Interview with Writer and Publisher Raymond Luczak

WG: Raymond, Handtype Press has come out with two books this fall that reflect the disability experience, John Lee Clark's Where I Stand and your own From Heart into Art, yet probably few people know about the press. Can you talk a bit about how Handtype Press got started and its underlying philosophy?

RL: Before I can talk about Handtype Press, I need to talk about The Tactile Mind Press (TTM). John Lee Clark and Adrean Clark started TTM in around 2000 as a way to publish The Tactile Mind Quarterly (TTMQ). TTMQ featured the creative work of writers from the Deaf and signing communities. I had my poems and short fiction published in a number of their issues. When I first appeared in TTMQ, I had only two books published. In the summer of 2002 TTM published the first editions of my books Silence Is a Four-Letter Word: On Art & Silence and This Way to the Acorns as well as two of my full-length documentaries Guy Wonder: Stories & Artwork and Nathie: No Hand-Me-Downs for release on DVD. When TTM was unfortunately shut down in December 2005, I was very sad. To my knowledge, TTM was the only publishing company in the world that focused on the creative aspects of the signing experience as opposed to cranking out sign language manuals and instructional books for hearing parents with deaf babies.

Prior to TTM shutting down, though, I had decided that it was high time to look for new material for my next anthology Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader now that my first book Eyes of Desire: A Deaf Gay & Lesbian Reader (EOD) was officially twelve years old and out of print. What was the Deaf LGBT community thinking right now? I've always felt that EOD was more a historical document of how we'd thought and felt at that time, which was why I was eager to see how much, if any, had changed more than a decade later. I didn't have a publisher for my second anthology at the time, but I went ahead anyway. I put out the call for submissions in January 2005. I had no idea that by the time 2005 ended, I would've spent a total of two months in England and Europe and relocated from New York City to Minneapolis, Minnesota. I continued to review and edit submissions that came in as well as seek out those who had unique stories to share. It became clear to me that I needed to make the book more international in scope.

By January 2007, none of my queries at prospective LGBT-friendly publishers turned up an offer. I wasn't sure what to do. I had seen firsthand from TTM how expensive publishing could be. Did I truly want to become a publisher? (Remember, this was way before print-on-demand [POD] firms were able to produce quality books without lopsided spines, faintly-printed text, and so on. The many mechanical glitches did not impress me so POD wasn't an option.) But I never forgot what happened to me when I was in Nuremburg, Germany in November 2005. My Deaf gay host brought me to this old building in a part of town close to the train station. I followed him up the stairs and entered a medium-sized room. The door showed that it was the local LGBT community center, but that wasn't what stunned me. A group of twelve to thirteen Deaf people were sitting around a long table, and most of them had a copy of EOD in front of them. You have to keep in mind that EOD was available in only the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK. I didn't know Deaf German Signs very well, so my host interpreted for me. Basically, it had been very important to them to own a copy of EOD because it meant that they existed. It validated their identity, their lives. I was very moved. As a writer and editor, I rarely hear from readers so I have no idea of whether, or how, my work may affect others. The more I thought about this incident, the more I realized that I had to do something about Eyes of Desire 2. I explored what my options were as a publisher and so on, and once I came up with the name Handtype Press and checked to see if handtype.com was available, I couldn't believe my luck. I grabbed that domain name and the rest is history. Well, not exactly, but some six months later, in October 2007, I brought out Eyes of Desire 2. I used an offset printer, which is what nearly all traditional publishers use for their books, so I was very pleased with the build quality of Eyes of Desire 2.

It was a lot of work to lay out the book (putting together a 400-page book as my first InDesign project was a real trial by fire), learn how to prepare it for printing, promote it, and give readings around the country. Of course, I had a few writers express an interest in having Handtype publish their books, but the problem with offset titles is that it's a lot more work to break even because you have all this inventory sitting there. I was more interested in keeping costs low and breaking even for the next few years, which was why I didn't seek to publish another book. (The only exception was John Lee Clark's chapbook Suddenly Slow in December 2008.) I didn't want to accrue a massive debt and be forced to shut down Handtype after only two titles.

However, by 2011, things were changing tremendously in publishing. I had paid close attention to what Amazon was trying to do with their Kindle ereader, but I sensed that ebooks wouldn't be ready to go mainstream. In the spring of 2010, though, when Apple announced its first iPad, which was indeed far more versatile than the ereader-only Kindle, and when Steve Jobs made a point of paying ebook writers 70% of the retail cost of their ebooks (I think Amazon was paying their Kindle authors a lot less back then), I went, "A-ha. This will change the ball game." Also, by then I noticed that the build quality of POD books had improved considerably. The spines weren't wobbly; the glue inside the spines wasn't bulky; the four-color printing on the cover no longer looked strangely fuzzy; the text was much easier to read on the page.

When Queer Mojo brought out my novel Men with Their Hands, I learned of their POD firm and investigated my options. The costs were quite reasonable. I decided to bring out the tenth anniversary editions of Silence Is a Four-Letter Word and This Way to the Acorns as a test run because fans and readers had been asking me over the years if I had extra copies of those books left over from TTM. I'm very proud of how these two books have turned out. The setup costs for those two books were quite low compared to the expense involved with Eyes of Desire 2. By then Kristen Ringman, a writer whose work I've always loved ever since I'd published an excerpt from her novel Makara in Eyes of Desire 2, happened to pop up on my Facebook newsfeed. I'd decided to ask her what was happening with Makara , and she said she was waiting to hear back from yet another publisher. I immediately asked for a copy. By the time she got the rejection from that publisher, I immediately offered her a contract. Her book came out about six months later and eventually got nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. I really enjoyed working with Kristen on that book, and I thought that this was something I'd be very happy to continue.

When I decided to publish books by other people, I knew that I needed to be strict about the number of titles I'd choose for any given year. I needed to have time for my own writing career in addition to doing a number of odd jobs to help pay the bills, which is why I prefer to bring out only two or three books a year via Handtype Press and its LGBT imprint Squares & Rebels. (S&R focuses on the LGBT experience in the Midwest, which may or may not have anything to do with disability. S&R has brought out three anthologies along with its latest title by Gregg Shapiro, whose book Lincoln Avenue: Chicago Stories has gotten a lot of press earlier this fall.) The small number of titles per year means that I can spend more time with each writer.

POD--and the relative ease of creating ebooks--has made it rather affordable for micropresses to bring out quality titles. Granted, the fact that I've done a number of book layout jobs for other publishers has helped given me the confidence to do a lot of production stuff in-house when it comes to Handtype and S&R titles so I haven't needed to hire a layout designer. Nearly all Handtype and S&R titles have at least broken even; some have naturally outsold others, but overall it's all evened out. This is why Handtype Press is still alive after seven years.

Part of the reason why I haven't been aggressive about seeking new manuscripts is that I don't want to be overwhelmed, but the funny thing is, as of right now, I currently don't have anything slated for 2015. I'm still awaiting a certain book from a wonderful writer friend of mine, but she hasn't delivered it yet. I do move very fast once I accept a book, however. It's a tough balancing act between my own writing career and my focus as publisher.

WG: Your discovery of the German readers of Eyes of Desire is really is an amazing anecdote. I think it is the sort of story that a lot of authors or editors would like to be able to tell about your work. Even though, the output of Handtype Press is modest, you have put out two books this year. Can you talk about the creation of From Heart into Art, which includes an amazing number of interviews? It must have been interesting to be both editor and publisher.

RL: In the summer of 2003, I was asked to join the new newspaper startup SIGNews. I was their Culture Editor, which meant I was responsible for writing features about the world of entertainment and editing the work of columnists. Early on, when I was asked to interview a "celebrity" every month, I didn't know what kind of a challenge it would be. I had thought that everyone wanted to be interviewed, but it gradually dawned on me that Deaf artists were markedly different from hearing artists in one respect. It seems that within our community, Deaf people aren't supposed to promote themselves. I suspect this is because the Deaf community is small enough, even on a national scale, that it feels as if everyone knows each other, so therefore why bother with promoting their work? Whereas hearing artists are very mindful of how many more artists they have to compete with in terms of mindshare and media attention, so if I wanted to interview a hearing nonsigner artist, it would be very easy to find one within minutes. But Deaf artists? It occasionally felt as if I was scraping the bottom of a barrel! I had to think outside the box in terms of what kind of artists to interview, which is why my book includes people not typically considered artists but also hearing allies. I ended up spending more time asking around and tracking down potential subjects. In hindsight, it was a genuine miracle that I was able to find so many. For nine years, I interviewed over 100 artists, but for purposes of this book, I pared it down and added some new unpublished pieces.

When SIGNews went on hiatus in the spring of 2012, I immediately went through all those interviews and chose the ones I felt that were still relevant to the ongoing discussion of what it means to be a part of the Deaf artist community. I shopped the book proposal among a number of publishers, and I was disappointed that most of them did not respond at all; not even an email acknowledgment of "thanks but no thanks." I don't mind rejection, but I do mind it when an editor doesn't even respond. If I've been willing to invest some time and energy in making my proposal as clear and concise as it can be, the very least I should expect is a form rejection letter. By the spring of 2014, I was getting ready to spend a month away in Red Wing, Minnesota where I was one of the five artists in the very first incarnation of the Deaf Artists Residency Program at the Anderson Center. Being with four other Deaf artists for a whole month was extraordinary. We talked constantly about what it meant to do what we do, and those discussions reaffirmed my decision to bring out From Heart into Art. The book came out a few months later.

Before I went down to Red Wing, I had the initial idea of putting it out as an ebook-only edition, but a librarian friend said that libraries still preferred print books. Whenever I edit my own work for publication, I never do it all by myself. I have an editor friend who reads my books in galleys, and he did catch a number of "oops." (Remember, SIGNews had already edited the vast majority of interviews prior to its original publication.) It's my hope that I'll finish the ebook edition by the end of the year. From Heart into Art wasn't the first time that I worked as both editor and publisher. I did this when I decided to reprint Silence Is a Four-Letter Word: On Art & Deafness and This Way to the Acorns: Poems, which TTM had published ten years earlier. (I believe Wordgathering has posted reviews of both books.) While it wasn't a problem to bring out This Way to the Acorns, my experience with Silence Is a Four-Letter Word was a bit tougher because I had written new observations that reflected the ten years since the book's initial publication. On top of trying to weave the new notes into the book as well as reordering some sections and deleting a few along the way, I was very mindful of how hard it is to be objective about one's own work. While some may say that I'm a prolific writer, I've long resisted the temptation to self-publish just anything. I suspect that in the future, many writers will straddle both the self-publishing model (usually ebooks) for their less commercial titles and the traditional publishing model for their more commercial work. Readers do not seem to care so much whether a book was self-published as long as it's tightly edited and professionally presented. The traditional method still holds a great deal of value because it means that one's work has been curated; considered good enough to beat out other submissions to warrant publication. Regardless of who's published it, readers expect quality in terms of writing and presentation. I am fortunate that my work was strong enough for publishers to bring out long before the POD and ebook revolution happened. This means I have some credibility to fall back on should I decide to be more aggressive about self-publishing. For the time being, though, I am still seeking an agent as well as opportunities to submit my novels.

WG: I was not aware of the Deaf Artists Residency Program. Can you tell us a bit more about it? What is the nature of the residency? What kinds of activities were you as artists involved in?

RL: The Deaf Artists Residency Program was really Cynthia Weitzel's idea. She felt it was important to have a safe space for Deaf artists where information accessibility wouldn't be a barrier in the sense that everyone signed in ASL. It was a fantastic experience, mainly because we shared different perspectives on a matter of art-related topics, and we all had worked in different disciplines. Spending a month with four other Deaf artists as well as Cynthia Weitzel herself only affirmed the importance of getting From Heart into Art out into the world. As for the residency itself, there were really no specific activities except that we were to do as much as we can of our proposed work plans, and that we got together at around 6 p.m. where Chef Amy prepared a meal for all of us. That was our time to know each other better; most of the time, we all followed our own schedules in terms of working. We all lived in the same house, which was beautiful and meticulously kept. I still can't believe that I was among the first group chosen for the pilot program, which was a huge resounding success. It's my hope that the Anderson Center will offer it again, possibly in June 2016. (For more information about the program and its future, you should get in touch with Cynthia herself.)

WG: One of the great joys of being an editor and publisher is the opportunity that it provides you to discover talented writers and get their work out to a wider audience. While I know you don't want to highlight one writer's work over another, are there some writers whose work you really wish the public had a much greater opportunity to read?

RL: Most people in the disability literature community are most likely aware of John Lee Clark's momentous contributions to Deaf literature. I'm very proud to have published his last two books Deaf Lit Extravaganza and Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience , and I hope to work with him again. But people should really pay more attention to Kristen Ringman's work. When I first read her novel Makara in manuscript, my reaction was immediate. It wasn't just her way with words that compelled me to turn the page for more, but also her unique vision that blended a touch of magical realism into a powerful story of loss and redemption. In the story, the narrator's mother is a seal who was human for only seven years. Typically I'd have rolled my eyes at such a premise as I am admittedly not a huge fan of fantasy or the like. Yet her scrumptious prose, so full of sensory recall revolving around a Deaf lesbian as the main character, made it impossible for me to resist that I had to publish it. It's that good; in fact, it won a finalist nomination in the Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction category. It's a real shame that other publishers hadn't snapped her up sooner, so I still feel incredibly lucky to be the one to publish her first book. She deserves every bit of success, and she will get noticed in the big leagues. It's only a matter of time.

WG: As a small publisher, Handtype Press needs to be pretty selective about the work that it chooses to publish. Can you talk about what you look for in a work that is submitted to you? Conversely, what kind of submissions do you not want to see?

RL: I'm open to a lot of things, but I'm not interested in "inspirational" literature, children's books, or genre fiction (unless it's extraordinarily written like Makara). These days I need to say no to poetry manuscripts, which is very hard to do because I'm a poet myself. For Handtype Press, I'm actually looking for literary fiction and nonfiction about the Deaf experience and/or the signing community. When it comes to nonfiction, John Lee Clark's book Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience is a great example of what I'm looking for. Even though I've been involved with the DeafBlind community for thirty years now, John's book presented a penetrating look that often felt like a revelation. He showed me things I hadn't considered before, and I'd considered myself quite familiar with the DeafBlind experience!

I'd love to consider novels and short story collections, particularly by women as I'd like to address the gender imbalance in our list. I love reading and discovering something new I hadn't thought of before, and this is where the most intangible quality—voice—comes in. The voice in the writing needn't be flashy or gimmicky, but it does need to convey an urgent sense of "Pay attention to me, and I shall make it worth your time." I loved how Carolyn Chute wrote The Beans of Egypt, Maine; that was a stunner. Nicholson Baker is another voice that I love. Sue Hubbell was amazing with her nonfiction books A Country Year and A Book of Bees. Jeffrey Eugenides is another writer I've truly enjoyed reading. Donna Tartt is an intriguing writer; I'm never sure how I feel about her work and yet something about her voice keeps me moving forward. I truly love Sherwood Anderson's writing, and it's not just his masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio. In terms of short fiction, I've never forgotten Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," Jane Smiley's "The Age of Grief," and James Joyce's "The Dead." I read a lot of short fiction collections during the 1980s, so I still remember Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior, Peter Cameron's One Way or Another, Raymond Carver's Cathedral, Susan Minot's Monkeys; and Joyce Carol Oates's The Assignation, In the summer I read a lot of short fiction submissions for Jonathan, a queer male fiction journal I edit for Sibling Rivalry Press, which appears three times a year. (Its seventh issue comes out this December.) Otherwise I read mostly novels and poetry collections these days.

These days, though, I've been toying with the idea of setting up a new disability literature imprint under the aegis of Handtype Press, but I haven't decided yet. It costs money—and time—to publish a book, but if I did happen across a manuscript that knocked me out, well, I'd definitely reconsider. I wish I could bring out a lot of books, but it's really unfortunate that I can't afford to publish a lot more a year. If anything, this means each writer that I accept for publication will get a lot of individual attention from me; thus it becomes more of a collaborative relationship. Writers interested in submitting their prose work should send me the first 20 pages of their completed books along with their bios; no book proposals, please. I'd be equally happy to consider possibilities for the Squares & Rebels imprint For more information, interested reeaders should check out the respective "About" pages at handtype.com and squaresandrebels.com.

WG: Raymond, good luck with Handtype Press; it is definitely something that is much needed and that more people need to know about. Before we finish up is there anything else you wanted to add?

RL: Actually, yes. While I haven't talked about the disability community in this interview, I'd like to say something here. Disabled writers who submit work about disability should be aware that quite a few editors aren't fully aware of their own ableism, particularly when it comes to sexuality and disability in the work. To the non-informed editor, the idea of a wheelchair user having sex with another person may seem circus-freakish, or having a handsome man fall for a woman who uses canes to get around might seem so wrong that his motives has to be very suspect. It doesn't feel "right. " The problem is that disabled writers will have non-informed editors rejecting their work because it may not conform to their unarticulated assumptions about disability, and so it's harder to get published. Put another way, many people would have a very hard time imagining a disabled actor play the character of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. (Would it work if Clark Gable sat in a wheelchair the whole time? Well, why not?) If your reaction to my suggestion of casting such an actor in a leading role that has nothing to do with disability is "Oh, that wouldn't work, " then you need to examine inside yourself why you are feeling that way. Chances are, you've bought into the misinformed notion that able-bodied (and hearing) people are more attractive and therefore sexier than disabled people. Disabled people aren't seen as the fully equal and sexy human beings that they are, and that needs to change. I look forward to the day when a person's disability is seen in the same way a person's hair color might get noticed without comment and not cause consternation.