Talking With Dorothy, a Publishing Project at LARB

Nathan Scott McNamara talked with Danielle Dutton and husband Martin Riker, co-publishers of Dorothy, a Publishing Project, for Los Angeles Review of Books. "I mention to Dutton a Los Angeles Times piece in which she’s quoted as saying that Dorothy, in terms of its slowness and smallness, 'feels sort of contrary to the cultural moment,'" writes McNamara. "I say that, in many ways, I think it is actually pretty related to the cultural moment — Dorothy’s feminine transgressiveness is a coveted trait." More from this piece:

...Though they started Dorothy before the #MeToo movement and the same year as the VIDA Count, Dutton says those things confirmed her own experiences as a woman and a writer. “I’m not a public activist,” she says, “but I felt like this was a way I could address something important. I saw at Dalkey there were so many fewer books coming in by women and the list was so male-dominated. Why would a woman feel encouraged to submit? I wanted to create a space where women felt welcomed. And frankly, on a personal level, I wanted to be working and creating relationships with women. I’m drawn to the sort of transgressiveness that often seems more available to women. It just made perfect sense.”

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Dutton grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, inland central California. Riker grew up in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Harrisburg. They met in Chicago in 2001 when Dutton was doing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Riker was running a Chicago office for Dalkey. At the time they met, Dutton says she was not thinking about the commercial component of literature. Instead she was more interested in art and poetry scenes and avant-garde feminist writing. After living together in Chicago for a year, Dutton went off to do a PhD at the University of Denver. Riker eventually followed, leaving his job to enter the same PhD program.

I ask them about what books they bonded over early on. “Our reading had almost no overlap. Almost none,” Dutton says. “And we still read almost none of the same books. That first year, we decided we would read each other’s favorite books...

Read on at LARB.