Ali McCart fo
unded the Portland-based Indigo Editing and Publications a little over five years ago. Since then, she and her band of like-minded editors have worked tirelessly in forming a company whose services, publications and local presence are unaccountably unique.
In addition to its ongoing offerings of editing and writing mentorship services, Indigo hosts the annual Sledgehammer Writing Contest—a scavenger hunt/team writing free-for-all that asks contestants to simultaneously test their skills in treasure hunting and under-the-gun scribbling. Indigo puts out its own literary journal (Ink-Filled Page) and offers regular classes on the ins and outs of the writing business.
McCart—along with Indigo’s Senior Editor Kristin Thiel and Associate Editor Susan DeFreitas—will be reading at this month’s Rough Copy reading series, on July 27. I sat down with the three of them to talk about the relationship between editing and writing, their upcoming artistic endeavors, and the many-headed beast that is Indigo Editing and Publications.
Shane Danaher: So first of all, do you want to just tell me a little bit about Indigo, how it got started and what it is?
Ali McCart: So, Indigo is a collective of editors and each of us has different specialties. We work with authors and publishers and organizations based on our various specialties. Nonfiction, health and wellness, memoir, fantasy, sci-fi, and other genres. We’ve got three of us here and then we have a fourth editor who’s actually in Sacramento. And so it didn’t work out for her to be in the reading this month. But yes. We edit for publishers and independent authors alike.
SD: And when did the business start?
AM: A little over five years ago I graduated from Portland State, the Ooligan Press program, so I had my Master’s, and it was really very fortunate for me. Anyway, I was working in a bookstore and a woman came in and asked my coworker if she knew any editors because she needed help with a book that she was working on and I had, you know, worked on quite a few books in the program. My coworker knew that I was an editor so she immediately referred the person to me, and that became my first paying client and she referred people who referred people and it grew.
And then we support our client base by doing monthly workshops that are a double-feature of craft and business for writing and monthly mini-Sledgehammers and annual main Sledgehammer writing contests that are…the annual one is what we started with and it was supposed to be both a celebration of writing and breaking writer’s block and then also of our city, so it’s a four prompt scavenger hunt around the city and then you get 36 hours to write a short story. And our month-to-month Sledgehammer contests are 36-minutes.
SD: Yeah, I know a couple people who’ve participated in the yearly Sledgehammer contest and they said that it was a lot of fun, a really positive experience. I didn’t know that you did monthly variations on it though. Could you tell me a little about that?
Kristin Thiel: Our first one…when did that one start, two years ago? We’ve had one going for about two years and we added a second one. The first one is still at Blackbird Wine Shop and Atomic Cheese on northeast Fremont at 44th. It’s every second Tuesday, starts at seven o’clock, so get there a little early for your wine and such. It’s free, there are prizes for the winners, announced right then and there. You don’t have to go running around town for 36 minutes, we give four prompts just there and you have 36 minutes to write your story. And then the second one, it has the same rules and everything, but that is every second Thursday at St. John’s Booksellers, in the St. John’s neighborhood.
SD: Do you feel that in the past five years there has been more of a writing community developing in the Portland area? Was that something that was there when you started Indigo Editing?
AM: I think that there was a community there for sure, but I know that I wasn’t personally as involved in it before. I do think
that Indigo has contributed in such a way to help that community grow. And that’s actually one of our goals, it’s part of our mission statement, to support the writing community both locally and nationally. And then another one of our sort-of side projects is we publish Ink Filled Page literary journal and that goes online quarterly and is anthologized in a print version once a year. So we do work setting up readings for those readers both locally and in other parts of the country.
SD: Do you feel that it’s more difficult to run the kind of business that you’re trying to run in Portland as opposed to New York or Los Angeles or somewhere similar? It just seems like it would fit more naturally in a place like New York where there’s such a strong publishing presence.
AM: I don’t know. The publishing community in New York, it was established so long ago that I think it may be more difficult for people who are newer and have sort of a new take on publishing to enter that community. Whereas in Portland—Portland is very much, I’ve heard Portland called, instead of a DIY culture it’s a “DIT” culture: “Do It Together”. And so people are very interested in group writing projects and whether that means writing groups coming together and discussing, or, like, in Sledgehammer, competing as a team to write one short story, to team write. And so honestly I think it’s probably easier to have launched the kind of business that we have here in Portland, as opposed to someplace like New York.
KT: It’s envious, also, that any event or activity or project that gets launched in Portland can reach out and touch more of the metro than in a larger city. Though Portland is a city of neighborhoods, they are neighborhoods that are very inter-connected and people travel between them. I can’t actually speak to what it would be like, but from what I’ve heard of New York, both practically speaking and philosophically as well that there are these set communities and they have very similar things that we have here, but it’s like, multiples of them around the city. Whereas we can have one type that goes out to the city.
SD: So I was going to ask you [Susan DeFreitas] specifically, but you’re all welcome to weigh on this as well. So you’re pursuing an MFA [at Pacific University] while you’re doing this editing work. How do you think that those two disciplines inform each other? Do you find things that you’ve learned from editing carrying over into your own work and vise versa?
Susan DeFreitas: Certainly. I think…I have heard people say that they wouldn’t want to work as an editor because they fear that that side of the brain would sort of take over the creative part of the brain and they would sort of be editing before they were writing. I have not found that to be true. But I really do believe that probably seventy-percent of my own creative process as a writer is editing. And so I’ve found that the editing—editing other people’s work, mentoring, I also teach workshops—that whole process, the more I have seen of other people’s work the more I have been able to see recurring themes, you know, the universal tough spots. And there are certain tools that help in certain areas to get the car out of the ditch, so to speak. It’s really helpful when I encounter those areas in my own writing as well.
AM: I actually met Susan at her MFA residency and I attended the open mic there after I had done one of the presentations there. And I was so taken by Susan’s performance of one of her poems, that I had to speak with her.
SDF: So, I haven’t gotten this poem published, but it did get me a job. [laughs]
KT: I imagine too, like, hearing you talk about the good sides of working at editing and writing at the same time and how they mutually benefit each other, similar to what we were talking about this past weekend. We often hear writers say, “Oh, I don’t read a lot actually.”
SD: So weird.
KT: I know, right? And it’s weird, but it’s so true, I mean that people don’t do it. They say they don’t want to, they’re particularly nervous about reading things that are written in a similar voice, or that are in a similar genre or a similar content to what they’re working on because they don’t want to accidentally pick up that style. So anyway, I think it’s a similar point. It’s actually a good thing to be reading closely and be that a published book, or in whatever capacity, and then be writing at the same time. You notice the good and catch the bad, hopefully.
SD: So you obviously all have your areas of specialty, but I was curious, are there kinds of manuscripts that come in that you’re just really excited to work on? Could you give me a “for instance” of what really sets you on fire as an editor?
AM: For me, I love memoir, and especially memoirs that have something to do with either animals, or the outdoors. I’m really excited right now, it’s not a memoir, but I’m really excited to be working on a book about the wild spaces in the urban areas of Portland, that I just got on Friday. So I’m really, really thrilled for it. Those are two things that really get me going.
KT: Well, let’s see, so I do love to get a great fiction manuscript, something that I would have picked up from the bookshelf to read, later in the process. Certainly that. And also though, it does come down a lot to who I’m working with, the individual client, that when I was sitting here thinking about projects that I really enjoy working on and you know, the book, the story maybe really isn’t my thing, but the client is such a pleasure to work with that they sort of sell it just sort of naturally and I wind up being like, “I do love this story.” [laughs]
And then also I enjoy, I work with, like, Lewis and Clark College and edit their Democracy and Education journal and I always think that’s really interesting. It gets me reading these great academic essays on education-related topics and so that’s really interesting.
SDF: As the resident sci-fi editor here, I would have to say one of the things that I really love, and this is maybe going to sound a little counter-intuitive, but I really love work that has huge ideas—like, brilliant ideas, really cool ideas—but that is still a little raw. Because, sometimes, maybe it’s something particular to the genre, I don’t know, there are software engineers who write their novels while their children are sleeping in the morning. They don’t have their MFAs, they may not have a lot of writing classes, but they have really good ideas. And that’s not the same as being a bad writer. That’s somebody who’s really kind of untrained, but really kind of has a talent for it.
SD: One of my favorite sci-fi writers is Orson Scott Card and he has brilliant ideas and can’t string a sentence together to save his life.
SDF: [laughs] In that sense it’s very gratifying because, you know, one, you’re kind of like the baby catcher, right? You’re the first person to engage with this work on a deep level, aside from family members. I mean, we’re the closest readers you will ever have of your work. And two, I feel like I really have an opportunity to help this person get their ideas out into the world, because all it needs is better language. Or better structuring, or punctuation. The traffic signals that allow you to read prose without noticing the punctuation, that’s what good editing is, you know. And I really like things like that because I feel like I’m really able to offer something.
SD: For Kristin specifically, I noticed that you were working on the Men Undressed collection. That seemed like a really interesting project. Could you tell me a little about that?
KT: Yeah, and we finally have an official press release so I can send that if you need more info, but it’s exciting, it’s a collection of fiction, written by all women writers and I haven’t read the other stories, but as I understand they’re all from the point of view of men, or from their perspective on sexual experiences and sexuality. And what I remember, I talked to the editor and publisher of the collection and she said, “One of the ideas I thought of this collection was that forever, since forever, men have been the published writers, forever. They have had opportunities to speak about women and sexuality.” And so that’s really interesting, and that comes out in October and I will be reading at Powell’s. We’re working on getting into Wordstock and then I will be going to the Twin Cities Book Festival…Lidia Yuknavitch, she wrote The Chronology of Water, which was good, she’s in it as well and we’re the two Portland-based writers. And Steve Almond did the forward. He’s the one boy involved in the project. [laughs]
SD: Could the three of you tell me a little bit about what you’re all going to be reading at the Rough Copy reading?
SDF: Okay, well I’m going to be reading from a piece that I recently had published in the summer issue of The Bear Deluxe about eating local in Portland. I write on various topics relating to the environment and sustainability. So it’s kind of connected in that way. It’s more of a creative nonfiction piece. And then I’ll probably do a little bit from my website of hypertexts, which is hypertextmeditations.com, because I have a few pieces that are meant to be read in different orders, so they kind of call for audience participation to approximate the way you would navigate it online. It’s sort of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” of structure, so I’ll probably read one of those as well.
KT: I will be reading a brand new, in progress piece. It’s a piece that I’ve been sort of mulling over and then writing bits and pieces of, and then when I got the theme for this month, I was like, “You know, actually, I just wonder”—I think that’s always good, a great exercise to put two things together that I’m maybe not required to put together, but it’s two things that I’m working on at the same time. And I was like, “Well, could I put them together?” So I’m going to do that. It will be fiction. That’s normally what I write, is short stories.
AM: Mine’s also in progress. And it will be narrative nonfiction, which is also what I write. So, related to family drama, I suppose. [laughs] But it will be entertaining, I hope.
SD: Those all sound great. I’m excited. Is there anything else that you want to put down, just for the good of the order?
AM: I think Sledgehammer is the main thing we want to plug at this point because we have that coming up in September.
SDF: And our monthly writing workshops. So, it’s always a creative writing workshop followed by a book business workshop. That’s been a really great combination. Every month it’s a different topic. It’s always the third Saturday of the month.
KT: Actually, I thought of one thing I’ll plug that’s not Indigo related, but is Indigo related sort of in a broader sphere. I’m on the board of the Portland Artist’s Clinic, which is a brand new thing and it’s getting going. The mission is to provide urgent and preventative healthcare for uninsured and under-insured creatives in the Portland area. So, we do have a brick and mortar space, we will be having our first clinic hours this month.
Join us on July 27 for this month’s reading. Canvas Art Bar, 7:00. The theme this month is “Distance,” open mic to follow.
