When Eastern Washington University decided last year to close its press, there was a great ... silence.
Contrast that to the clamor that arose when word got out, also last year, that state budget cuts threatened the existence of the Louisiana State University Press. The literary world sprang into action. Editors of highbrow journals wrote columns about the vital role such presses have played in the nation’s literary life. Supporters mobilized a grass-roots campaign of support. Letters of protest were sent to the governor. The directors of two other university presses flew to Baton Rouge to help the press work out a new, viable business plan.
The interventions worked. LSU Press lived to publish another day, although the episode added to the mounting evidence that literary prestige does not impress budget-minded university administrators the way it once did.
Yet Eastern Washington’s decision prompted no campaign, no letters to the governor, no passionate editorials or news stories outside the regional news media, at least none that I saw. Nor did I write about the decision. There didn’t seem like much of a story there—times are tough all over. Outside of a few authors and editors, who’s going to notice when a small regional press closes?
I thought about that again last week, when I heard that Eastern Washington University planned to give the dying press’s list of books to the Carnegie Mellon University Press. I called Christopher Howell, a poet and professor of English and creative writing at Eastern Washington. He had founded a small literary press, called Lynx House, and went to the university in part because of his experience with literary publishing. He served as the EWU Press’s director for several years, then became its main acquisitions editor.
The press’s closure leaves a large hole in Northwestern literary culture, Mr. Howell says. There’s only one other university press—Washington State University Press—between Seattle and Minneapolis. “We were kind of it in this quadrant, after you come east of the Cascades,” he says. “So we published books that had to do with the ecology of the region. We published a lot of literary books by regional and national authors.”
The EWU Press has been a refuge for genres that tend not to fare as well as novels and nonfiction at bigger or more commercially minded publishers. “We were one of the few university presses publishing books of short fiction,” Mr. Howell says. “We were publishing a lot of translation.” The press also sponsored two literary contests and a literary festival, Get Lit!, and offered internships to graduate students in the creative-writing program. Couple all that with the fact that few regional state universities even have presses, and the closure of EWU Press begins to look like a deeper injury to American literary life than it first appeared.
‘Noble Efforts’
John B. Mason, EWU’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, describes himself as saddened at pulling the plug on the press. “My doctorate’s in American literature, and you can imagine that it was not an easy personal decision for me,” he told me. “I loved the idea of having the press. We published some wonderful titles.”
The press was losing “an average of $400,000 to $500,000 a year,” Mr. Mason says. “That’s just not a loss we could sustain, and so we just had to stop operations. We could not find a way for the press to be self-sustaining, although there were noble efforts.”
Mr. Howell tells a different story. He says certain outlays on the press’s balance sheet, like office rent, shouldn’t have been there, and that because the press received money through an “entrepreneurial” division of the university, responsible for summer schools and continuing education, it wasn’t actually using state money anyway.
“I don’t agree at all that it was independent of the university and therefore was no financial drain on it,” Mr. Mason responds. “It was taking half a million of summer income that could be used for other purposes.”
The two men also disagree about how much consultation there was with the university community about the decision to shut down the press and about the wisdom of handing over the press’s list. Mr. Mason emphasizes that negotiations with Carnegie Mellon are still under way, and that the terms of the deal have not been made final. Mr. Howell worries that “instead of finding distribution for these books, they’re planning simply to give them away. The worth of the backlist is hundreds of thousands of dollars. If we’re having economic troubles, I can’t understand why these assets would simply be dumped.” Mr. Mason says that the university does not see a way to make much money off these books, and that the main thing is to find them a safe haven somewhere.
If there’s any happy ending, it’s that the EWU Press’s books will have a good home if they do go to Carnegie Mellon. I spoke with Gerald Costanzo, the CMU Press’s longtime director and a professor of English at the university. “I really love it,” he says of the EWU list. He rattles off a list of the poets and writers whose work has appeared there: Robert Bly, Carolyn Kizer, Dorianne Laux (now publishing with Norton), Joseph Millar, Bill Tremblay, Paisley Rekdal. “There’s a lot of good things on their list, and it just didn’t seem it should disappear,” Mr. Costanzo says. “We’ll do the best we can with it. It just seems like the right thing to do in service of the literary community.” (It’s also likely to be a pretty good deal for Carnegie Mellon, which stands to inherit a number of high-quality titles at relatively little cost.)
Eastern Washington University Press will cease to be as of June 30. “It was a tremendous literary press for a university press—it really was,” says Mr. Costanzo. “It’s hard to believe they’re going to give it up. Universities in the current era are scrambling, but I think there are other places they might have saved some money.”
