Dorothy

Nice interview at The Paris Review Blog with Daniel Dutton, publisher of Dorothy press. Great press, too.

And you found the poets you knew weren’t reading fiction and vice versa?

I still know a lot of people like that, actually. I don’t want to generalize—there are plenty of poets who read fiction and fiction writers who read poetry—but there was an area of experimental fiction that seemed overlooked by both camps. A lot that gets lost in the middle. Reaching that middle was the hope—but it’s such a utopian hope.

If publishing books that fall into that gap between narrative and poetry is part of your aim, is the other part publishing works by women?

I wanted to create a space where women felt encouraged to submit their work. Working at Dalkey, I saw that the number of submissions were overwhelmingly from men. Right around this time, too, I was talking about a book with a man who said to me, “I really liked it because five pages in I didn’t know it was written by a woman. I couldn’t tell a woman had written it.” And I thought, Are you kidding me? Are we still talking about this nearly a hundred years after A Room of One’s Own?

The exception so far is Draeger.

Right. Manuela Draeger is the pseudonym for Antoine Volodine, which is a pseudonym for an unknown person who I think is a man. But that book has a weird, hermaphroditic quality to it and a funny gender play that I really liked. The very first line is about how the man who invented fire was a actually woman. I liked that we were publishing a secret man.

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