Congratulations on officially taking the reins of West Virginia University Press! Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I was born in Morgantown, left with my partner Susan in our twenties and early thirties to acquire education and work experience, and returned in 1996 to live on her family farm just outside Morgantown, where we’ve raised our two kids. Like a lot of West Virginians, I’m attached to this place in a way that’s difficult to explain or understand, and seems to transcend reason.
I grew up in a media family. Both of my parents were creative professionals. My dad was a news and portrait photographer, and we had a darkroom in the basement. My mom was a radio copywriter and visual artist. My siblings and a number of other relatives are or were involved in creative pursuits as well. I think I either inherited or absorbed a natural comfort with creativity and being in a maker relationship to culture.
Ours was a house filled with books. A facility for language, art and culture were not just encouraged but expected. Spelling was important! And on a given afternoon, you could hear Mom in the back room tapping out 30-second haikus for Sanders Floor Covering on the Remington typewriter. Thinking about it later, I realize I developed an awareness of how things sound, how language and delivery impact meaning and inform understanding, what a “pro” aesthetic is, from those early years observing my mother’s work at the radio station. It was a very fertile environment for a kid who’s interested in culture.
What was your first job after you graduated?
In college at WVU, I had a radio job and maybe had fooled myself that I would go into broadcasting, but something shifted when I quit my radio job to become a dishwasher and got a pay raise. After three years of fumbling halfheartedly toward an English degree, I pressed “pause” and left WVU and moved to London with my eventual partner, Susan, who had just graduated, to experience life from another viewpoint.
When we returned, we had decided to move to greater Boston—she to attend Harvard Divinity School and I to start a four-year program at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts—and for financial aid we both scored work-study jobs at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. I became an exhibits fabricator with a graphic arts focus. For about 20 hours a week, I screenprinted large panels, made a mount or two, printed photos, and designed maps and other exhibit graphics. I spent a lot of time cutting shapes with an X-Acto knife. That felt like my first “real” job.
The other days of the week felt like an entire second life, filled with the more esoteric work I was doing at the Museum School as a student: some painting, some work with experimental artist’s books, some sculpture that tapped into the exhibits work, but I was also really embracing digital technologies. I was learning graphic design and photo manipulation with the latest digital tools, and I also had on-demand access to a Heidelberg printing press and faculty who were distinguished photographers and book artists. I came away from the two milieus with a great skill set, and more importantly an expansive mindset.
How did you transition into book publishing?
After we graduated from our programs, Susan and I stayed in Boston and ended up creating a small company, Stone Circle Productions, to produce education-related digital media that included work for Harvard, Brown, and Columbia University Press.
In the mid-nineties, my mother started to suffer from really poor health, so we decided to move back to Morgantown, at least temporarily, with a plan to continue the multimedia work but also to start a travel guide series for vegetarians that we would self-publish.
It seems like a left turn, but we had become vegetarian, and among our many creative pursuits, we had started writing travel articles for Vegetarian Times magazine. And on one of those trips, we had been kind of amazed and delighted by the food that we had found at Walt Disney World, which was in the process of remaking its upscale restaurant menus. So we thought we’d take a risk and see where it led. We got a huge boost when Paul and Linda McCartney agreed to endorse the series, although Linda passed away before the initial book came out. We wrote, designed, printed, warehoused, and shipped the books, and arranged wholesale agreements with distributors throughout the US, and in the UK, and we drove the length and width of Florida more than once to hit every single Waldenbooks in every single mall and hand-sell cases of the books to stores. Amazon was just getting started, and we were happy to sell through Amazon as well.
Vegetarian Walt Disney World and Greater Orlando sold in numbers that we’d love to see in a university press book, and Vegetarian New York sold well too, but to be honest the workload was crushing, and growing family priorities compelled us to put our energies less far afield. So we sold the series, continued with client work and decided to remain in Morgantown for good. Susan ended up doing an internship and ultimately becoming a producer with Ken Burns, a relationship that continues today.
What brought you to WVU Press?
Dr. Patrick Conner, former WVU Press director, had accepted the position of director and applied for membership to the AUP (then AAUP) in 1999, and so the press’s revival was known around Morgantown’s creative circles. At that time, I wasn’t really involved in campus life, but Both Susan and I had taken Pat’s fantastic Chaucer class as undergrads and found it a highlight, and I also knew and loved the fact that Pat was an important figure in humanities computing. He created the well-known “Beowulf Workstation” in HyperCard at the very same time I was doing my silly computer art experiments at the Museum School in the early 90s. I knew he was relentlessly creative, but also a respected scholar.
I’d seen one or two of the Press’s books and a catalog or two, knew people who were involved in it, and I thought some of the design was interesting. I was, at the moment, doing mostly freelance design work, and so I offered my services to Pat, who hired me to design a couple of CD packages and told me the Press was looking for a design and production manager. I applied and was surprised to find that I’d gotten the job (and then I was surprised to find just how meager our resources were! But no hard feelings Pat, really 😉 !
As art director, what publishers do you most admire for their aesthetic? Who/what are your influences?
Chicago, of course. So many witty and brilliantly understated covers. I always look forward to the McGill-Queen’s University Press catalog. Princeton’s books seem to make me say “I wish I’d done that” a lot. Paul Rand’s Yale UP logo should be reinstated immediately and makes me appreciate our fabulous logo by David Alcorn all the more every time I think about it.
In terms of influences, Paul Renner’s Futura typeface continues to amaze and perplex. Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s Tokyo: A Certain Style is the book I can’t do without. And weirdly, the series of Whole Earth Catalogs were incredibly important to me as a young person trying to figure out what was out there in a pre-internet West Virginia.
Share a few of your favorite projects you’ve done over the years and what has made them special…
This is getting long, so I’ll just do one. Shaun Slifer’s So Much to Be Angry About (currently being reprinted!) has to be a favorite, partly because the production process was so tedious but so rewarding. I had Shaun’s entire archive folder of precious Appalachian Movement Press pamphlets in my home office, and we’d determined that I should scan them myself to keep them safe and be sure the scanning was done carefully. So I cooked up a little jig that would keep the pages in exactly the same spot as I went through each spread, and I was delighted to see, as I went, that you could see the brightly colored Kraft paper covers bleeding through the cheap pamphlet paper as you got toward the beginning and end of every pamphlet. It created almost a little animated effect of paging through the booklet. And that sudden physicality served to kind of remind me that this kind of history—of giving some kind of visual life to the marginalized corners of our cultural history—is really important. That book really captures the flavor of that period in West Virginia’s history, as well as giving new life to primary documents.
Looking back over the past 20 years of university press publishing, what are the most surprising changes you’ve seen in issues or practices?
Short-run digital printing and print on demand really have fulfilled their promise as a revenue stream for small publishers like us. We’ve learned how to keep quality up by placing the right kinds of orders at the right time.
As someone who was messing around with digital art and literature 30 years ago, I’m really surprised that we haven’t really seen the rise of a more developed digital book platform, whatever that might be.
What is the most important contribution made by university presses?
I think what makes a university press different is that we may acquire books more for curatorial reasons, reasons of mission, rather than explicitly for business reasons. So a book like Harkins and McCarroll’s Appalachian Reckoning, or Neema Avashia’s Another Appalachia, are examples of books that my predecessor Derek Krissoff had the prescience to acquire not because of a marketing plan, but because he felt they represented important work that should be given a voice; because they fit into an editorial approach that values voices of marginalized groups. It was my privilege to work on both of them, and it’s my privilege to represent them now, because that’s what university presses do: we leverage our resources into an editorial approach that, we hope, furthers culture.
I don’t really think any of us could have anticipated the resonance those two books would both take on for new readerships with the candidacy of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate. But because of the agreements that we have with our distribution partners—agreements built by press director Carrie Mullen many years prior—we’ve been able to get thousands of those books into the hands of readers over the last few months, and the ideas in the books contribute yet again to the cultural discourse. Publishing work that proves of value again and yet again is what university presses aim to do. And continuing to seek out ways to bring them to audiences, often by partnering with other institutions and sharing resources, is just as critical to our work.
What would you like to see WVU Press accomplish in the next five years?
I’d like to see us fully develop our partnerships with the WVU Foundation and others to build out our fundraising apparatus, so that we can add to the funds we have available to do special projects that may have a greater cost and an uncertain return, but are unquestionably worth doing.
I’d also like to see us returning to our roots within the university as a source of opportunity for graduate students and interns with an interest in publishing. I’ve done some outreach in that area and hope to see it grow.
The loss of our dear friend Travis Stimeling in 2023 was a huge blow to our community here in Morgantown; but it was also a loss for readers of books in Travis’s Sounding Appalachia series. We can’t recreate Travis’s sensibility, but I do feel strongly that we should be renewing our focus on the cultural soundscapes of Appalachia, whether through books, streaming media, or combinations thereof.
I’d love to see us build on our teaching and learning titles with a series about creativity, whether in science, art, language, business—skunk works, DIY, bootstrapping. I think it’s an area of conversation that suits Appalachia well and feels very relevant globally. It’s a topic that we see cropping up in Stephanie Foote’s Salvaging the Anthropocene series and in other forthcoming titles, and I’d like to expand our offerings there.
We haven’t really engaged with issues of Open Access at all, and given the fact that we have a close operational relationship with our library, it seems as though we’re missing an opportunity to use their expertise to help us craft a policy and possibly start releasing some material under a liberal OA license.
And I’d like to get back into one or two showy, visually intense books per year, including a series devoted to certain archives of photographs within the West Virginia and Regional History Collection here at WVU.
The opportunities are really endless.