Dzanc Books Announces Launch of New Imprint, Graver Goods Press
Ann Arbor (October 2, 2023) – Dzanc Books is thrilled to announce a new publishing partnership with Graver Goods Press, a groundbreaking imprint founded by editors Bret Gladstone and Daniel Wallace.
Graver Goods is a non-profit literary organization based in service work and dedicated to the publication of radically attentive writing. Designed as a research institute for the literary arts, the Graver Goods initiative also shelters Impracticum, a vocational school offering its own intensive curriculum of workshops, seminars and lectures conducted by innovative writers across literary disciplines.
Graver Goods Press is committed to publishing startling and decreative work which meets the world on its own mysterious terms. Its inaugural releases will be Joe Wenderoth’s genre-dissolving manifesto Agony: A Proposal, and the second volume of Wenderoth’s celebrated epistolary novel Letters to Wendy’s.
Graver Goods is also proud to announce the forthcoming publication of performance artist Chris Erickson’s debut novella Henrytown—a contemporary American folktale which plays on the page like an old-world variety show crackling between frequencies.
Inspired by Anne Carson’s concept of “the lyric lecture,” the press is also planning to publish a series of “commonplace books” to report upon ideas explored in Impracticum courses. Gladstone and Wallace said the project will be dedicated to renowned Columbia Professor Richard Locke, who passed away in August and whose lectures celebrated teaching as its own literary genre.
“We’re grateful to be supported by a press which has worked so earnestly for writers in the margins of the marketplace,” said Graver Goods founder Bret Gladstone. “Michelle and Steve have built such a distinctive archive of work, and they’ve supported authors who have inspired us. We see this as a special opportunity to place our writers in a well-respected recording studio where serious producers are listening from one sentence to the next, making trustworthy decisions to amplify that craftsmanship, and where writers can recklessly explore the limitations of form because they know their work is protected in that space. It’s tremendously meaningful because we’re in the company of brilliant and compassionate writers who deserve that support. This is really a celebration of Joe’s work, and Chris’s work, and of the writers who stepped forward to teach our first classes and put the curriculum in place.”
About Impracticum
Impracticum is a formal apprenticeship school for writers and an experimental sanctuary for teaching as a literary art form. The program insists upon practical intelligence and physical labor as transformational forces in any creative life: While studying with some of the most innovative writers in the world, Impracticum students are required to meet weekly work obligations chosen by faculty members. These might range from animal shelters and community gardening projects to repairs on the homes of local families. Strictly by teaching these courses, Impracticum instructors are supporting projects they care about and generating change beyond the classroom.
Over the first eight weeks of the Impracticum program, Joe Wenderoth led his class through a deeply procedural reading of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs.
In January 2020, Guggenheim winner Catherine Lacey conducted “The Practical Writer”—a seminar which invited students to write their way through a rigorous eight-week “obstacle” course of reading assignments and creative writing prompts.
And in March 2021, celebrated author and filmmaker David Shields taught “Eight Prison Breaks: Beyond Traditional Narrative.” Shields investigated a variety of formal strategies to subvert readerly expectations: Brevity and Journal; Collage, Remix and Appropriation; Photo, Film and Collaboration. Students were encouraged to see books, stories, essays, and novels less as pitiful linear operations than open-ended experiments.
Renowned writer Dawn Raffel’s interdisciplinary workshop helped students bring their full human attention to the practices of composition and editing while also surfacing deeper layers of consciousness through yoga and meditation.
“It’s moving to me how immediately Dzanc was capable of imagining Impracticum as a serious vocational institute for writers,” said Gladstone. “The most important projects I’ve encountered have almost invariably started with small groups of people who are obsessively interested in a discipline and thinking very carefully about the conditions which make real explorative attention possible. I think about what someone like Abraham Flexner was capable of creating at IAS, just by loving science and insisting upon curiosity—how that institute became a refuge for unprotected thought, for physicists escaping fascism, for brilliant women in science and mathematics who were barred from the best graduate schools. I think of David Krakauer and Cormac McCarthy’s work at the Santa Fe Institute—an extraordinary place which seems to genuinely recognize literature as a centrifuge for interdisciplinary thought. I also think about what Grove Press was capable of accomplishing—and how socially useful it became—strictly by being in love with literature and fiercely defending its writers. We’re speaking about a small press which immediately starts publishing landmark experimental theatre, becomes a spearhead in the fight against obscenity laws, introduces Samuel Beckett’s entire body of work to America, and then goes on to publish Malcolm X, Barry Hannah, Kenzaburo Oe, Tom Stoppard, Jean Genet, Denis Cooper, Helen McDonald, Claudia Rankine… The longer the list becomes, the more complicated and chaotic and irreducibly unique the underlying algorithm seems. We’re trained to read that diversity as an ideological statement. But it’s worth remembering that systems in nature produce that kind of diversity and complexity at every moment just by keeping themselves alive. They’re constantly tuning themselves to their environments as sensitively as they can to protect these simple homeostatic principles. They’re constantly reorganizing themselves; constantly producing unpredictability and heterogeneity by responding to the world as adaptively as possible. That’s the simple and profound point people at the Santa Fe Institute keep making, and it should be applied to literature: Complexity is the emergent signature of a system working to preserve life. I think you can feel the texture of that complexity in good writing. Good sentences, read closely, always feel fish-scaled and foliated with the same patterns of complexity you see in living systems—especially the simplest and clearest ones, which are famously the most mysterious. Assonances, consonances, alliterations, iterations, negations, contradictions: It’s important that all the formal properties we associate with poetic beauty are also hallmark features of complex systems. That really lovely word Chilean biologists coined to describe self-organization—autopoiesis—even contains the root word for poetry. That’s important, I think. Watch what’s happening in any good poem or prose passage and you’ll recognize the same kinds of self-replicating behaviors we see in nature. There’s something adaptive and responsive about musical sentences––a sense of something repeatedly recreating itself out of the same constituent symbols and sounds; of language naturally generating all those unpredictable patterns in the process of registering reality. When Joy Williams tells us that good writing “startles the reader back into Life,” we should take that literally. We should think about what Don DeLillo really means when he says that a sentence “speaks the writer’s will to live.” These are records of our will to live. We’re remembering what consciousness feels like when it’s fully fixed on the world; when we’re absorbed in the business of being alive. I think that’s what the practice of close reading is really helping us recognize at the deepest biological level. If you read across disciplines for the physiological impact of those sentences—for writing which makes you maximally present—you’ll naturally discover a really startling and diverse body of literature. We built the program to explore that premise and make it useful to other people.”
About Dzanc Books
At its founding, Dzanc Books was hailed as “the future of publishing” in Publishers Weekly in December 2007. Beginning with modest goals of publishing four to six titles each year, the house now publishes between ten to fifteen books annually. Notable and award-winning authors include Charles Johnson (National Book Award), Lindsey Drager (Shirley Jackson Award winner, Lambda Literary Award finalist), Chaya Bhuvaneswar (PEN/Bingham Award finalist), Josip Novakovich (finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize), and Lee Martin (Pulitzer Prize finalist).
In the thirteen years since its founding, Dzanc has published over 224 original works, including 87 works by debut authors. We’ve restored more than 290 titles that were either out of print or unavailable through the Dzanc rEprint series. In 2011, Dzanc Books also founded the Disquiet International Literary Program, a two-week annual workshop in Lisbon, Portugal. Past guests of honor and instructors include Colson Whitehead, George Saunders, Denis Johnson, Sam Lipsyte, and Tayari Jones. The press is also working to establish a Dzanc writing residency in Greenfield, MA, and a low-cost Dzanc Mentorship Program for aspiring writers.For more information, visit www.dzancbooks.org.