Caron Andregg and Robert Wynne, Co-Editors of Cider Press Review
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Caron Andregg and Robert Wynne, founders and co-editors of Cider Press Review. Launched in 1999, this Halifax, PA–based literary journal has published such authors as Catherine Carter, Kathleen Flenniken, Diane Lockward, Robert Parham, Ryan G. Van Cleave, Charles Harper Webb and Paul Willis. Cider Press Review accepts mail and online submissions of original poetry, translations and brief reviews from April 1-August 31 annually; no simultaneous submissions.
The Cider Press Review Annual Book Award offers $1,500 and publication for a full-length poetry manuscript. The contest is open to all authors. Submissions are accepted September 1-November 30. The 2007 final judge is Tony Hoagland. Past winners include Carla Panciera, Don Colburn and Anne Caston.
Along with her work as co-publisher and co-editor of Cider Press Review and the Cider Press book titles, Caron Andregg is a former host of the poetry channel of BellaOnline.com. Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Spillway, Rattle, Poetry International, Solo and many others. She currently lives in rural Pennsylvania.
Robert Wynne earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He is the co-editor and publisher of Cider Press Review. He is the author of six chapbooks, and one full-length collection of poems: Remembering How to Sleep, which was awarded the 2006 Eakin Memorial Book Award by the Poetry Society of Texas. He has won numerous prizes, and his poetry has also been published throughout North America.
Q: Tell me about Cider Press Review's genesis and artistic mission.
A: Caron: Back in the mid-1990s, I was part of the very active and energetic Southern California poetry scene. It was an idyllic time and place for poetry, especially spoken word and theatrical poetry. Dozens of venues in five counties hosted poetry readings at least once a month—many of them once a week—so writers could find someplace to read with an interested, intelligent crowd every single night of the week. More important to the scene's cohesiveness was the publication that kept everyone in touch and up to date, a newsprint magazine called Next... Magazine run by the indefatigable G. Murray Thomas and his partner and friends. The monthly readings calendar in Next... made it possible for poets living hundreds of miles apart to plan readings and publication dates, and to keep track of where other poets were appearing.
Having a reliable mouthpiece that covered such a vast area made it a lot easier for arts groups and poetry reading groups to be successful, because they could count on a good turnout for their events. It also helped support self- and small publishers who could advertise their new releases affordably to a targeted audience. A lot of poets weren't waiting for publishers or editors to pick them up, but used their own energy to publish their own work in chapbooks and small journals, advertised those titles in Next..., and produced their own "chapbook tours" or established readings. It was a very dynamic publishing environment!
By 1995 or so, I had amassed what I thought was a pretty solid collection of poems, and I started looking around at the opportunities to have it published. I liked the content of the chapbooks I was seeing around, but I really didn't like the quality. I've always been pretty handy, so eventually I decided to hand-make my own first chapbook. I even borrowed a friend's industrial trimmer to tidy up the edges. It looked great as a product, ended up getting pretty decent reviews, and eventually sold out, so I was happy.
But making that first book is like eating that first potato chip. I went on to print more of my own books, and then to create a goofy little ditty called the Southern California Poetry Calendar, which was a kind of coil-bound week-at-a-glance appointment book with a poem-per-week on the facing pages. The poems were mostly works by other artists also active around Los Angeles.
After a few years of that, I felt ready to move on to publishing a proper poetry journal good enough for national distribution; however, I didn't want the next journal to be merely a bigger, shinier version of the poetry calendar. And I didn't want the included work to be limited to poems by my immediate circle of friends and colleagues. I wanted the new journal to showcase high-quality new poetry from all over the country, and the world. In order to do that, it would have to have something special be able to attract first-rate submissions from new and established writers beyond the confines of Southern California.
That kind of outreach could be accomplished in two ways: either spend a lot of money on postage and publicity to reach out to established writers, or reach out to a larger network of writers by leveraging personal contacts. There was no outside funding, so the money-angle was a non-starter, and I'm just about the world's biggest introvert, so the idea of me "turning on the charm" wasn't much of an option, either.
Enter Robert Wynne. During this same period, he had been one of the directors of the Valley Contemporary Poets organization, a group that hosted weekly readings of both local and national poets and that had itself produced a couple of VCP reading anthologies. Robert has the kind of personality that lights up a room the moment he enters it; he is gracious, charming, intelligent, discerning...and knows absolutely everybody.
I'd like to be able to report that there was some long, complicated negotiation between us before he would agree to work with me on Cider Press, but the truth is much less romantic. I think our partnership came about in about a minute with two lines in two emails. I'll quote them to you:
Caron to Robert:
"Do you think it's time we start up that literary journal?"
Robert to Caron:
"Yes."
Yeah, that simple. Robert even had the name picked out: Cider Press.
As it happened, we'd each been thinking along the same lines for some time, and we already knew how each partner would compliment the other. And despite our very different social personalities, we both had the most important thing in common: a fairly fierce commitment to our own brand of literary quality. We share pretty similar criteria regarding what makes a poem truly fine, and a genuine stubbornness against compromising those literary standards for, well, anything.
So, Cider Press was born. We started soliciting submissions in 1999 and published our first issue in early 2000.And it's still a damn-good-looking issue, if I do say so myself. Granted, there were a few poems by some of our friends, but only the very best of their poems, and other authors included a Pulitzer Prize winner (W.D. Snodgrass) and others who would go on to become Guggenheim Fellows and National Book Award finalists (among other honors).
We're editing our ninth volume of the journal this year, and will release our third single-author Book Award winner this month. Our artistic mission remains the same as it was in the beginning: to publish the very best poetry we can find.
Q: What publishers or journals were your role models when starting Cider Press Review?
A: Caron: In truth, a lot of our guideposts were negative. We knew for sure several things we didn't want to do: promote only our friends; filter content to present a particular school or style or political or social point of view; or produce a cheesy rag with low production values. From the first moment, we had national and even international aspirations for CPR. We wanted the authors who appeared in it to feel good about being there, to be proud of their work as it was presented and appreciate the other work appearing alongside them.
Of course we had other books in mind as we developed that first issue. I can't speak for Robert, but for myself I definitely looked to Ploughshares, and also Prairie Schooner, and Poetry East for contextual and technical inspiration. I've always been obsessed with the book as a physical object, as well, so paid close attention to the technical characteristics of high-end single-author publications, like those put out by BOA Editions and Houghton Mifflin.
Q: How is the press funded? If you were advising other small poetry publishers, what would you say were the pros and cons of that business model?
A: Caron: Out of our own pockets, and as a "business model," I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
That first volume of CPR ate all our combined savings and maxed out at least one credit card. At this juncture, entrance fees from the Book Award competition don't quite cover the cost of printing and distributing the winning book, but they come close. Neither Robert nor I have ever yet been compensated financially for the thousands of hours of work we put into the press. We'd love to change that, but not at the cost of yoking ourselves to a benefactor or becoming a non-profit arts organization. Rather, we'd like to continue to grow our titles and increase distribution knowing that it's only a matter of time before the very high quality of our authors' work will attract at least enough of a following that the press breaks even.
Q: What accomplishments are the editors particularly proud of? (E.g. discovering a new author; a creative book promotion that worked.)
A: Caron: That we're going on our tenth issue now and still publishing! On top of that, each year we seem to be doing better—more and higher-quality submissions each year, a widening reputation for excellence, and three (soon to be four) very fine single-author books out in the world that otherwise might not have seen the light of day.
I am pretty proud of having nurtured some very fine talent along the way, and grateful that those authors supported CPR by contributing some of their very best work. A Tenth Anniversary anthology is in the works now that we hope will showcase several of those authors. Look for that anthology sometime in 2009.
Q: Would it be fair to describe the dominant style of your magazine as narrative free verse? Was that consistency a conscious aesthetic choice or more determined by the kinds of submissions you've received? How does a magazine develop its distinctive "voice"? (Feel free to opine here about poetic schools/movements you especially like or dislike.)
A: Caron: Yes, certainly, but only because free verse is the predominant verse form in general right now. I don't think that form is represented in a way that's disproportionate to its population density in the wild, as it were.
If you look back over all our issues, you'll always find some structured verse scattered throughout. In fact, I'd be very surprised to find that any past issue didn't include at least one sestina or pantoum (or both), and sonnets appear pretty regularly. Robert especially has a penchant for complex French forms; I'm more partial to eastern syllabic forms, but that doesn't mean I won't respond positively to a really great villanelle.
I think the real reason more formal verse doesn't show up in all mainstream journals is that few people know how to write formally any more. That's not to say we don't get more than a few submissions of formal verse each year; we certainly do. Unfortunately, most of them are dreadful. It's a fashion cycle: the big names (who get studied more often) started writing in free verse, so students coming up all focused on free verse and ignored form. Now those students are the mainstream writers, but lacking that very precise element of craft necessary to make formal verse sing. When that rare, really polished piece of formal work comes across our desks, we usually snatch it up as quickly as possible.
Q: In some of your past issues, I perceive an openness to poetry with spiritual themes and references, often framed in a fresh way via contemporary images and a dose of humor.
A: Caron: Really?!?!? Where? Are we reading the same journal?
Robert: I looked back at Volume 4/5, the double-issue we put out in 2004, and did indeed find a good many poems with spiritual language and themes. A bunch of these poems are grouped right at the front of the book, and serve to set the tone for the whole collection, and that's not accidental. Lee Stern's opening poem "The Universe" toys with the idea of Creation in a humorous way. "Dogma", by John Wright, follows that with an explication of spiritual crisis in everyday life. A few poems later, Robert Parham brings food and God and his father's death together in "Being Fed". And Catherine Carter offers these lines at the end of her wonderful poem, "Meditation on Lettuce": "Let us be forgiven our hunger, our lust, / out of which, lettuce, I have sinned against you." B.J. Best brings The Last Supper in for a lighthearted appearance. Hans Ostrum brings Jack Benny and T.S. Eliot together in heaven, while Ryan G. Van Cleave calls Britney Spears the Anti-Christ and meditates on Sin and Anger in contemporary America.
So, we definitely appreciate the language and imagery associated with spiritual themes, even if we don't necessarily seek them out. In thinking about your question, though, and in looking through that issue again, I was reminded how many of the poems we publish have a "spiritual" quality without actually addressing such themes or using such language directly. I think we are most moved by poems that seem to spring from a strong sense of belief, whether that is a belief that there is wonder in the world, a belief that one must go on after a devastating loss, or a belief in a higher power. God is, after all, in the details, and we love poems with rich, vivid and plentiful details.
Q: Do you see a resurgence of interest in such themes, in contrast to the crisis of faith among high-modernist 20th century writers? Are independent presses any more receptive to spiritually oriented poetry than academic publishers?
A: Caron: You are asking the wrong person, on every conceivable level! I prefer that everyone, of every stripe, just keep their spiritual lives at home in private where they belong. Even the question creeps me out.
I will admit to being consciously open—and even actively encouraging—to authors who demonstrate an ability to see beyond the narrow confines of their own experience. Descriptive musings about personal events in and of themselves are fine I guess, but face it—most of what can be seen and described has been seen and described. Besides, self-absorption is pretty damn dull.
For that reason I really appreciate the author who can get over herself, the one who can go beyond mere description to appreciate the broader implications of an experience, or at least who can demonstrate some consciousness of external context. Read anything by Catherine Carter, an author who manages to get outside of herself particularly well.
This demonstration of external awareness may be what you're terming "spirituality"; for myself, I'd just call it being minimally observant.
(If you sense that I am dodging the last clause of that question: I am. For one thing, the question itself hinges on far too many unsubstantiated assumptions. For another, I care so little about what might be other publishers' levels of receptiveness or editorial orientations that my galvanic response would hardly register on the most sensitive of measuring devices.)
Robert: I have not personally noticed a resurgence of such themes, but I don't read nearly as much as I should—primarily because I work a full-time job, am a husband and father, help run Cider Press, and still try to find time to write. It is an interesting question that makes me think more people may be relying on their spirituality now that the world is more frightening than it was on 9/10/01—so it wouldn't surprise me if that trend were apparent in poetry publishing. Such themes have been rampant in my own writing for more than a decade, usually in a questioning tone, and that has not changed recently. As for whether independent presses are more open to themes of this nature than academic ones, while I expect that may be the case I would attribute that tendency more to the fact that independent presses far outnumber academic ones, and independent presses also tend to reflect the sensibilities of the one or two people in charge in a way that academic presses rarely do. As far as Cider Press is concerned, we don't have an overt bias one way or the other—we just want the work to be strong, original and moving either intellectually, emotionally, or (preferably) both.
Q: How many manuscripts do you receive for the poetry contest? Who screens the entries, and how many are passed on to the final judge? Are they blind-judged?
A: Caron: The number of submissions has grown significantly every year, from around 125 manuscripts that first year to an expected 500+ this coming season. I do the initial screening, mainly because all the entries come to my place. Because I'm the only one who sees all the contact info, my role in the selection process is pretty basic. I do the first culling, separating the manuscripts into an 'A' and 'B' groups, 'A' being those we would publish, and 'B' being those we would not.
[ASK ME HOW MANY WIND UP IN THE 'B' GROUP]
70 percent.
The top 30 percent then go on to blind judging. I do pick my list of favorites from that 'A' group; my top six or eight or ten (depending on the strength of crop in a given year) go onto a card and are sealed in an envelope that's included with the 'A' batch. After that, the hard manuscripts are boxed and the online submissions are transferred to disk and sent along to Robert Wynne. He conducts a blind judging of every 'A' group manuscript, rating each individually.
Only after he's read and ranked the manuscripts himself will he open my sealed list. More often than not, there's a lot of overlap between his top ten or twelve and my top ten (except for last year, when our choices varied wildly). Any manuscript that is on both our lists becomes a finalist, along with any manuscript that is in one or the other's top five or six.
Only the finalists (again, blind manuscripts) get printed out and sent along to the final judge, this year, Tony Hoagland. Sometime in December or early January, he'll call or email me with his choice, by which time I've forgotten what contact info goes with which manuscript, and so I have to look it up in the database so I can tell him who he selected.
After that, I get to make my happiest phone call of the year.
Q: What structural or stylistic factors distinguish a publishable manuscript from a mere compilation of poems? To put it another way, what characteristics should a writer try to optimize when selecting the poems for her manuscript (apart from the poems' individual craftsmanship)?
A: Caron: How dare you relegate "the poems' individual craftsmanship" to a parenthetical aside at the end of the paragraph! What else do you think is signally lacking in the 70% of manuscripts that don't even make it to the second round?
Sadly, I find that far too many authors (at least judging by their manuscripts) have dismissed craft in favor of style. We see a lot of work wherein the individual poems share some stylistic conceit—either a set line limit or a syllabic or slant-rhyme or subject pattern—but often there isn't much substance underneath the gimmickry. The aimless word-play manuscripts are my particular bête-noir, but there are plenty of other gimmick-styles floating around out there.
There is a clear and immediately-visible difference between sentences constructed by an author who just throws in a bunch of adjectives in an attempt to force an almost-right noun to convey meaning, and that crafted by an author willing to put in the hours, days, and sometimes years necessary to find exactly the right verb. A really well-crafted manuscript will sing in its own voice without having to rely on cheesy word-play or other stylistic tricks.
And you're right in your assumption that a properly publishable manuscript is much more than a collection of finished poems. Each poem should be finely crafted and stand alone as a complete unit, but also the book as a whole needs to offer up a complete and unified vision. That's not to say that the book has to "tell a story" like a novel, with a beginning, middle and end; however all the individual pieces have to have an identifiable relationship to one another. Ideally, the manuscript should build, poem by poem, section by section, with each subsequent poem adding resonance to the ones that came before and will come after. By then end of that book, I want to come away with the feeling that I have visited that author's universe, and emerged a bigger person for the journey.
Q: Please talk about the recent winning books and what considerations contributed to their success in the contest.
A: Caron: If you compare our winners from the past three years, you'll notice that they are each quite different from one another in terms of tone and voice and subject matter. Carla Panciera's book, One of the Cimalores, is intensely personal and intimate. Don Colburn's As If Gravity Were a Theory touches on more topical subjects with a much harder-edged voice. Our latest winner, Anne Caston's Judah's Lion, deals with chillingly difficult subjects with clarity and precision in a voice like chipped flint. (All of these titles are available through the Cider Press Review online bookstore.)
The one thing they do have in common (and this will come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention) is craft. Each one of these manuscripts was honed into shape over literally years and years of refinement and revision. Anne's manuscript was in the works for at least eight years, Carla's for at least three or four, and Don's for I don't know how many (but several). These authors never, EVER settled for the facile verb or the glib turn of phrase at any point, and as a result each work is as sharp and glittering as a scalpel.
Q: How do you promote your titles after they win? Where are they sold and reviewed?
A: Caron: All our titles are available on Amazon.com and directly through the website, and we have standing subscriptions with several college libraries. Up to this point, we've done mostly direct-mail and email promotion for the single-author books, along with sending books out to other journals for review. We also promote our authors to MFA program reading committees in an effort to get readings at various colleges, especially near the authors' location. Honestly, the authors themselves have been the best promoters, lining up readings and then putting us in touch with bookstores who then stock the books.
Anne Caston was the first to bring in an outside publicist, which has worked out splendidly. As we speak, CPR is pursuing an expanded publicity relationship and courting more widespread professional distribution. With any luck, those channels will be opening for Cider Press titles by the time this interview hits the Web.
Q: What authors should entrants read to get a better sense of Cider Press Review's tastes and the artistic vision that inspires you?
A: Caron: That's rather a dangerous question, which is to say, I think if I were to point specifically to a handful of authors as representing CPR's "tastes and artistic vision," I'd be narrowly misrepresenting both the authors and CPR. And without a doubt, we'd suddenly find ourselves inundated with bad stylistic copies of Stafford or Kumin or Kinnell or Collins (or other—don't think I've let the cat entirely out of the bag!). I would strongly encourage any potential entrants to be widely versed in writing from the mid-19th century onwards. A healthy familiarity with the Elizabethan, Restoration and Metaphysical poets wouldn't hurt either. I'll assume most writers have the Romantics covered without having to be told.
That's not to say that a characteristic "Cider Press" style of poem is not emerging. Robert has a better eye for those than I do, but even I can see the signs: clarity, directness, strong images and a definite rhetorical point. I find myself fighting against them, actively, because the last thing I want CPR to become is a formula mouthpiece. My most exciting moments during our reading periods are when I stumble upon an entirely new and original voice.
The best thing an author can do to discover our editorial slant is to read the journal. Pick up a couple of recent back issues and read them all the way through. I would hope, while they're reading, they'll be as impressed by our variety as by anything else. Readers attending AWP (or just in the New York area) in January will be able to pick up back issues for $5, so there's no reason not to read some.
At the very least, authors should read our guidelines, either on the website or in Poet's Market. It floors me how many people clearly do not. At least once each year I receive a submission entirely composed of short stories or artwork. Get a clue, people! Sending out submissions scattershot without doing five minutes of research is expensive for you and a waste of time for the editors that have to cull through your misdirected work. Besides being rude, it's also an indication that you don't know how to pay attention to your world, and the ability to pay close attention to the world is, of course, the primary strength of a really good poet.
Fall 2007
