Interview with Erin Elizabeth Smith
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Erin, thank you so much for taking a moment out of your busy schedule to join me for this interview! It is much appreciated.
You are the President and Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, as well as the Creative Director of Sundress Academy for the Arts. SAFTA conducts writing workshops, a reading series, a film production company, and artist residencies. You are also a full-time lecturer at the University of Tennessee and an excellent poet in your own right. How do you manage to balance it all? What is a “typical” day like for you?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: The balancing act is a constant one and one that I don't always do gracefully.
That being said, we have an amazing staff at SAFTA, including T.A. Noonan who runs our reading series, Kristi Havens who helps to network with other local nonprofits, Vania Smrkovski who runs our film production company, Adam Crandall who heads up our theatrical arts department, and Chris Johnson who is our go-to for all things visual arts. We also have a large staff of interns and assistants who help to organize and promote things here in Knoxville. And this is just on the SAFTA side! At Sundress we have 14 members of our editorial board, plus a heft design and intern staff who help to edit, design, and promote our books. All in all, we have over 40 staff members at Sundress & SAFTA, not including our readers for our journals or anthologies, all of whom are entirely unpaid. I couldn't be prouder of the folks who give their time and energy to our programs.
For me a typical day doesn't really exist. I teach a 4/4 course load of all different sorts of things at the University of Tennessee, so there's the normal grading, class prep, teaching, office hours, etc. I also teach an independent study and workshop that's held weekly on the side just for fun. From there, I do all the social media work for Sundress and SAFTA, answer emails about both organizations, edit manuscripts we are going to publish, format books, send work to assistants for proofing, editing, etc, schedule visiting writers (who usually stay at my house), and basically juggle a 100/hour work week as well as I can. Our weeks usually are filled with SAFTA events (whether we're hosting a workshop, entertaining visiting writers, helping out with a First Friday event with one of our local partners, filming a timed competition film, attending local festivals and events, etc), there's not really a dull moment. In the next three weeks alone we have a translation workshop, a salon, a reading series event, a showing of our most recent film and the subsequent award ceremonies, a workshop on writing about queer identity in the South, as part of our OUTSpoken series, a poetry reunion of the original founders of the Knoxville slam scene, and probably at least three other things that I'm forgetting.
Occasionally, I sleep!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Give us a little history of Sundress Publications. How did it begin? How has it expanded since its early stages?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: Sundress started in 1999, shortly after I began Stirring: A Literary collection, as an umbrella site for several other online lit mags (including originally Stirring, Samsara, Sometimes City, Small Town, etc), which offered free web-hosting space without any strings attached. We helped to promote one another's journals pre-social media, and we worked together to help to build legitimacy for online publishing back in the very early 2000s. (You can see more about this is in my goodbye note at Stirring.)
In 2006, we began taking submissions for the first Best of the Net Anthology and in 2010, we began moving into print publishing. Now we publish four single-author poetry collections a year plus one anthology and several e-chaps. We also have two imprints--Flaming Giblet Press, which focuses on fiction and experimental literatures and Doubleback Books, which re-publishes out-of-print books from contemporary writers.
Up the Staircase Quarterly: You recently stepped back from your long standing role as Managing Editor over at Stirring: A Literary Collection. What can you tell us about your experience with Stirring? What will you miss the most about editing the publication?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: Stirring was my baby. She started all of this crazy back when I was eighteen and living illicitly in my boyfriend's dorm room at Brown. I was a total baby back then and didn't know anything about publishing, but I loved poetry and I read contemporary writing voraciously. I also knew how to write HTML. It was the late '90s. Everyone was going to get rich off the internet. Why not me?
Of course the joke goes—how do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune.
But through Stirring I met so many people who were hugely important to me. One of my best friends, T.A. Noonan, and I met through publishing one of her pieces back in 2005. I dated a man for two years whose worked we published. I've come to know most of my Sundress editorial staff originally through Stirring. It's so amazingly important in everything I've done since I was a college drop-out in 1999—helped me get into great MFA and PhD programs, introduced me to other editors who we have worked with since, and given me an opportunity to publish many writers first piece.
I'm going to miss it. But Luci Brown & Andrew Koch, two close friends and former students, are unbelievably amazing editors and writers who are going to do so much with the poetry at Stirring. And Sarah Einstein, the former Managing Editor of Brevity, has come on board as our new Prose Editor, and I can't wait to see what happens next!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: You began SAFTA (Sundress Academy for the Arts) at Firefly Farms in 2013. What excites you the most about this new project? What do you want people to know about SAFTA? How can we find out more information about events, residencies, and its overall progress?
Everything excites me about SAFTA! Every project I've started over the last fifteen years has been ambitious, sometimes, perhaps, overly so. This one takes the cake though. It's not just starting an artist residency; it's gutting a 50+ year old farmhouse that had been sitting on abandoned property for three years. It's learning to drywall and run electrical wire and use a chainsaw and start a bonfire and lay tile and pour concrete and cut trim. In fact, we went from an uninhabitable house in February 2013 when we closed, to nine months later, having our first resident move in. We've had literally thousands of hours of volunteer labor from local artists, writers, friends, etc. We've built something from scratch and that means a lot.
In the meanwhile, we're also working to build a local arts scene too. One of the things that I want to see SAFTA be able to do is to work to bridge the disparate artist groups to work together to make Knoxville an even better place! I want to see dancers at poetry readings and filmmakers at the ballet. I want to see art galleries host one-act plays and fiction writers learn to write screenplays. I love this city, and I think if we work together, it will only be even more of a beacon for the arts in Appalachia.
We are incredibly excited to now be open for national residencies as well! We are accepting applications for the spring right now in all of the arts—from creative writing to visual art to crafts and culinary arts! The applications are filling up fast, so definitely apply! I want to bring as many people to this city as we can!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Which literary journals, outside of Sundress affiliated journals, do you love to read? What makes these journals exciting and unique?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: Oh man! There are so many! I really love Menacing Hedge and their focus on publishing linked poems—it feels like you get to read a mini-chapbook each time. I'm loving with Fox Fraizer-Foley is doing at the TheTheInfoxicated Corner, especially her Political Punch series, which helped to inspire our new Sundress anthology on the Politics of Identity. I love the eclectic work that Ken Robideuax and his team do at Connotation Press! And I have a large heart for some of the old guard like Juked, Typo, Eclectica, etc. I also am currently loving all these new hip online journals coming out of new MFA programs. I remember when everything felt that shiny, and I love seeing it with the new generation of poets. And you know, of course I love Up the Staircase!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: As for your own work, what writing projects are you currently working on? Do you have anything in the publishing pipeline?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: I'm currently shopping around the manuscript for what will hopefully be my third book. It's a collection of poems about Alice in Wonderland and divorce, that is ultimately also a love poem to Knoxville. Most of the poems from the collection have been published—now it just needs a publisher. Fingers crossed on the contest game currently!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: You have published a few collections of your poetry. Where can we find and buy your books?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: You can buy my first two books at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately my first collection, The Fear of Being Found, went out of print with Three Candles Press folded, but the lovely folks at Zoetic Press are bringing it back as an e-version available on iPad! They are doing fantastic work over there. Check them out!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: What was the worst editing or writing advice you received? What was the best advice you received? Did you follow these pieces of advice? Why or why not?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: My first writing professor in college pulled me aside and asked me if I was majoring in English. When I said yes, she said, “Have you considered anything else?” I always wanted to send her a snarkily signed copy of my first book, but I never managed to do that.
I was also told never to use “I” if the narrator wasn't myself. I still find that entirely silly.
And so I write persona poems that I don't denote as persona poems and I got not only a BA, but also an MFA and PhD in Creative Writing. So, no. I didn't follow those.
The best piece came in my MFA. My professor asked me very pointedly, “Why is everything you write about over?” And I realized that I needed to actually have far less distance from my life and my poems. I started writing work with more immediacy and thus more fear, sadness, hope, and love. I think that was a major turning point for me.
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Finally, Erin, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: I would love to share a crazy opulent meal with Edna St. Vincent Millay and then get into an enormous amount of trouble with her. That woman knew how to write. And party.
I'm a huge foodie, but I imagine our main course would simply be dirty martinis and maybe some bourbon. Who knows, though? Maybe we could make some sort of crazy Middle Ages-era chimera of a half pig and half turkey. (For Easter, we stuff a rabbit into a duck, so I'm a fan of the crazy!) Or a good ole fashioned crawfish boil.
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake, 2011) and The Fear of Being Found, which will be re-released from Zoetic Press later this year. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and The Wardrobe.
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Erin, thank you so much for taking a moment out of your busy schedule to join me for this interview! It is much appreciated.
You are the President and Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, as well as the Creative Director of Sundress Academy for the Arts. SAFTA conducts writing workshops, a reading series, a film production company, and artist residencies. You are also a full-time lecturer at the University of Tennessee and an excellent poet in your own right. How do you manage to balance it all? What is a “typical” day like for you?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: The balancing act is a constant one and one that I don't always do gracefully.
That being said, we have an amazing staff at SAFTA, including T.A. Noonan who runs our reading series, Kristi Havens who helps to network with other local nonprofits, Vania Smrkovski who runs our film production company, Adam Crandall who heads up our theatrical arts department, and Chris Johnson who is our go-to for all things visual arts. We also have a large staff of interns and assistants who help to organize and promote things here in Knoxville. And this is just on the SAFTA side! At Sundress we have 14 members of our editorial board, plus a heft design and intern staff who help to edit, design, and promote our books. All in all, we have over 40 staff members at Sundress & SAFTA, not including our readers for our journals or anthologies, all of whom are entirely unpaid. I couldn't be prouder of the folks who give their time and energy to our programs.
For me a typical day doesn't really exist. I teach a 4/4 course load of all different sorts of things at the University of Tennessee, so there's the normal grading, class prep, teaching, office hours, etc. I also teach an independent study and workshop that's held weekly on the side just for fun. From there, I do all the social media work for Sundress and SAFTA, answer emails about both organizations, edit manuscripts we are going to publish, format books, send work to assistants for proofing, editing, etc, schedule visiting writers (who usually stay at my house), and basically juggle a 100/hour work week as well as I can. Our weeks usually are filled with SAFTA events (whether we're hosting a workshop, entertaining visiting writers, helping out with a First Friday event with one of our local partners, filming a timed competition film, attending local festivals and events, etc), there's not really a dull moment. In the next three weeks alone we have a translation workshop, a salon, a reading series event, a showing of our most recent film and the subsequent award ceremonies, a workshop on writing about queer identity in the South, as part of our OUTSpoken series, a poetry reunion of the original founders of the Knoxville slam scene, and probably at least three other things that I'm forgetting.
Occasionally, I sleep!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Give us a little history of Sundress Publications. How did it begin? How has it expanded since its early stages?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: Sundress started in 1999, shortly after I began Stirring: A Literary collection, as an umbrella site for several other online lit mags (including originally Stirring, Samsara, Sometimes City, Small Town, etc), which offered free web-hosting space without any strings attached. We helped to promote one another's journals pre-social media, and we worked together to help to build legitimacy for online publishing back in the very early 2000s. (You can see more about this is in my goodbye note at Stirring.)
In 2006, we began taking submissions for the first Best of the Net Anthology and in 2010, we began moving into print publishing. Now we publish four single-author poetry collections a year plus one anthology and several e-chaps. We also have two imprints--Flaming Giblet Press, which focuses on fiction and experimental literatures and Doubleback Books, which re-publishes out-of-print books from contemporary writers.
Up the Staircase Quarterly: You recently stepped back from your long standing role as Managing Editor over at Stirring: A Literary Collection. What can you tell us about your experience with Stirring? What will you miss the most about editing the publication?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: Stirring was my baby. She started all of this crazy back when I was eighteen and living illicitly in my boyfriend's dorm room at Brown. I was a total baby back then and didn't know anything about publishing, but I loved poetry and I read contemporary writing voraciously. I also knew how to write HTML. It was the late '90s. Everyone was going to get rich off the internet. Why not me?
Of course the joke goes—how do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune.
But through Stirring I met so many people who were hugely important to me. One of my best friends, T.A. Noonan, and I met through publishing one of her pieces back in 2005. I dated a man for two years whose worked we published. I've come to know most of my Sundress editorial staff originally through Stirring. It's so amazingly important in everything I've done since I was a college drop-out in 1999—helped me get into great MFA and PhD programs, introduced me to other editors who we have worked with since, and given me an opportunity to publish many writers first piece.
I'm going to miss it. But Luci Brown & Andrew Koch, two close friends and former students, are unbelievably amazing editors and writers who are going to do so much with the poetry at Stirring. And Sarah Einstein, the former Managing Editor of Brevity, has come on board as our new Prose Editor, and I can't wait to see what happens next!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: You began SAFTA (Sundress Academy for the Arts) at Firefly Farms in 2013. What excites you the most about this new project? What do you want people to know about SAFTA? How can we find out more information about events, residencies, and its overall progress?
Everything excites me about SAFTA! Every project I've started over the last fifteen years has been ambitious, sometimes, perhaps, overly so. This one takes the cake though. It's not just starting an artist residency; it's gutting a 50+ year old farmhouse that had been sitting on abandoned property for three years. It's learning to drywall and run electrical wire and use a chainsaw and start a bonfire and lay tile and pour concrete and cut trim. In fact, we went from an uninhabitable house in February 2013 when we closed, to nine months later, having our first resident move in. We've had literally thousands of hours of volunteer labor from local artists, writers, friends, etc. We've built something from scratch and that means a lot.
In the meanwhile, we're also working to build a local arts scene too. One of the things that I want to see SAFTA be able to do is to work to bridge the disparate artist groups to work together to make Knoxville an even better place! I want to see dancers at poetry readings and filmmakers at the ballet. I want to see art galleries host one-act plays and fiction writers learn to write screenplays. I love this city, and I think if we work together, it will only be even more of a beacon for the arts in Appalachia.
We are incredibly excited to now be open for national residencies as well! We are accepting applications for the spring right now in all of the arts—from creative writing to visual art to crafts and culinary arts! The applications are filling up fast, so definitely apply! I want to bring as many people to this city as we can!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Which literary journals, outside of Sundress affiliated journals, do you love to read? What makes these journals exciting and unique?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: Oh man! There are so many! I really love Menacing Hedge and their focus on publishing linked poems—it feels like you get to read a mini-chapbook each time. I'm loving with Fox Fraizer-Foley is doing at the TheTheInfoxicated Corner, especially her Political Punch series, which helped to inspire our new Sundress anthology on the Politics of Identity. I love the eclectic work that Ken Robideuax and his team do at Connotation Press! And I have a large heart for some of the old guard like Juked, Typo, Eclectica, etc. I also am currently loving all these new hip online journals coming out of new MFA programs. I remember when everything felt that shiny, and I love seeing it with the new generation of poets. And you know, of course I love Up the Staircase!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: As for your own work, what writing projects are you currently working on? Do you have anything in the publishing pipeline?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: I'm currently shopping around the manuscript for what will hopefully be my third book. It's a collection of poems about Alice in Wonderland and divorce, that is ultimately also a love poem to Knoxville. Most of the poems from the collection have been published—now it just needs a publisher. Fingers crossed on the contest game currently!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: You have published a few collections of your poetry. Where can we find and buy your books?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: You can buy my first two books at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately my first collection, The Fear of Being Found, went out of print with Three Candles Press folded, but the lovely folks at Zoetic Press are bringing it back as an e-version available on iPad! They are doing fantastic work over there. Check them out!
Up the Staircase Quarterly: What was the worst editing or writing advice you received? What was the best advice you received? Did you follow these pieces of advice? Why or why not?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: My first writing professor in college pulled me aside and asked me if I was majoring in English. When I said yes, she said, “Have you considered anything else?” I always wanted to send her a snarkily signed copy of my first book, but I never managed to do that.
I was also told never to use “I” if the narrator wasn't myself. I still find that entirely silly.
And so I write persona poems that I don't denote as persona poems and I got not only a BA, but also an MFA and PhD in Creative Writing. So, no. I didn't follow those.
The best piece came in my MFA. My professor asked me very pointedly, “Why is everything you write about over?” And I realized that I needed to actually have far less distance from my life and my poems. I started writing work with more immediacy and thus more fear, sadness, hope, and love. I think that was a major turning point for me.
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Finally, Erin, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
Erin Elizabeth Smith: I would love to share a crazy opulent meal with Edna St. Vincent Millay and then get into an enormous amount of trouble with her. That woman knew how to write. And party.
I'm a huge foodie, but I imagine our main course would simply be dirty martinis and maybe some bourbon. Who knows, though? Maybe we could make some sort of crazy Middle Ages-era chimera of a half pig and half turkey. (For Easter, we stuff a rabbit into a duck, so I'm a fan of the crazy!) Or a good ole fashioned crawfish boil.
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake, 2011) and The Fear of Being Found, which will be re-released from Zoetic Press later this year. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and The Wardrobe.
