Occasionally, I am asked why I run Backlash Press. It’s a fair question and, truth be told, one that I have wondered myself sometimes! We all have those days, right? I mean, it’s a lot of work for little pay. I’m a writer who seldom, ironically, has the opportunity to focus on my own promotion. And I’ve had to deal with some pretty tricky egos throughout the years. All the same, the reasons why I continue to maintain the press have come to represent how I want to live.

It began with the Paris bombing in 2015, which triggered a spate of bombings across Europe. Up until that point, I’d been working as an admin for our other business, raising children, and writing every moment in between. The senseless violence made me suddenly feel very alone, cut off from my American roots and from the things I cared about, namely literature, art, and ideas. I’d just finished another manuscript draft, written in stolen hours, and I felt a long way from where I wanted to be professionally. Ten years had vanished. I had three book manuscripts, countless poems, and no idea of what to do with them. I started to search for an agent or publisher. I found plenty of places that represented who I would have liked to have been, but none that felt like who I actually was, none that fit. They were either too privileged, too masculine, too vanilla, too young, too edgy, too dull, too prescribed, too cool, and I closed the drawer once again. Every place wanted its version of sexy, and I just wanted companionship and discussion.

But the bombing and the general feeling of broken interaction had made me want to do something proactive. I felt a strong conviction that creating a physical object would lead me to my next stage of thought, so the idea of putting together a poetry journal of sequenced narrative was born. It was a sticky tape and shoestring experience. My children and I folded the book jackets together and took the journal to the Anarchist Bookfair in London, one of my favorite memories. It was an eclectic mix of lively, inclusive, and radically progressive people making change happen in their own way.

A year later, our first full-length poetry collection, Michael Tyrell’s Phantom Laundry, was published, and I was heading to the London Bookfair. I didn’t expect the London Bookfair, a worldwide corporate event for trade, to resemble the Anarchist Bookfair, but I was curious to note how I felt about the differences.

I had just finished a meeting and was having a coffee on the second-floor balcony, which offered an aerial view of the major publishing houses below. I watched those interactions and did some research. The fact is, of the big five publishing houses, only one woman (on a board with three other men) is a CEO. The concept of a company begins at the top and filters down, which was representative of what I was witnessing.

I’ve often wondered why, at least in my experience, women do not advocate for other women with the same generosity that men advocate for other men. I’ve come to the understanding that the reason is that there are fewer spaces for us. The goalkeepers, the gatekeepers, even now, even after MeToo and BLM, are still unrelatable to the majority of the population, which keeps them elite and the rest of us sidelined.

Too often, we agree with the sentiment of a movement – we “like” the work of Extinction Rebellion, we “like” BLM, but we don’t change the actual behaviors that could work to prevent the need for the movement in the first place. 2020 was the year for publishing women – great! 2021 will be the year that African voices are finally heard – wonderful! But marketing marginal voices is not enough. In many ways, it’s a bit insulting and patronizing. It is not enough to be placated; no, the internal structuring of the system and the goalkeepers must change for the inclusion of all voices to become the accepted norm.

All along the edges of the London Bookfair were incredible small presses doing astonishing work, and I applauded them all for their part in rebalancing. I felt like it was a movement that I wanted to be an active part of. So, sitting there having my coffee, knowing that I’d created a Backlash community of people that I’d come to love and was creating and publishing work that I admired, I took a deep and committed vow to be disruptive.

I feel that striving towards a worthy disruption is the best way to live and that maybe, just maybe, I’ll start something. Like a whole new game.

Wishing you luck and love,

Gret Heffernan

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