Mission Statement
Starcherone Books, Inc., exists to stimulate public interest in works of innovative prose fiction and nurture an understanding of the art of fiction writing by publishing, disseminating, and affording the public opportunities to hear readings of this work. In addition to encouraging the development of authors of innovative fiction and their audiences, Starcherone conducts workshops in independent publishing, to encourage the growth of other small presses.
Our Hard-Working Staff
The Starcherone History
by Ted Pelton
Starcherone Books began in 2000 when six years after winning a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction writing, I not only couldn't find a publisher for my first collection of stories, I couldn't even find a publisher who would consent to read it. So I decided to publish it myself. I stripped it down to the best stuff -- 60 pages I really believed in (both because I was paying for it myself and because I knew that a self-published book would be looked at askance, and I didn't want there to be any questions of suspect quality). I had recently joined the faculty at Medaille College of Buffalo, NY, and advised the literary magazine, Prelude. Now, with the help of Prelude's student editor (now Starcherone's Graphic Arts Editor) Rebecca Maslen, who knew Photoshop and Quark, I put together the first edition of Endorsed by Jack Chapeau in the college's basement multimedia lab and called the company Starcherone ("start-your-own").
In 2001, over coffee at Caffe Aroma in Buffalo, my former teacher Raymond Federman told me he liked what I had done with my debut book and asked me if I could bring back into print his out-of-print avant-garde classic, The Voice in the Closet. Later that year, now armed with two titles, I got a table at the "Big Small Press Fest" at UMass-Amherst. I had seen an ad for this small press festival in Rain Taxi Review of Books, and since they were one of only two national publications to review Jack Chapeau, I thought, These are my people! I was right. In Amherst, I met a number of people who would come to define the small press scene that Starcherone was joining, each of whom had founded their own magazines or presses, or would soon do so: Ethan Paquin of Slope and Slope Editions; Daniel Nester of Painted Bride Quarterly; Rebecca Wolff of Fence Magazine; Matthew Zapruder of Verse, later of Wave Books; Richard Nash, soon to be of Soft Skull Press; and Eric Lorberer and Kelly Everding of Rain Taxi. All of these people more-or-less knew each other already -- they had all gone to UMass. I hadn't known the event was something of a UMass reunion, and I'm glad I didn't, because I might not have gone. A year after this, I was able to hire Ethan Paquin at Medaille, and we were part of a national scene. Ethan talked to me about the value of doing something he was doing with Slope, an annual contest, and Starcherone began its own contest in 2004.
(to be continued...)
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