Barrelhousing with Books Editor Lilly Dancyger
We’ve got a couple big announcements for the new year. First, Barrelhouse Books is currently open for nonfiction manuscripts; you can see the full call for submissions here.
Second, we’re thrilled to announce that Lilly Dancyger, who’s worked as an assistant editor on our last two nonfiction books, has agreed to take on a larger role with Barrelhouse, and will be working as lead editor on this next book project. Mike Ingram, who worked with Lilly on our last two book projects, chatted with her about what she’s looking for in this new manuscript search, and how her editorial work with Barrelhouse has changed the way she thinks about her own writing (and submitting).
Mike Ingram: It's the new year, so I have to ask a question about resolutions--specifically, writing-related resolutions. Do you make them? Do you find them useful? Or do you have any other taking-stock/goal-setting habits you do at the beginning of the year?
Lilly Dancyger: I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, probably because I’m already constantly setting new short-and long-term goals and refining my habits, especially when it comes to writing. But my timelines are project-based and personal, rather than tied to the calendar. I’m coming up on a big deadline for my current book project (a collection of personal/critical essays on female friendship), and I have plenty of goals for that... but they were already in place well before the new year! (So far I’ve just been plugging away on individual essays, and I’m about to compile them and start working on the whole thing as a book for the first time, which is really exciting.)
MI: You've helped choose the last couple book manuscripts Barrelhouse has published, which has involved reading a lot of pitches and manuscripts. Are there things you've learned from that process that you've been able to carry into your own writing (and submitting) practice?
LD: Definitely. The first book that you and I worked on together, we were reading submissions while my memoir was also out on submission, and it really helped me to internalize how subjective the process is. Everyone says that—that a rejection doesn’t mean your work is bad, it’s just not what that editor is looking for right at that moment, which is related to their personal taste, the press’ catalogue, and any number of other things that really don’t have to do with you or how brilliant your work is—but it’s hard to believe it when you’re sending your work out. It’s such a scary and vulnerable thing to do, and emotions inevitably run high. But being on both sides of that equation at the same time really drove it home for me, as I reluctantly sent rejections for tons of great books that just weren’t what we had decided we wanted for the next Barrelhouse book. I tried to remember that when I went on submission again with my next book, and it helped a bit (even though all of the usual writerly doubt and fears were still there, too).
MI: What are some of the things that make a manuscript stand out to you, that get you excited to keep reading?
LD: I love, love, love a memoir that’s also more than a memoir. A memoir (or essay collection) that’s also a work of cultural criticism, that uses research to deepen and complicate a personal story. A book that makes you rethink the boundaries between genres. Basically, if it’s operating on more than one level at a time, and those levels are building off of each other to create something new and exciting, I’m in. I do usually still want there to be some sense of narrative momentum—I love a story to follow as much as the next person. But just a straightforward story,even a unique and well-told one, usually won’t light a fire for me as much as a project that uses that narrative as a container to hold inquiry and exploration. I like to see a writer use their personal story to launch into talking about big ideas that keep them up at night, and/or use something completely outside of their own experience to make sense of their personal story.
I also love unique structures and forms—but I don’t like gimmicks. This can be a fine line. I like to see an unusual form take shape because that’s what the story demanded—because it couldn’t be told any other way. Not because a writer took a straightforward story and thought “I should make this weirder” just for the sake of making it weirder. The best innovations in form come, I think, from stories that feel impossible to tell, so the writer has to invent a whole new way.
MI: I've heard so many writers say that the world of book publishing can feel inscrutable--figuring out which presses might be open to unsolicited manuscripts, for instance, or whether to query agents or enter contests or try some other route. As someone who's been on both sides of that process, as both editor and published author, what advice would you give to someone who's finished their first book manuscript and isn't sure what to do next?
LD: It really can be hard to navigate, I think largely because there’s no one right or best way to approach it. I often see people asking if they should query agents first or go straight to small presses, if they should focus on finishing their manuscript or a proposal, etc. etc., and the answer to that kind of question is almost always “it depends.”
One thing that clarified a lot for me was coming to understand that small presses aren’t just a back-up option for when mainstream publishing boxes you out, they’re really their own ecosystem, with different priorities, producing very different books. There are definitely some books that could go either way (big five or small press), but there are others that are distinctly meant to be small press books. Once I realized that my debut memoir was never meant to be a big five book and shifted my focus to finding the best small presses to submit it to, it finally clicked after years of rejection and won a contest. The biggest advantage of publishing with a major publishing house is obviously that they can usually pay more, but that’s also exactly what makes them more risk averse—profit and loss meetings are a big part of how they decide to take on a book. They have to know it’ll sell to a certain level, and they’re hoping it’ll be a blockbuster. Obviously small presses want to sell books too, but because we’re smaller operations with usually tiny budgets, we’re able to take more risks—we can publish weird unusual stuff that may or may not sell a lot of copies. We can choose books based purely on whatwe find exciting. This is what I love about the small press world—being both a small press author and editor. And it’s also important for writers to understand, so that when they finish their experimental, totally out-there book that may or may not be “commercially viable,” they can save themselves the trouble of knocking on the steel-reinforced doors of establishment publishing and go straight to a small press that will be thrilled to take a risk on their weirdness.
Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger. She is currently at work on First Love, a collection of essays about the power and complexity of female friendship, forthcoming from The Dial Press. Lilly's writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and you can find her on Twitter at @lillydancyger.