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ILLUSTRATION: NADINE NAKANISHI

With March coming up fast, and with it the annual Small Press Month celebrations, the perfect metaphor for small-press publishing in Chicago popped into our brain: It’s the story of Other Voices. Until the release of its final issue in November, OV was considered one of the premier literary magazines in the country, certainly in the city. It had loose ties to a university —receiving office space but no money from the University of Illinois at Chicago—and a volunteer staff ran it. In the fall the editors switched from publishing the magazine to publishing only books, a venture they’d begun in 2005. But it’s the way they’re doing it that’s most resonant: They’re now a part of Dzanc Books, a small, nonprofit publisher based in...Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We’re not criticizing OV for joining forces with Dzanc, a respected publisher that will now take over the business side while the Chicago staff retains editorial control. But it’s telling that OV had to look outside of Chicago for institutional support. The fact is, the health of the Chicago small-press publishing scene is a matter of touch and go. In January 2006 everyone celebrated the launch of the new press, Stolen Time Publishing, when it released its first title, The Best Underground Fiction Volume One featuring John McNally, Elizabeth Crane and others. It’s now February 2008 and there’s no Volume Two. These days, stolentimepublishing.com sells laptops and online dating services, and founder Scott Miles says plans for another installment were scrapped. Last year, Punk Planet Magazine tragically folded, though its book imprint continues to operate as part of New York’s Akashic Books.

As it stands, there isn’t much institutional support for literature in our fair city, whether we’re talking city-sponsorship or private foundations. (Full disclosure: I own a small publishing company in town called featherproof books.) One need only to look to the (far) north to see how a small-press publishing scene can thrive. The Twin Cities have numerous presses—Graywolf, Coffee House and Milkweed, to name a few—that prosper, at least in part, thanks to the city’s tradition of generous private and public funding. We don’t expect much to change here. The governor’s 2008 budget slashed the Illinois Arts Council’s funding and, truth be told, not much of that went to literature, anyhow.

But there is one bright sign of life. The city’s cultural affairs office recently created a position in the office of tourism: director of literary arts and events. Danielle Chapman, a former staffer at the Poetry Foundation, was hired late last year and has since met with numerous publishers around the city. She declined to be interviewed for this story, saying she was still in a “fact-finding phase” and figuring out the duties of her position. But it’s easy to see Chapman occupying the same sort of space as the director of fashion arts and events, a position created in 2006 to be a liaison among various fashion professionals and help promote the industry. Though it remains to be seen what will become of the new position, it augers well that the city has recognized a need to help foster the burgeoning literary scene. We guess it speaks to the fashion of the times that literature comes a year-and-a-half after clothing.

In the meantime, more light continues to peek over the horizon. Already in 2008 we’ve seen the launch of two literary magazines, the creative-nonfiction journal Paper & Carriages and the fiction and poetry mag The Bruiser Review. That last one is particularly interesting, as it explicitly intends to capture the current literary culture in Chicago, which is very much dominated by the explosion of reading series over the past few years. Without much publishing in town, writers have taken to the stage to find an audience. The poetry scene melds those worlds most successfully, with numerous chapbook presses thriving, and feminist publishers Switchback Books and Dancing Girl Press garnering national attention.

With more writers in Chicago taking to the stage, we’re glad to see more editors trying to get them on the page and the sleeping giant of the City suddenly rubbing the crust from its eyes, it might just become fashionable to be in publishing.

Follow the discussion about Small Press Month on the TOC blog here.