Small Press Is Beautiful

Dan Cullinane </a><a href="index.php3?iyear=05&inumber=28&eid=36932&iimage=sm28wls19.jpg" target="_top">

AlysonbooksEven after 25 years of operation, the queer press’s most famous title may still be HeatherHasTwoMommies,the 1989 Alyson children’s book that helped satisfy Jesse Helms’ curiosity about gay families. (Helms denounced it from the Senate floor.) Despite the widespread vandalism and theft of library copies, Heatherstill managed to sell over 35,000 units. The real happy ending for Alyson marketing manager Dan Cullinane, however, is that “the world is so different now — there’s sonothing controversial about being gay anymore.” Times have changed. Original publisher Sasha Alyson, who sold the company to Outand TheAdvocatepublisher LPI Media in 1995, now leads adventure hiking tours. Barnes & Noble now carries such racy Alyson titles as the forthcoming how-to orgy manual, SexParties101.The press, which now puts out a formidable 50 titles a year, is also moving into the mainstream with such hetero-friendly titles as PartyLikeaRockStar(EvenWhenYou’rePoorasDirt),written by a fired dot-commer who managed to do just that, journalist Camper English. (“ ‘A great place to score cash and loose change is under the bar,’ ” Cullinane says, excerpting from the book.) But Alyson is and always will be a queer press. Says Cullinane, “We’ll always do fiction, history and erotica, though how and what we publish will reflect changes in the community.” CloverfieldPressGiven the inherent difficulty of establishing a new novelist or short-story writer’s reputation, few small presses dare to take fiction as their métier, at least at first. Newcomer Cloverfield is throwing caution to the wind by inaugurating its catalog with a New Writers’ Series of short fiction. Cloverfield markets its limited-edition books as objets d’art, pairing works by emerging writers (Miranda July, Carol Treadwell) with handsome illustrations from artists at similar stages of their careers. “My wife and I started Cloverfield for the same reasons that drew me to independent film,” says Matthew Greenfield, producer of indie films Chuck&Buck,TheGoodGirland StarMaps,and husband to writer and Cloverfield co-publisher Laurence Dumortier. “There’s a lot of incredible work that wasn’t getting out there. We’ve always believed in the single short story as its own medium, and now we’re getting a chance to test that out.”

Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe live in UglyTown. </a><A HREF="index.php3?iyear=05&inumber=28&eid=36932&iimage=sm28wls23.jpg" TARGET="_top"> UglyTown Crime pays. That’s the lesson to be learned from the success of crime-fiction publisher UglyTown, which, after a decade of publishing mysteries and thrillers, has two dozen titles in print — no small number for a small fiction press — and is launching a new kids’ imprint, UglyKids. (The imprint will specialize in G-rated kids’ stories, not self-esteem books as the name might suggest.)

UglyTown began humbly, as many small presses do, with a vanity project. Back in the Internet boom days, when companies needed “content,” UglyTown publishers and former Hollywood freelance writers Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe decided to create themselves the ultimate business card, By the Balls: A Novel, publishing under the pen name Dashiell Loveless. “We had this notion that as long as we’re making this business card, writing and printing it, we might as well publish and distribute it,” says Fassbender. The team, who subsequently collaborated on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books, decided to forgo the “content providers” title for something more archaic, “book publishers.” “We thought what we’d like to do is offer the wisdom and knowledge we’ve learned over the first two years to like-minded writers,” adds Fassbender, who, in his quest for books that have “a higher purpose than straight mysteries,” looks to greats like Raymond Chandler. “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket,” he quotes. Maybe Chandler’s narrator was just feeling the spine of an UglyTown mystery.