How do you pick up the ocean? How do you swim in a pail? Water always lives in a state of questioning the walls that hold it. When we put water in a pail it takes the shape of the pail, but it’s back to being to only water as soon as the pail disappears.
During the process of creating the Small Press Database, I repeatedly wondered how to hold something as fluid as water. From the beginning it was clear that the edges of our subject were porous, that any boundaries we imposed were just that—imposed. The exciting thing about small press publishing is that it is uncontainable, constantly shifting, without a central organizing government or institution or even principle. How were we going to make a resource that allowed people an entryway into small press community? How were we going to bring small press publishing “together,” creating a usable resource that acknowledged the unboundedness and uncategorizableness of the landscape it represented?
We navigated these difficulties practically, in the everyday labor of assembling the database. When it came to the tags we applied to presses, for example, we wanted to indicate when a press focused on a certain genre or on writers with a shared identity. At the same time, we wanted to honor the specific ways presses expressed their affiliations, rather than reducing them into an overall category that smoothed over important differences. As a group we valued self-identification, the complexities and textures of how people and presses construct an identity for themselves. These two desires—to simplify for purposes of access, and to honor and go toward complexity and intersectionality—felt at odds with one another. It was often hard to decide what “categories” to use because we didn’t want to impose them.
Maybe that tension is the definition of a database. And maybe that tension is the Small Press Database’s primary contribution.
Maybe the database is necessary, in fact, because it highlights everything it cannot do.
This is my hope, at least, with the Small Press Database. I want to open toward complexity. I want the questions that arise to be more important than the conclusions. Do I want the tags and categories to help people gain familiarity with the landscape? Yes. More important, however, is to allow the limits of the Small Press Database to illuminate fissures that future participants in the small press world will inhabit.
By opening gaps in our seeing, that is, we give the yawn of those spaces to the future. We invite correctives to our current capacities. We invite new possibilities in.
If you are trying to pick up the ocean, let the pail be porous. Let the water pour back into itself. You can’t hold something forever. My hope is that the Small Press Database holds just enough of the small press world to create community, to give back, to start it all again.
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