Ellen’s chap—that babe’s cover is shimmery AF). That being said, we have found that in general, it’s a bit easier to work with experimental/visual poets, because they tend to think more consciously about what the final printed book page will look like, and write accordingly. Experimental works tend to be a challenge to typeset at times, but they’re also fun in that way. Also some writers, especially those who are just starting out, format their submissions according to an 8.5 x 11 Word document. No no no girl - get them poems down to a half letter or half legal, and then we’re talking.
Canthius: How does your press make space for collective imaginations and collaborations?
Gap Riot: We’ve built a production model whereby we can allocate resources to having collective input on our publications, whether it be by hiring editors, artists, and working with our printer, David Bernstein at Product Photo Inc., who always has the most wonderful and creative ideas. We get a lot of energy from these collaborations, and we want to do more of this in the future so the press becomes more truly a collective enterprise of the communal imagination…stay tuned!
Canthius: I know Kate is also an academic, so how do you see pleasure as something to take seriously, in an academic sense?
Gap Riot: Both of us are academics (and have the scars to prove it) and we’ve learned to not take anything “seriously, in an academic sense,” especially if “seriously” means “not pleasurable.”
That being said, we do love the ways writers and thinkers write and think through pleasure as a concept, a tool, a means of active survival--as in the case of our Lorde and saviour who describes pleasure and self-care as “political warfare” or M. NourbeSe Philip, who reminds us that “To love! is to resist.” And while the academy is rife with bullshit on a good day, to us it can be a place of great pleasure. It’s so bougie—in the best and worst ways—to be able to sit in a room with smart, interesting people and talk about books and call that work. It’s absolutely pleasurable and a goddamn privilege. It’s also a pleasurable privilege to teach—again, being conscious of the precarity of most of the academy’s labour (#solsolsolidarity), the classroom can (should) be this beautiful site of wonder and opportunity and inspiration. Lighting the fires of young minds is a particular pleasure we both enjoy.
Canthius: Thank you so much for these generous answers, Kate and Dani!