WC: OK. Why the name “Tinfish”?
SS: [Laughs] OK, well that was an accident.
WC: Really?
SS: We had a visiting writer at the time named Terese Svoboda and she was—still is—married to a guy named Steve Bull, and he’s really a hoot to talk to. I ran in to him at Barnes & Noble and I said, “Hey Steve, what would you call a journal of experimental poetry from the Pacific?” And he says: “It has to have a metal in it and the word ‘fish’—like Goldfish.” I’m like, no way to Goldfish. But then tin popped into my head so I said, “Hey Steve, how about ‘Tinfish?’” And he says: “That’s it!”
And remember that was before the days you could just Google things, so only later did I discover that it actually means ‘torpedo.’ And there are a bunch of restaurants called Tinfish, there was a rock band in Chicago called Tinfish, there was a theater company called Tinfish—so I wasn’t alone.
WC: [Laughs] That’s too funny. How do you select which poets you want to publish, and how does that process work?
SS: OK, well when we had the journal running—which, it ended in 2010, mostly because people just don’t buy journals anymore—I would get a lot of submissions from people and often I’d be surprised and pick something by somebody I’d never heard of.
Now that I feel like I know the territory a little bit better, I either solicit material from people that I know are out there, or it somehow finds its way to me. We don’t have an open submission period like a lot of presses, really because we just don’t publish that much.
WC: Tinfish has been called “one of the great small presses of the United States” by Ron Silliman. I’m curious though, how does that epithet gel—or maybe not gel—with the Pacific colonial-conscious poetry you publish sometimes?
SS: [Laughs] When people say nice things like that I don’t quarrel. The whole notion of “greatness” is one I don’t really abide by in any context. Ron Silliman has had other comments about me and about Tinfish that have been a little off the point because he doesn’t understand the region at all, but in general he’s been wonderful for us.
do you select which poets you want to publish, and how does that process work?
SS: OK, well when we had the journal running—which, it ended in 2010, mostly because people just don’t buy journals anymore—I would get a lot of submissions from people and often I’d be surprised and pick something by somebody I’d never heard of.
Now that I feel like I know the territory a little bit better, I either solicit material from people that I know are out there, or it somehow finds its way to me. We don’t have an open submission period like a lot of presses, really because we just don’t publish that much.
WC: Tinfish has been called “one of the great small presses of the United States” by Ron Silliman. I’m curious though, how does that epithet gel—or maybe not gel—with the Pacific colonial-conscious poetry you publish sometimes?
SS: [Laughs] When people say nice things like that I don’t quarrel. The whole notion of “greatness” is one I don’t really abide by in any context. Ron Silliman has had other comments about me and about Tinfish that have been a little off the point because he doesn’t understand the region at all, but in general he’s been wonderful for us.
WC: “Jack London is Dead” is a really interesting book, and I felt like I empathized a lot with it. Can you talk a little about how that book came about and what the overall reaction to it was here in Hawaiʻi?
SS: Well, I’m a writer as well as a publisher as well as a critic. I think writers have their own particular issues. And if you are a Euro-American writer—a haole writer—in Hawaiʻi, the real issue is there’s not really an audience for you. All the action is elsewhere, for historically valid reasons. So I came here and I thought: “What do I, and people like me, do to find an audience here?”
I started thinking about that conundrum over many, many years and then, one year I had a student named Mason Donald in one of my grad classes—whom I quote in the introduction to the book—who wrote this poem about being a kid who grew up on the Big Island but had a professor here tell him, basically, “You can’t write about Hawaiʻi because you’re not from Hawaiʻi.”
Perspective:
"...if you are a Euro-American writer—a haole writer—in Hawaiʻi, the real issue is there’s not really an audience for you."