Behind the Books is a River Street interview series celebrating the hard-working visionaries creating the magic of small press CanLit. We are honoured to have Noelle Allen join us for our first installment!
Noelle is the publisher of Hamilton’s powerhouse small press, Wolsak & Wynn and the recent winner of the 2024 Arts Champion Award. She is the organizer for Sharp Words: Hamilton’s Winter Book Fair and works with Supercrawl to program the author talks. She is also the past chair of gritLIT and has long contributed to the literary community.
Welcome Noelle!
Wolsak & Wynn Publisher, Noelle Allen. Photo credit: Banko Creative.
1. Tell us about Wolsak & Wynn. What makes your press singular?
Wolsak and Wynn is a small literary press based in Hamilton that publishes a rich range of books. We’ve always gone a bit against the grain. When Marja Jacobs and Heather Cadsby started the press in 1982 it was dedicated to poetry and only published poetry for the first twenty years. As poets themselves Marja and Heather felt that authors they knew and admired were being overlooked by the current publishers. They decided that they would start a press and do something about that. When they had the press incorporated the lawyer also added stationary publishing to their papers, in case they decided they wanted to make money at some point. But they never wavered from poetry.
When I purchased the press and moved it to Hamilton, we continued going our own way, as the steel city was not seen at that time as a place for the arts. But we found a thriving literary and arts community here and we’ve grown much since then. I believe this ability to see potential where many companies might shy away is what sets us apart. Whether it’s a dedication to poets, seeing the beauty in a post-industrial city, encouraging our authors to blur literary genres and making space for new voices, we find books that change how people think about literature in Canada.
2. What’s one misconception people have about small press publishing?
That our books aren’t as good as something published by a multinational because they don’t sell as many copies. There are fabulous, innovative books being published by small presses across Canada, which I think are often better than much of what comes from those presses. What we lack is the heft of those enormous marketing departments. If I had as much money to spend on marketing as Penguin Random House does, our books would top every bestseller list.
3. Share a proud moment in your career as a small press publisher.
Why don’t I share two. The first was watching an author who has long been with the press, Richard Harrison, be awarded a Governor General’s Award for Poetry. I had attended a few of those ceremonies in other roles in the industry, and I had been struck by the power of seeing publishers I knew introduce their authors and then watching the authors be awarded those prizes. This was one of the earlier titles edited by our senior editor, Paul Vermeersch, after he had joined the press and it was lovely to be in Ottawa as this new version of Wolsak and Wynn, with a new publisher and new editor, was recognized in this way.
The second one is a bit more humorous. I was walking down my street in Hamilton one day, when one of my neighbours stopped me to tell me about this book she’d just read. She was sure I’d really enjoy it. She couldn’t quite remember the name, but it was by a local writer, something like Garden Work and it was put out by a publishing company in Westdale, just across the city. After a few questions I realized she was talking about Daniel Coleman’s Yardwork, which I had acquired and edited and which the press had released that spring. That’s when I knew our Hamilton books were really resonating with the community, even if the readers didn’t quite know where the books came from yet.
Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place by Daniel Coleman, published by Wolsak & Wynn, 2017.
More about Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place:
How can you truly belong to a place? What does being at home mean in a society that has always celebrated the search for greener pastures? And can a newcomer ever acquire the deep understanding of the land that comes from being part of a culture that has lived there for centuries?
When Daniel Coleman came to Hamilton to take a position at McMaster University, he began to ask himself these kinds of questions, and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place is his answer. In this exploration of his garden – which Coleman deftly situates in the complicated history of Cootes Paradise, off of Hamilton Harbour – the author pays close attention to his small plot of land sheltered by the Niagara Escarpment. Coleman chronicles enchanting omnivorous deer, the secret life of water and the ongoing tension between human needs and the environment. These, along with his careful attention to the perspectives and history of the Six Nations, create a beguiling portrait of a beloved space.