Leaping into the unknown has become a way of life for Jen Woods. Woods, the driving force behind Typecast Publishing and The Writer’s Block Festival, holds a resumé punctuated with calculated risks, each leading the young publisher-entrepreneur into more exciting unchartered territory.
Take the success of her literary journal “The Lumberyard”. Woods and her brother, Eric Woods of Firecracker Press in St. Louis, began collaborating on the literary journal in 2006, hoping to create something visually interesting that might also bring poetry to an entirely new audience. It was a complete experiment. Woods only hoped that “The Lumberyard” would satisfy a personal creative yearning, regardless of whether it was a commercial success, and would be something cool to look back on when she grew old. The result was a publication exploding with graphic design produced by hand on letterpress. Woods was working at Sarabande Books when she took the first issue of “The Lumberyard” to the Association of Writing Professionals (AWP) conference. With permission from Sarabande editor-in-chief, Sarah Gorham, set it on the edge of the publisher’s table. On the very last day of the conference, “a fancy guy in a suit came up to me and points to the magazine and says, ‘Who’s responsible for this?’ and I said, ‘Well, I guess I am.’ And he says, ‘This is the future of poetry. Here’s my card. We want to help you.’” The man was from the National Endowment for the Arts. “The Lumberyard” is now five years old and on its 8th issue. It has attracted both emerging poets and best-selling writers like Sherman Alexie. The fifth issue was reviewed in The New York Times, elevating its location on the literary map and boosting its subscription rate by a hefty 75%. “We went from a healthy handful of subscribers to a thing.” Now Woods, 35, gets calls for speaking engagements and travels frequently to New York for book fairs and meetings.
Looking at Jen Woods, the words risk, chance, and experiment do not leap to mind. Petite and understated in a striped crewneck sweater and jeans, Woods looks more like a dancer with her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, than a literary visionary, but then again, Woods thrives upon busting stereotypes. This past summer, for instance, Woods and her crew at Typecast Publishing took some of their recent poetry publications to Derby City Comic Con – the comic book convention. Her mission: to bring poetry to a non-poetry audience. The experiment paid off when Woods sold more books than she normally does at a book fair! Looking at a copy of “The Lumberyard” or perhaps Matthew Lipman’s collection of poetry, “Monkey Bars”, you can see how comic book lovers could be drawn to Wood’s publications. The illustrations are bold, resembling the broad, flat designs of classic comics and graphic novels, and
the typeset is often irregular and fills or falls off the corners of the page. Design is a big part of the publishing process at Typecast. “We spend equal amounts of time with editorial as we do with object design. Almost everything that you see in the magazine and in books, if we can use hand methods and not machines, we use the hand methods, always, even if it takes us longer, even if it’s more expensive. We feel like when actual human beings spend time creating it, the consumer, whether they know it on a conscious level or not, they know it, and they respond to it in a very visceral way and they tend to want to love what’s inside. So, thus far it has worked.” It is evident that Woods takes great pride in her products. While discussing the design process, she carefully handles a book, fusses over a small imperfection on the corner. Chance and experiment may be themes in Woods’ life and career, but perfection is her modus operandi.
Woods credits much of her success to trusting chance. Hailing originally from Piedmont, Missouri and moving to Louisville by way of Asheville, North Carolina, Woods toyed with the idea of formally studying creative writing in two different MFA programs until a chance meeting with Charles Frazier, author of the bestseller “Cold Mountain”, changed all of that. Woods had just matriculated into the program at University of North Carolina, Greensboro and was having second thoughts about the program. She met Frazier while working at a local bookstore and asked for his opinion, “and he told me to get a life!” Woods dropped out of the program just two days into the semester and has never looked back. A few years after “The Lumberyard” took off, Woods decided to take another leap of faith. In 2010 she quit her job at the nonprofit press Sarabande Books to start the for-profit press, Typecast Publishing. The press now occupies the bottom floor of her home in Lyndon, has two full-time staff, Woods and Lindsey Alexander, two interns, and employs a “small army of freelancers, from designers to printers to copywriters, including our extended family at The Firecracker Press.” Woods is quick to share credit, “We could never achieve what we do without these artisans; they are key to our success.” The press now has printed 11 titles, has 4 more in the works, plus “The Lumberyard” and its digital counterpart The Sawmill, available at typecastpublishing.com.
Woods’ face lights up when she tells me about Typecast’s new project, “Travel”. “I’m so excited about it!” Poet and musician, Matt Hart from the journal “Forklift, Ohio” has written a collection of poetry, “but it’s not just a poetry collection. His band took the collection and made an album out of it that accompanies the book and we’re pitching the whole thing to the music community.” Grinning with both enthusiasm and embarrassment, she adds, “So, I’ve never put out an album before. I have no idea what I’m doing.” But it’s this embrace of new territory that has proved successful for Woods time and again. Woods hopes the boxed set takes off with the twenty-something crowd. She plans to send Hart-the-poet, not Hart-the-musician, on tour as a warm-up act at music venues and has already lined up punk musicians Jordan Dreyer from the band La Dispute and Johnny Whitney from The Blood Brothers to write a blurb about the poetry collection, rather than having a recognized name in the poetry world for pre-publication publicity. “Hopefully you’ll see us on Pitchfork some day or if we’re hyper lucky maybe Rolling Stone will take note.”
Woods hopes that Typecast inspires writers, publishers, and artists to take chances, to try new things. When she was deciding whether or not to stay where it was safe at her full-time job at Sarabande or go out on her own and launch Typecast, the recession hit and she realized that she wasn’t all that safe in the non-profit world. “Is it really that much more risky to try a completely capitalistic approach to this business than relying on donors and kind people to support you?” she wondered. “I think [Typecast is] disproving accepted gospel about publishing and where it’s going and whether or not this is the end of books, which of course it’s not. We can’t survive as a society without our stories.” Woods believes that the publishing industry is on the cusp of vast change because consumers and writers are tired of corporate greed and demand better products. Typecast appears to be leading the way into the vast unknown experiment of indie publishing. As the publishing landscape changes over the next 5-10 years, Woods believes Typecast “will have had, by then, several years of practice putting out gorgeous, one-of-a-kind hardbound editions so if people want to learn to do that, we are more than happy to help presses sort that out, because let’s make prettier books, I say!”
–Amy Miller
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