Vignette Press Resumes and Immediately Geeks Out [14.07.2011]

Hi Lisa, New year has me thinking new ideas…. Would you ever consider selling Vignette? Best for the new year :) Amy 7 Jan at 17:07

That’s how it started. I’ve never exactly been the planning type. Without a strategy or even much of a dream, I tweeted/launched myself into independent publishing. I’ve done this before, actions without thoughts: going to uni, dropping out of uni, going back to uni; leaving my family and running away to Australia; getting married, getting divorced; going back to uni and never quite leaving again. In various slides down chutes or snakes and climbs up the ladder, I’ve gone with my gut and usually have been pleased with the results. So, I don’t know what took hold of me on 7 January 2011; all I do know is that I leapt and seem to have landed alright.

Vignette Press has always taken chances on writers. Former owner and publisher Lisa Dempster has been a fixture on the independent publishing scene for years, and she’s been responsible for discovering and promoting many new and emerging writers. Only a couple years ago, I was so happy when editor Dion Kagan chose a story of mine for The Death Mook. I’m sure many other writers had the same joyful experience via editor Julian Fleetwood’s The Sex Mook and the innovative Mini Shot series. Vignette Press has always felt exciting, friendly and accepting. This—I think—is what I was so attracted to and wanted to continue: providing an opportunity for new and emerging writers to publish their work, hold a book that held their names, and finally feel like ‘real writers.’

Our first project, then, had to be something that expressed that take-a-chance, welcome-to-the-club kind of feeling. Enter Aaron Mannion and Julian Novitz; they pitched the idea of Geek Mook, a magazine book that would pull submissions from both geeks who don’t usually write and writers revealing their hidden geekdom. They envisioned an exploration of the intersection of geekery and the literary. Geek Mook writers have been asked to “explain to us the aesthetics of coding; remember a childhood struggling with the unfair dice rolls of AD&D and ADHD; trace the interconnections between infidelity and Star Trek; show us the human heart beneath the steampunk carapace.”

And the writers have not disappointed. Although submissions are open all of July, great fiction, nonfiction and poetry have already started landing in our inbox. We’re thrilled about the keen reception Geek Mook has received in the writing community and hope to ontinue the enthusiasm. To that end, Vignette Press is holding a fundraiser, Dungeon Mook: Crawl to Mount Geek!

This extraordinary, literary-themed Dungeon Crawl will be held on at the Bella Union on 21 July 2011, (doors from 7pm, starts at 8pm) with tickets available at the door or online.

Hosts Ben McKenzie and Richard McKenzie will guide several publishing heroes and writing villains through a magical Dungeons and Dragons adventure. After the quest, there will be readings by fantastic quill-bearing geeks and plenty of time for general socialising and conviviality. We’re releasing the names of our shining literary stars via Twitter @geekmook and the Vignette Press Facebook page in the coming weeks.

So, as Dungeon Mook: Crawl to Mount Geek rolls around on 21 July and when the Geek Mook submissions close on 31 July, don’t worry or fret. Don’t think ‘I won’t know anyone’ or ‘Who am I to submit to a literary magazine’ or ‘I’m too tired from work to go out again, sit among all those wankers who just complain about publishing and writing and reading and metaphors, who then go home and sit up wasting time on Twitter all night.” Don’t think any of those things. Instead, think, “Wow, what a great opportunity to meet new people and get my writing out there.” (There is no argument against the third thought; we are all tired and wanky.) My main message is that there is space for writers and new work. There is space for you. And—while I have your attention—what I want to say the most to my fellow writers and publishers is this: keep leaping.

Amy Espeseth is a writer, publisher and academic. She is the recipient of the Felix Meyer Award for Literature, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award – Unpublished Manuscript, and QUT Postgraduate Creative Writing Prize. Amy is the publisher at Vignette Press. She holds a MA in creative writing from the University of Melbourne where she is a sessional tutor and PhD student. Born in rural Wisconsin, she immigrated to Australia in the late 1990s. Scribe Publications will publish her first novel, Sufficient Grace, in 2012.

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