5ish Questions with Elizabeth Clark Wessel, co-editor of Argos Books

How one publisher is managing the post-SPD landscape

Elizabeth Clark Wessel lives in Stockholm, Sweden and makes her living as a translator of Swedish literature. She was born in rural Nebraska in 1980 and lived for many years in New York and Connecticut. In 2010, she co-founded Argos Books with the poets Iris Cushing and E.C. Belli; they have been publishing innovative poetry books ever since. She’s the author of four chapbooks of poetry, and her first full-length collection, None of It Belongs to Me, is forthcoming from Game Over Books in June 2024.

Although our last names are similar (Wessel and Wessels) and a source of mutual amusement and periodic confusion in the literary community, there is no relation.

Andrew: Hey Liz! I wish we were talking under better circumstances, but despite that it’s always a pleasure to chat with you. I want to start things off with a pretty basic question: What is your high-level, immediate reaction to the SPD closure?

Elizabeth: I was gutted – the timing couldn’t have been worse. At the end of February, SPD told us they owed us $3,200. We were counting on that money for the relaunch of our website and to help cover upcoming printing costs.

Later, I realized that we also have hundreds  of books in a warehouse somewhere, and the labor of getting them back – and probably the cost too –  will be on us.

I started this Substack with the argument that SPD wasn’t fulfilling its stated mission to serve small presses (translation: it was bad at its job). What was your personal viewpoint of SPD over the years, both as a writer and a publisher?

As a press, our needs were modest. They kept our books on Amazon and handled bookstores and libraries. I never felt that they did much beyond that, but those were things we couldn’t do ourselves, and they were important to us and to our authors. 

I was aware that other presses had problems with their professionalism. Maybe I’m just so unprofessional myself that they met my expectations.

I also knew some left due to their labor practices in 2020. I’ll be frank—all of that happened when I was at my most burnt out by other life obligations, and the labor of finding a new distributor was too much for me. We felt that our options were to stay with SPD or close down. My co-editor and I just did not have the wherewithal at that point to do much beyond the most basic actions to keep going.

I did talk to the new director at AWP last year, and he told me about the plan to move the books to Ingram. It seemed odd to me. Why not just get a warehouse someplace cheaper? But I figured I must just be missing some piece of the puzzle.

Now let’s get down to details and specifics. How is the SPD closure impacting you directly at Argos Books?

We’ve been around since 2010, but since 2020 our production has slowed considerably due to the typical complications of any volunteer-run project. My co-editor and I now each have a young child, she recently finished a PhD, and I moved abroad. Despite all that, we have put out four incredible books in the last four years. And this last year we’ve been working on making Argos Books a more sustainable project for both of us—financially and labor-wise. So not only does this loss of funds impact how we will develop our next chapter, it’s also just a huge waste of time.

What are you planning to do now? How are you going to make up for SPD’s loss? What options and paths are you exploring?

We’re still very early in this process. My co-editor went to the CLMP meeting, and we’re going to a few more informational meetings with other distributors. But from what I can see none offer as many services as SPD did.

I want to pull back out and get high level again. What kind of organization, platform, tool, or system do you think should be created to support literary publishing now and into the future? Basically, what is the future of literary publishing that you want to see?

What I would like to see is a concerted effort to support small presses with microgrants. There are so many poetries in this country, so many regional and aesthetic scenes that were supported by SPD, or which never had any support at all. I want to see a poetry publishing world that’s not so based on the national prominence of a few publications and more deeply connected to communities. We got a CLMP FaceOut grant for two of our books in 2018. It was transformative. We need so many more programs like that.

In Sweden – where I live these days – there’s a grant for small presses which pays printing costs via the Swedish library system. Can you imagine if we had a system that facilitated the purchase of small press books into their local library systems? Maybe one that also included local events and education? I dream of something like that. 

I encourage you to support Argos Books and pre-order Elizabeth’s forthcoming book None of It Belongs to Me.

If you’re a publisher or writer who has been impacted by SPD’s closure, please message me using the button below.