Let's get joyously weird

"Genres are a funny little concept"

I listened to the new Beyoncé album, Cowboy Carter, on Wednesday evening. Maybe some of you are surprised, maybe some of you aren’t. It’s good! (I mean, duh.) What really spoke to me was how varied it is. How versatile the voice and lyrics and styles. I was making dinner, glad to finally be off my screen which I’d been glued to all day after launching the Galiot Press Kickstarter campaign and stressing about whether we were possibly going to make our funding goal, and it was a pleasure just to be stirring onions and garlic and moving about a bit.

At the start of the song SPAGHETII (yes, double letter at the end), singer Linda Martell says, in a crackly voice that sort of sounds like it’s coming from outer space:

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they? Yes they are. In theory, they have a simple definition that's easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”

She should know. From the album notes and Wikipedia I learned that Linda Martell, born Thelma Bynem in 1941, was the first commercially successful black female artist in the country music field. Hearing this, I shouted YES! out loud. Genres—what they are, how they are defined, who gets to claim which ones, what relative value they hold—can be hugely confining. I have so many friends whose writing process is impaired by their worry about what genre their book is or will be, and what genre “the market” wants or not, and whether that will be different when they have finished their manuscript and try to shop it to agents and editors. It can be paralyzing.

NPR says the Beyoncé album is a “portrait of the artist getting joyously weird.” I think I need to adopt that phrase. By now you all know I gravitate toward the mixed and the hybrid, the overlaps and in-betweens. And I’ve been talking about that a lot in person this week as my colleague and friend Henriette Lazaridis and I have launched the crowdfunding campaign for Galiot Press. We want more of the joyously weird. We want to support work that plays with genre and we want to help writers feel less confined. We want to publish books that will startle and leave their mark. That transcend categorization. I grew up checking the “other” box on all forms, and we want to be able to do the same for books. Other is where it’s at.

So I’m going to do what I try not to do too often, which is cross-reference the Galiot Press Substack, because getting this company off the ground is so much a part of my daily life at the moment. And I’m going to ask you if you’d consider checking out our Kickstarter and making a little (or big!) pledge. I’ll only ask on here this once, because I know this isn’t why you signed up for this newsletter. (Why DID you sign up? I’m always curious to know.)

About 48 hours after launch we are at 20% funding, for which we are very grateful. If you were among those early backers, THANK YOU! Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing model, which means that if we don’t reach our funding goal, we will get zero dollars. So we are biting our nails and hoping our mission and vision will resonate with many, so we can select and produce our first set of three books. And may at least one of them be joyously weird.

Meantime, maybe you’ll check out Henriette’s beautiful new book that also launched this week, LAST DAYS IN PLAKA, set in contemporary Athens, and which is described on the back as “An immersive and multifaceted novel—The Talented Mr. Ripley by way of Elena Ferrante—that explores the lies at the heart of an old woman's identity and the desperation of a young woman's struggle to belong.”

Happy Friday from rainy Boston.