David Wilk interviews Russell Banks about Lillabulero magazine

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As every media business continues to experience disruption and change, I’ve been talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as it is affected by technology and the larger context of culture and economics.

Over the past few years, the series has expanded  to include conversations on many other literary and publishing topics. I’ve talked with editors and publishers who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present, and will continue to explore the ebb and flow of writing, books, and publishing in all its forms and formats, to help document the breadth and depth of modern literary publishing.

Listeners will most likely know of Russell Banks for his powerfully written and evocative fiction. His novels include The Darling, The Sweet Hereafter, Cloudsplitter, Rule of the Bone, Affliction, Continental Drift, Searching for Survivors, Trailerpark, among others, as well as a collection of short stories, A Permanent Member of the Family.

The prolific Banks has written poems, stories, and essays that have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper’s and other magazines and journals. His most recent book is the memoir entitled Voyager.

Banks has been widely honored, having won the Ingram Merrill Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were Pulitzer Prize finalists; Affliction, Cloudsplitter and Lost Memory of Skin were PEN/Faulkner Finalists. He is also the founder and president of Cities of Refuge North America.

I think Russell Banks is among the best writers we have. I’ve been moved and challenged by his writing for a very long time. But  the main reason I wanted to talk to Russell for this Publishing Talks series is that he was the co-editor of the important literary magazine and press, Lillabulero. With poet Bill Matthews, Russell started publishing Lillabulero when they were students at UNC in Chapel Hill in 1966. That magazine was an important part of the sixties generation of literary magazines and presses, and along with its many peers and competitors helped build a new literary culture that we are still experiencing today.

In those days, mimeographs and a new generation of small offset printing presses, along with inexpensive postal rates, enabled a low cost of entry for writers and editors to reach a wide audience all over the country and to create a new community of readers that were equally hungry for new work as much as the writers themselves sought audiences. Russell and Bill were at the center of much of the creative energy that was circulating around the country at that time, and Lillabulero quickly earned a reputation for quality writing from new writers.

Bill Matthews passed away far too young, and is missed by all those who knew him and his work; I hope this conversation will help bring him wider attention. And it was a great pleasure and honor for me to have this opportunity to speak with Russell about this period in his illustrious literary career.

Bill Matthews’ son, Sebastian, interviewed Russell for the Fiction Writers Review a few years ago, and that interview is a valuable source as well, and the Paris Review interview with Banks is flat out terrific.

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David Wilk interviews poet and publisher Bill Corbett

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As we continue to experience disruption and change in all media businesses, I’ve been talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as our culture is affected by technology and the larger context of civilization and economics.

I’ve now expanded the series to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. I’ve talked with editors and publishers who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present, and will continue to explore the ebb and flow of writing, books, and publishing in all sorts of forms and formats, as change continues to be the one constant we can count on.

For the past several years, I’ve been talking to editors and publishers of independent presses about their work, including a number of important literary publishers. It’s a great pleasure for me to add Bill Corbett to this group. He’s been a key figure in the Boston literary scene for more than forty years, though he has now moved to Brooklyn.

Corbett’s house in the South End was an essential literary salon for local and many visiting artists, poets, and writers. Corbett has been active in what has been known as the “New York School” of poets, with a deep and abiding interest in the intersections of art and poetry. In a review of Corbett’s All Prose, Kevin Gallagher said “Corbett is ambassador to a strange land.”

Editing and publishing have also been central to Corbett’s work. He edited the literary journal Fire Exit with Fanny Howe and The Boston Eagle, with Lewis Warsh and Lee Harwood, wrote for the Boston Phoenix, and has been involved with literary magazines Ploughshares, Agni, and Grand Street. In 1999, Corbett founded Pressed Wafer, a small press publishing poetry, essays, and art writing. Corbett taught writing at MIT, and also has taught at Harvard and Emerson.

Patrick Pritchett summed up Corbett’s work rather well as follows:

For several decades now, Corbett has been one of our leading men of letters – the phrase itself has been rendered almost extinct in this age of ubiquitous bloggery and relentless peer-review – but I use it here to indicate a breadth of range and a fineness of attention that once upon a time was the norm, rather than the exception. As poet, essayist, memoirist, art critic, literary historian, publisher and tireless promoter of other writer’s work, Corbett is – yet ought not to be – sui generis. But even if the present time were more thickly populated by writers of comparable range, he would still be a force to be reckoned with, in a category of his own.

In this conversation, we talked about a wide range of topics, but it seems we may have barely scratched the surface of Corbett’s work in art and writing. I hope we will have a chance to talk again soon.

Links:

Pritchett essay about Bill Corbett on the blog Writing the Messianic

Pressed Wafer books “poetry fiction essays art memoir etc”

Bill Corbett’s Tumblr

 

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