What An Indie Publisher Can Teach You About Writing

As part of our Poetry Craft series, Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton from Corbel Stone Press discuss what an indie publisher can teach you about writing.

How has running Corbel Stone Press shaped your perspective on what poetry can do, beyond the autobiographical?

Our personal experiences inform every aspect of our lives, so we’re not necessarily encouraging writers to abandon autobiography altogether, but there are ways to transmute our experiences into other kinds of narratives. Many mythopoeic texts, for instance, focus on aspects of collective identity, and seek to explore more universal themes that transcend individual circumstance. One of the joys of running a press has been receiving poet’s submissions from around the world in response to specific themes that we’ve advertised. For example, we published a series of booklets focused on different aspects of the other-than-human world, including ideas about sentience, language, and the sacred, and the work we received was incredibly diverse, thought-provoking, and, in some cases, about as far from autobiography as it’s possible to be.

What do you think independent publishers like yourselves offer that larger presses can’t, especially when it comes to working with archival, mythological, or multilingual material?

Undeniably, there’s a certain agility that comes with being a small press. We can perhaps take more risks with publishing experimental and marginal literatures. We began in 2009 by documenting our own work – work that seemed to fall outside the remit of other publishers. This meant that we could truly experiment, and so, over the course of the years, we’ve created an evolving public archive that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible. We’ve had a particular freedom to explore unusual formats, from unique, one-off prints and single-poem pamphlets to digital soundworks and multimedia editions. We’d therefore wholeheartedly encourage other poets to incorporate self-publishing strategies into their broader practice.

Why is it important to you to publish texts that centre the more-than-human world? How does that philosophy influence your work?

Given the global environmental crisis, there’s an increasing sense of urgency inherent in acts of testimony – it feels vitally important to record what’s disappearing before our eyes. But more fundamental for us at Corbel Stone Press is the simple process of fostering an awareness of, and an attentiveness to, the world around us, regardless of any broader environmental and cultural pressures. In other words, we’re less motivated by the need to adopt a reactive stance, and more by the desire to document and celebrate the natural world on its own terms. Accordingly, the founding principle of our journal, Reliquiae, was to publish texts that shared a similar outlook, and through our research we uncovered diverse writings from around the world – including ancient sacred songs and prayers that venerated the natural world. These texts therefore provide a deeper historical context for the contemporary writing that we feature in the journal, and our work as publishers concerns itself with finding connecting threads between the distant past and the present day.

What have you learned from curating and editing Reliquiae that you think could be important in classrooms, workshops, or writing spaces? / For writers looking to move beyond personal narrative, how can archival or mythological texts open up new creative possibilities?

On the most fundamental level, an exposure to other literatures can open us up to new thought forms, new ideas and new vocabularies. Writers often develop their own poetic language through the example of others. We learn what poetry is through reading other poetry. As often as not, we become encultured in the writing of the fashionable present. And whilst it’s true that Corbel Stone Press initially grew out of a shared admiration for certain poets, we also found equal inspiration in a broad range of other texts, from folkloric and mythological works to language glossaries and obscure scientific treatises. A process of valuable estrangement can therefore occur by absorbing the lessons that these different kinds of texts can teach us.

How can cultivating an ‘archive’ – whether as a poet or a publisher – be a generative part of the writing process?

It’s not uncommon for poets to look at their poems as unique, self-contained objects, but it can be a fascinating exercise to step back and look at our body of work as a whole, and to examine the recurrent themes, ideas and even vocabularies that give it structure and coherence. It is often through such reflection that hidden or unintentional resonances make themselves known, and bringing these elements from the subconscious into the conscious realm can be a key step in advancing our work. As poets we’re often encouraged to be diverse – magazines and journals regularly solicit work on specific themes, for example – but it’s important to maintain a kind of fidelity to the ideas we wish to share through our work, rather than spreading ourselves too thinly. Instead, we can deepen the core values of our writing by exploring them iteratively, using different techniques and perspectives.

Autumn Richardson is a poet, editor, and translator. Her work has been published widely in literary journals, pamphlets, and anthologies, and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish. Her collections, which include Heart of Winter, An Almost-Gone Radiance, and Ajar to the Night offer non-anthropocentric views of the world and are deeply informed by wide-ranging research into ecology, ethnology, ancient history, and philosophy. Since 2009 she has been co-director of multimedia publishing house Corbel Stone Press with Richard Skelton. Between 2013 and 2022 they co-edited the influential journal of ecopoetics and esoteric literature, Reliquiae, which published more than 300 writers in over 45 languages. https://www.autumnrichardson.net 

Richard Skelton is a British writer, publisher, and artist. He has produced over a dozen books of experimental writing, primarily focusing on the ecology and archaeology of northern landscapes. These include Beyond the Fell Wall (Little Toller Books), Stranger in the Mask of a Deer (Penned in the Margins), and The Giving Way (Guillemot Press). He holds a PhD from the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and his work has been exhibited at galleries and art institutions worldwide. A DIY advocate in the tradition of small-press pioneers, the majority of his work is published through Corbel Stone Press, the Anglo-Canadian publisher he has run with Autumn Richardson since 2009. https://www.richardskelton.net.