Magic Helicopter Press was started by Mike Young, the editor of NOÖ Journal, in late 2007. The press will publish paper chapbooks, e-books, and experimental multimedia projects. The first two titles will appear in mid-November—Mary Miller’s Less Shiny, and Benjamin Buchholz’s Thirteen Stories. For more information, visit Magic Helicopter’s website.

Below is an interview I conducted with founder Mike Young.

Why did you start Magic Helicopter Press?

Small press literature depends on the idea of community. Always has, really. Writers and readers connecting directly. And writers tend to make for really good readers, proactive and wildly enthusiastic. One of the best ways to use that energy and support that community is to spread what you like to read. Be an open node, as Blake Butler says. You can write reviews, start a blog, or publish. Me I chose to extend what I’d begun with NOÖ Journal and publish small runs of work I felt wild about. What I want to do with Magic Helicopter is make language gifts: tiramisu-quality books with axes and fireworks inside. We’re not in this to make money. I don’t think of it as a labor of love, since labor is what you do to make room for fun. Getting people to read, to live for a few minutes slightly to the side of where they normally live–that is fun. So I want to sell chapbooks of that fun stuff to around 75 people at a time, and then–the theory goes–we laugh away our anxiety and feel glad aboard the ark.

Who else is involved?

Ryan Call, former fiction editor of Phoebe, is helping with editing and promotion. He’s a great guy: thoughtful, meticulous, beastly on the squash court. Courtly in the beast squash.

Give us teasers for Mary Miller’s Less Shiny and Benjamin Buchholz’s Thirteen Stories.

Miller’s stories are the honesty under the table, comparable to the best moments of Robison, Paley, Carver, and Hannah, and her work is already known and sought after in the small press scene. Hobart’s putting out a collection of her long stories in 2009, and you can find several of the short-shorts in Less Shiny in awesome lit mags: “Boyfriend” from FRiGG, “South Dakota” from elimae, and “Los Angeles” from Quick Fiction are all in Less Shiny. Plus there are new, never before published pieces in there. These are 11 funny and unflinching stories. Basically, they will make Mary Miller feel like a dangerous and excellent friend, which is my criteria for good literature.



Buchholz’s poems, too, arrive like something already intimate, soldier letters full of the stuff unreported and the stuff that goes missing: stolen DVDs, faces in woolen blankets, Julius Fili, Elvis, a private smuggling beanie babies to a little girl under the smell of napalm, everything from Adam to sand in the laptop-light. His chapbook also features the photo series that was excerpted in NOÖ Journal [eight]. We’re hoping to print full color photos. It’s great stuff on multiple media levels.

You’re also launching a limited edition print magazine called Loveless. What’s that about?

My friend Kendra Grant Malone and I have a lot of things in common. We both like Conor Oberst, against our better judgment. The kids in Bushwick: we both like them, and Cuban pork breakfast sandwiches too. Two other things we both like are sex and poetry. We decided it had been too long since a good sexy poetry magazine, like something Dennis Cooper might have done back in the 80s. So we started LOVELESS to publish poems and photography that seeks to demystify sex and bodies. Our aesthetic basically depends on the idea that the words vulgar and tender shouldn’t rhyme, but do. We’re going to publish in editions of color–the purple LOVELESS, the blue LOVELESS, etc.–with one featured photographer per issue and about a dozen poets. People in our first issue willl include Juliana Spahr, Richard Siken, Dorothea Lasky, Jennifer L Knox, and more. It’s gonna be good and scandalous and good.

And Dragons with Cancer?

Another partnership production. This one with Bradley Sands, the editor of absurdist fiction magazine Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. We wanted to host a summit, basically, between the internet and absurdist scenes. The anthology will feature two stories per author, one realistic and one unrealstic. We’ve left it up to the authors to decide what that means. Folks in the anthology include Blake Butler, Avital Gad-Cykman, Andersen Prunty, D. Harlan Wilson, Ofelia Hunt and more.
Bradley’s a dedicated editor with a keen eye, and a fine writer in his own right, so I think this is going to flat out surge.

What is Magic Helicopter’s submission policy?

Right now we’re soliciting MS’s from people who have been published in NOÖ Journal. Anyone who has published in NOÖ is welcome to send a short MS of poetry or prose along, something 32 pages or under say. Sometime in the future we’ll open to general submissions, but we’ve got chap plans lined up until Spring ‘09 right now. Lots of good stuff in the works.

How do you decide what to publish in print, and what to publish online?

Online is for getting the word out. Online is like a big practical conflagration of trumpets and bells. When you’re at your computer and ready to read new stuff, here: read this. That’s the rhetoric of publishing stuff online. Print is more commemorative, more of an archive and inhabitance philosophy. You should enjoy holding print in your hands, enjoy touching the cover when you see it on your kitchen table or atop your medicine cabinet. Print is for something you already believe in and you want to learn more about, so you take it on a date to the park. This is getting very sentimental and ridiculous, so let’s get even worse. Online is like that whirl of friends you hit the bars with, and when you smile at them the next day that smile is also a kind of high five. Print is like who talks you to sleep, with the phone in the pillow, eyes impatient to clock out while you refuse to say goodbye.

Is there anything else we should know about Magic Helicopter Press?

Only the integral capitalist stuff: Mary Miller’s chapbook and Benjamin Buchholz’s chapbooks are available for pre-order at the website: http://www.magichelicopterpress.com. They’ll be shipping in November. I’ll also have copies of them at AWP, fingers crossed, where we’ll be holding down the fort with NO COLONY and Publishing Genius. Plus, hopefully someone will stand on our table and play thrash metal. If, of course, this government bailout goes through. If not, I won’t be at AWP. I’ll be inside a picnic basket, weeping, eating what I hope are carrots.

Contact Magic Helicopter Press: magichelicopter AT gmail DOT com