"Kindness First": An Interview with Tennison S. Black

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Tennison S. Black, the managing editor and a member of the board of directors for Sundress Publications. Sundress Publications is a volunteer-run press that publishes both chapbooks and full-length works in print and digital forms, in addition to hosting online journals. The press dedicates itself to publishing work from people that are typically underrepresented in the literary world. In this interview, Tennison answered my questions about Sundress Publications itself, such as some of the press’s inner workings, and what it hopes to bring to the literary world. 

—Al Gastmeier, Spring 2023 Intern, River River Books

RRB: The about page for Sundress Publications reads: “we do not and cannot publish works we do not love whole-heartedly”—how does that standard affect your editorial process?

TB: Everything we publish has to go through multiple stages and steps depending on which way it came in and at each step it has a chance to create a champion of the work. When we meet as a board we all come in with a list of books we love. And everyone has the opportunity to say what they found in the submissions to love and why, as well as why they think it's a great fit for our catalog as planned for the coming year. 

Going into every meeting I think okay, these are the two or three I will die without. So I write out an argument about why I really want to publish this or that book. But every time I find that other board members love the same works, so it's not much of a fight. Sure, sometimes I don't really "feel" a manuscript that another member of the board just adores—or maybe I love something else more so another's preference doesn't bubble up for me as being worthy of giving up this other one I love more. But we respect each other deeply and we all want the same thing: to publish books that we're proud to represent by authors we're proud to stand behind so we talk and come together in the end. 

But there are so many more things to consider than just whether we love it or not. Does this work well with the whole of our list for the year? Does this conflict with another title we published last year? And many other questions come up—so it's not just a matter of simply loving the work, unfortunately.

Though I suppose that ultimately, "we have to love it" means that we have to really want to put in the work. Consider: we're an all-volunteer press. None of us are currently being paid (though we're working on deploying a small honorarium program soon). But putting out a book is a ton of (usually thankless) work. Many hours and hours of time we could all be spending writing instead of editing or sending emails or laying out a tricky poem. From my role as Managing Editor to the editor of each project—then there's the book designer, cover designer, copyeditors, an entire intern team, a Marketing Director, and on and on. Not to mention the running of our intern program by a Staff Director, and then there's our Executive Director who oversees all of our various programs. By the time we put out a book, a dozen people may have had a hand in it (less if some roles double-up like if someone is the editor and also does the layout or the editing). And we couldn't put in those hours if we didn't really believe that this book needs to be in the world. We're here for that love of these books and that dedication to promoting the whole of literature. If it wasn't for love—of both books and authors, we couldn't do this.

RRB: I got the impression that Sundress Publications aims to give a large amount of support to authors during the entire publication process. Why is it important to you to do so?

TB: Most of us are authors, too. We have books with various presses both large and small. And while we love our various presses and are grateful for the opportunities to publish our own work with them, we also recognize that publishing is hard on authors. We want to try to provide support in a way that we ourselves haven't had. We're the type of people who look at our own struggles and think about how we want to smooth the way over that same road for others. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's hard to be an author. I see it in myself and I see in many of our authors that the only thing scarier than worrying your work will never get published is seeing it published. The whole thing is hard. And it's easy as a press to just think, "hey, we're publishing your work, shouldn't you be excited!?" When the truth is that yeah, they're thrilled—but also suddenly very very scared.

Many of our authors are debut authors and from the contract to the promotion, they're doing something new and hard for the first time while also struggling with those feelings of terror (not to mention the confusion as to why they feel scared!). So I see our role as being one of assistant coach as much as publisher. We want to help authors and produce good work that we feel needs to be read. If we're not going to do so kindly and with compassion for the entire process, we should all find something else to do with our time. We choose, every day, to be a part of the solution to the challenges of publishing.

RRB: I’m especially interested in the Gone Dark Archives, which fits under the Sundress Publications umbrella. Why did your press decide to take action to preserve defunct online journals?

TB: This was all Erin Elizabeth Smith, our Executive Director. So I took the liberty of asking her to answer this for you. Here is her reply: "Back in the day, I saw a lot of journals just *poof* disappear from the internet. Basically, the amount that it cost for them to keep the site up wasn't worthwhile and the whole history of the journal just disappeared. When a print journal goes belly-up, at least there are print copies floating around in the universe somewhere. With online journals, they were just gone. So we figured since we had unlimited hosting that we could offer that space to other organizations. We haven't added a journal in a while, but we like to be a resource to our community to keep work alive."

RRB: What do you hope for Sundress Publications to bring to the literary world?

Kindness first. Kindness and compassion and intellectual and artistic safety for every staff member and every author. If we aren't a place where everyone is safe and cared about, first and foremost, then what are we even doing? 

In this, I hope we can be an example of how a press can thrive even as it keeps pushing to be better and to improve every day. We're always turning it up one notch. How can we make this space safer for our BIPOC authors? How do we start to pay our staff? Can we open up new opportunities? Can we tighten our process? How do we do this better? Can we adapt this to make something easier for our staff?

We really don't ask ourselves how everyone else is doing it. We just start at a place of caring and try to find as many ways in every process to evidence that deep and authentic caring. If we can do that as much as possible, then that's all that matters. Everything else will work out.

Thanks to Al Gastmeier and Tennison Black for their time and care on this interview. Find more of Tennison’s work at their website https://tennisonblack.com/, and please note that their poetry collection SURVIVAL STRATEGIES is forthcoming Fall 2023 as a winning title in the National Poetry Series. Congratulations, Tennison!