Self-described literary wet nurse Miette Gillette is one of our belletristic crushes. Whiskey Tit publishes books no-one else will, with titles like, Kinderrinder, I, No Other, and The Man Who Can’t Die, which we can’t get enough of. When we decided to do a Five Questions With…, our series on interesting New Englanders, Miette was an immediate, must-involve choice.

Take: When did you know you were a New Englander?
Miette Gillette: Transplant from NYC. I’m still not sure I’m a New Englander, though last summer I was attempting to inseminate our sow, and couldn’t get the cap off of the bag of pig semen. I didn’t have a free hand, and the pig was getting excited, so in a pinch I used my teeth to remove the cap, and got more of a taste than I’d ever like to admit. Is that a New England thing?

T: What one word would you use to describe New Englanders?
MG: Subarued

T: Favorite New England-based artists?
MG: Yannick Murphy and Carolyn Chute are both doing vital, astonishing work in American letters. Stylistically they’re diametric opposites: the literary equivalent of working in NYC interactive agencies, then retiring to inseminate pigs in Vermont. But both women capture very thin slices of New England culture in ways that nobody else in the country is capable of.

T: What’s your favorite bizarre, historical, or quirky piece of New England trivia?
MG: There’s a law against bringing elephants into the state of Vermont. Given the current collection of beasts roaming on my land, this is a law that’s definitely looking out for my interests.

T: What’s the funniest thing you’ve seen while driving in New England?
MG: I’ve seen about all the things one might see on Vermont Driving Bingo: skunks chasing moose, naked families happily hitchhiking, ducks stopping to drop an egg. When we first moved to the area, we were renting the last house on a dead-end road. The road apparently had not always been a dead-end; a bridge had gotten washed out years prior, and the town had decided not to fix it. But GPS systems still had the road intact on their maps, and had that road marked as the fastest route from Sugarbush ski resort to Boston. Every Sunday night in the wintertime, without fail, a car would be barreling down the road and smash directly into the snow bank in front of our house. So the funniest thing many weekend skiers had probably seen in Vermont were two beleaguered city transplants, hopping out of bed at midnight often in boots and coats but nothing underneath, patiently towing them out of the snow bank and turning them around. Notice: Heed the Dead End signs!

Bonus Questions:

T: What’s pissing you off today?
MG: The same thing that’s been pissing me off pervasively since January 20.

T: Dog or cat?
MG: Well, just today the Dog gave my daughter’s favorite stuffy a rhinectomy, and the cat vomited mouse guts all over the proof of a new book I’m debuting in two weeks’ time. So, both?

The post 5 Questions with. . .Miette Gillette appeared first on Take Magazine.

Yarrow Paisley doesn’t want readers to ignore the id. His new collection of narrations—I, No Other—explores the gamut of chaos that can erupt when you suppress the baser impulses lingering beneath the surface of your consciousness. His prose bursts with what can seem like inscrutable absurdities, as bizarre events manipulate timelines, bodies, and any lingering shred of literary convention.

A deep solipsism links his cast of first-person narrators. “They’re basically hardly even aware of an audience, of anyone listening to what they’re saying,” Paisley says. “They’re just kind of speaking to the world in a natural way.” The collection’s title nods to that intentional egoistic element, playing on a Rimbaud quote included as an epigraph: “Car Je est un autre” (“For I is an other”). Paisley’s characters operate on the assertion of the self over anyone else. That’s why he bills the collection as “narrations” specifically rather than short stories. “They don’t have the structure of stories for the most part,” he says. “but they’re definitely about this kind of explosion of self, narrative impulse.”

These “absurdist interludes,” as Vermont publisher Whiskey Tit bills them, provide Paisley a dreamlike space to transgress certain norms—of narrative form and, obliquely, of gender and sexuality. “The more of those taboos you can break, the clearer your vision becomes,” he says. “I know my stories make people uncomfortable. To me that’s a good thing. That’s what I want my literature to do to me.”

An interlude calls to mind a separation, as in between songs on an album or acts in a play. Paisley considers his interludes to be “separating mundane reality, kind of tearing open a hole in the fabric of spacetime and peeking out.” He clarifies: “When I say the fabric of spacetime I’m referring to the social fabric, as opposed to reality itself.”

“Because you know they seem to be admitting this more and more in science, but this is all a social construct,” he continues. “I mean reality itself—we’re taught how to perceive it, but it’s all filtered through your brain, so it could be anything. That’s where cosmic horror comes from—that sense that we know deep down none of this is real. I think an absurdist interlude keys you into that.”

Paisley—who splits his time between raising his son, writing, and delivering mail around Northampton, Massachusetts—deliberately aims to discomfort the reader. In some cases he tries to shock and “force [the reader] to confront the empathy they should feel for these characters.” More broadly he hopes to make readers face the psychological forces they most often refuse to recognize.

“If you never acknowledge [the id] or if you make denials to yourself about it all the time, then you run the danger of being easily controlled by it without even realizing it, without knowing,” Paisley says. He suggests the danger of rejecting the unsavory truth, comparing a figure like Trump to one of his narrators.

“He’s the id that emerges when you try to turn away from it,” he says. “You have to confront those things directly and not turn away from them.” Unfortunately, Paisley notes, people had turned away from a frightening reality. “That’s why they were caught by surprise when [Trump] just came up and grabbed the throne. Because everyone was complacent. People were told that it was absurd. It was an absurdist interlude to them. They thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be over on election day.’ And it wasn’t.”

That insight makes I, No Other feel all the more necessary. Paisley agrees that the jolt it gives the reader could be more broadly applicable in this kind of moment. Many people “woke up shell-shocked,” he says, because “they wouldn’t look at [the truth]” before the election. “They still won’t. They still can’t believe it. It’s gonna take a while for people to really internalize the way everything’s changed now.”

Yarrow Paisley
Northampton, Massachusetts
Website

Top image by Philip Shelley

The post Man of Letters appeared first on Take Magazine.

Miette Gillette is a writer, mother, farmer, and the boss publisher at Whiskey Tit, the Vermont-based publishing house where homeless books seek asylum from the rigid standards of the broader publishing industry. Gillette and the Whiskey Tit team specialize in publishing books that are, according to publishing norms, too long or too short. They publish books that aren’t easily summed up in a 250 word blurb because the narrative is too experimental, or the book doesn’t have a real narrative at all. They work with authors who want to design their own covers, authors who don’t even want their name on the cover and writers of tentacle porn…well, only if the writing is good.

I, No Other book cover published by Whiskey Tit

Gillette began her publishing career “in the middle of nowhere” after, like so many others almost a decade ago, she was priced out of New York City. If she was going to live outside the city and be a publisher, she wanted a, “diametrically opposite existence. I didn’t want to live in the ‘burbs and I didn’t want to live in a smaller city…I wanted as far away from that as I could get. Now, we literally live on a little homestead. There’s no running water. I have livestock, so it’s not unusual for me to be inseminating a pig, then editing a book. Of course, I wash my hands obviously. I wanted the fundamental elements of both those worlds. If I was going to publish, i really wanted to publish. And if I was going to live outside of the city, I wanted to get dirty and really do it.”

In addition to this change of place, Gillette’s slight career change was influenced by her pregnancy. For her, being pregnant meant, “you can’t really focus for hours on writing a piece of literature anymore. The only things you can focus on are your baby, making sure you’re nursing, feeding your baby, not killing them, and the insatiable need for a drink.” Even though Gillette couldn’t sit for eight hours at a time writing, she continued to read her friend’s unpublished work, and realized she could be more than just an editor or an advocate for them–she could be a partner and publisher.

The name of the publishing house, Whiskey Tit, was also born during this time of pregnancy and prose. Gillette’s need for a drink while she was pregnant was not because she was an alcoholic, but because “doing those things without a sweating glass of booze seemed impossible. So I went down this rabbithole of trying to figure out exactly how much whiskey I could drink without giving my baby brain damage. I spent a LOT of time with this math,” she continues, “and found a small but dedicated community of new mothers similarly obsessed with Whiskey and Tits in this really specific way. It sounds like a horrible and selfish thing to admit, but at the time, whiskey, and the relationship of whiskey to my own tits, seemed like a perfectly natural way to attempt to get my life back while caring for my baby. Or at least that’s how I excused it at the time.” This unique mix of math, contemplation, and desperation led her to the brilliantly provocative name she uses today.

Poster Child book cover, published by Whiskey Tit

Initially, Whiskey Tit was a vanity project for Gillette, where she mostly published works by her friends. These works were roundly rejected by the publishing industry not because of the quality of content, but because of the structural limitations of the industry. Beyond this focus on literature that is difficult to categorize, Whiskey Tit cares about the aesthetic experience of their published works in a way that sets them apart from other independent publishers, “We’re less interested in how a book is going to look when it’s face up on a Barnes and Noble shelf and more interested in the book as an object and as a piece of art.”

As Whiskey Tit gained legitimacy, the publisher’s position in the market strengthened. Today, Whiskey Tit’s team of seven recieves a few submissions a day, some of which are hundreds of pages in length, and some of which, as mentioned before, are tentacle porn. “I really felt that I succeeded as a publisher when I received my first submission of tentacle porn,” she says. “It was actually pretty good! But it does need a bit of work.”

Queer and Alone book cover, published by Whiskey Tit

In addition to publishing “good but homeless” books by less established authors, Whiskey Tit is in the business of reviving out-of-print books. Always a crusader for print and transgressive industry presence, Gillette believes that due to the current technological climate of digital files and storage, no book should be out of print, “The only reason why books go out of print are reasons related to [these] really antiquated traditional publishing model[s]…if someone wants to buy a book, there’s no reason they should have to rely on this inflated secondary collectors market, which is kind of like the housing-market bubble of the literary world.”

Miette Gillette and her team at Whiskey Tit have carved themselves a valuable niche in the world of traditional publishing. By relinquishing more control to authors, searching for undervalued and out of print books, and thoughtfully prioritizing the aesthetic experience of a book, Whiskey Tit is reinventing what it means to be a publisher of the written word. Expect more great works and new approaches from the small press, since, according to Gillette, “If you’ve ever had whiskey tits, you should know that they fill up, have many dimensions, and take many shapes.”

Miette Gillette lives in up-state Vermont and is the publisher at Whiskey Tit. Follow her work with Whiskey Tit on Instagram and Facebook, and follow her bedtime stories podcast here.

Top Image Whiskey Tit logo | All images courtesy Miette Gillette

The post Whiskey Tits Have Many Dimensions appeared first on Take Magazine.