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Community Profile: New Victoria Publishers
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Community Profile
 | Claudia McKay and Beth Dingman Struggle to Keep Lesbian Feminist Culture Alive |
by Euan Bear
In the quiet hills above Norwich, Vermont, a small white cape-style house sits on the left side of the road, behind a birch tree holding a small sign: New Victoria Publishers. It is an unassuming place for a publisher whose mission was originally to revolutionize gender relationships in the United States. But there it is.
Work and life partners Beth Dingman and Claudia McKay have 44,000 books in the distribution pipeline, in bookstores around the country, and in storage in their garage. Beth is short and wiry-tough, with short iron gray hair, a practical businesswoman. Claudia is tall, with short auburn curls and a medium build, articulate and visionary. They’ve added a collection of lesbian-oriented rentable videos to broaden their cultural reach. But both women admit that the press they’ve spent 27 years of their professional lives on is struggling.
It helps not one bit that their primary distributor has gone bankrupt – again – and that they won’t receive payment for any of the books the distributor has shipped out or has in its own warehouse.
Another factor is that, as Claudia says, “The culture has changed, and we just don’t get it.” Beth continues, “Lesbian feminist enterprises are going through a major transformation and difficult times, especially publishers and book stores. The current situation is not just a slump – it isn’t going to get better. The culture has changed and women don’t need the affirmation of the word lesbian in books: it’s so much more available now.”
We commiserate over how many women’s presses and bookstores have gone out of business in the last five years, and it’s a long list. In part, the bookstores fell victim to the same forces that have closed independent bookstores across the country: cutthroat competition by large chains offering huge discounts.
But in part, “The agenda has changed. Lesbianism is now about assimilation. Feminism was more radical, about changing the values of society so we’re not just men in high heels,” Beth suggests.
New Victoria began as a print shop run by a feminist collective in Lebanon, New Hampshire in 1975. The group came together through a women’s writing workshop and included four women who had been fired from another press. Claudia had been arrested with a group of Quakers demonstrating at the White House some time before, and was optimistically expecting a $30,000 settlement or judicial award for false arrest. The settlement was eventually pared down to $1500, all of which went to the ACLU for legal expenses. The group then applied to the Haymarket People’s Fund for money to buy a printing press – Haymarket declined to provide funds directly, but did connect the women with a donor who could provide a press. They printed a lot of local women’s, nonprofit, and leftist movement fliers and posters.
The following year, New Victoria Publishers was born as a nonprofit organization. Claudia remembers, “It really was a women’s community effort. Beth, I think you were the only lesbian in the collective at first.” Claudia reaches for a file of old photographs of the original women who worked on the print shop. She flips it open and begins listing names, along with where the women went when they left New Victoria. Most simply moved on to other projects.
The first year of publishing, Beth got a job teaching printing in Bradford in order to support the press. In 1976, the first edition of the children’s book Brown Like Me (originally titled Noelle Lamperti’s Brown Book, it was reissued in 1999 with a new introduction and afterword) was published. And the next year, poetry by Maine writer Miriam Dyak, who named herself after a tribe in Borneo (I met the poet a few years earlier, and I had always thought she said it was matriarchal, but I could find no reference to matriarchal or matrilineal traditions with regard to the Dyak of Borneo). Dyak’s second book of poems, Dying was embraced by Marge Piercy, who called it, “an extraordinary work... as real as a lump of stone, as the palm of your hand.”
Then came Tilt, a collection of northern New England women’s art and writing that included poetry by Louise Erdrich, who was then a student at Dartmouth, a member of the first women’s class to matriculate there. The publishers got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to print a collection of women’s speculative fiction called WomanSpace, that included a story by Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man.
Eventually, the group had to either find a substantial amount of money to upgrade the print shop or close it. New Victoria Publishers paid off the print shop’s debts, the print shop closed, and in 1985, New Victoria – by then with three members (Beth, Claudia, and Rebecca Beguin; Claudia and Rebecca are both editors and authors in their own right, and Claudia designed many of the covers) – moved across the border to Norwich.
That was the year Sara Dreher sent New Victoria her first Stoner McTavish mystery.
In New Victoria’s best year, said Beth, “we grossed a couple hundred thousand dollars.” The four women who worked there actually got paid. But by 1998, sales had started to dip. In 1998 New Victoria published eight books. In 1999, six books came off the presses. They had four books planned for 2000, but there was no income because their distributor – a specialist in alternative presses – went out of business. They now have a new distributor – not the same principals under a new name – and plan to publish two books this fall.
“No one’s been paid,” declares Claudia. She has been talking about retiring, being less involved. She’s relieved in a way that there were so few books in the pipeline when their distributor dissolved. Rebecca Beguin has gone to work for the Vermont Book Professionals Association. The new distribution deal doesn’t “officially” take effect until January.
“Part of me, I would like to just shut the doors and move on,” Beth admits. But the lifestyle is still attractive: “I could be my own boss and do the things I wanted to. Except for the pay, it’s been great! This was a mobile proposition, we could go anywhere and still do this. Finding a regular job would mean our not being together as much, not being able to travel. We travel well together. There are places that we would not go separately, but together we would.”
Beth adds that she has reservations about the deal with the new distributor: “It means making a commitment to keep publishing. Maybe if someone came along who was interested and savvy about publishing... but it’s not happening. Besides,” she muses, “inertia is my middle name – I’m not very into making changes.”
Claudia comes back into the room and the conversation returns to cultural change. “The thing is that we’re very wary of getting subsumed by gay male culture. We come out of the feminist movement. But now, ‘feminist’ is not used and ‘lesbian’ has been subsumed in the gay cultural scene. And the term ‘queer’ – I disagree with that, not because of its pejorative history, but because it loses women.”
The phone rings, and Beth answers. “No, look,” she explains, “we’re not a retail store. We have a catalog, and we do everything by mail. If you give me your address, I’ll send you out a catalog.” It’s a guy from New Jersey looking for explicit ‘lesbian’ pornography among the video offerings. “You can usually tell,” she says. “We do have one or two guys who order the more quality videos, but mostly, when it’s men, they’re looking for porn. None of our titles is porn, though a few might be bad erotica. It’s always a question, whether we should be sending that stuff out to men or not.”
The video collection was acquired when another woman decided to close her business and sold it to New Victoria. It is, the two women say, an effort to both keep lesbian culture alive by appealing to women who are more video-oriented than print-oriented, and a hoped-for source of income from rentals. Among the titles there are Aimee and Jaguar, Before Stonewall, Chutney Popcorn, November Moon, and Boys Don’t Cry.
Some of the funds are generated by the $25 membership fee – which also helps screen out guys calling on a whim, looking for pornography. But response (even to a flier in this very newspaper) has been low and slow.
Claudia notes the upsurge in glossy magazines: “They’re fine, but the feminism has gone out of it. Now it’s all about fashion, lifestyle, celebrities, parenting. Maybe,” she muses, “it’s because we won, but I doubt it. It’s true that half the people in law schools now are women, and half the people in med school are women,” but it feels more like being co-opted than like winning, she concludes.
“We’re not willing to work on books that are only for entertainment. [The book] needs to be worth the time and have a political point of view or a spunky character,” Claudia explains. I quote a mutual colleague who says she works only on books that “are worth the tree.” “Hmmm, ‘worth the tree,’” says Beth. “Yeah, I like that.” Claudia adds, “Our kind of books are a refuge – especially for isolated lesbians. We want to keep them going.”
But, counters Beth, “The truth is that there’s less demand for the books we publish.” She says she would not have minded publishing a few more books that might not have met their political standards as long as they generated some cash flow. “There was Naiad, publishing 24 books a year, and maybe 22 weren’t worth reading. But at the end, they had more cash flow, more assets.”
New Victoria’s best selling book so far is Barbie Unbound, by Sara Strohmeyer, which sold over 20,000 copies in four months. It was a quirky choice for New Victoria, a photographic compilation of the iconic anti-feminist doll’s adventures in the “real world,” as imagined by Strohmeyer: PMS Barbie; Barbie d’Arc; Overweight Adolescent Outcast Barbie; Tailhook Barbie; Barbie Plath; Virginia Slims Barbie Dates Tobacco Lawyer Ken; Barbie Antoinette; Co-Op Barbie, complete with brown hair on legs and armpits. Sometimes satire is the best revenge. Certainly Strohmeyer seems to have thought so.
Claudia refuses to name a favorite book, saying that since she edited them all, she has no perspective. Beth’s favorite book is one of the Stoner McTavish mysteries: Something Shady, by Sarah Dreher, “because it pokes serious fun at psychiatry and talks about the definition of crazy – sort of like the movie King of Hearts.”
Both Beth Dingman and Claudia McKay seem to be “in process” with New Victoria. At age 68, Claudia hopes to travel more and edit less. Beth would feel more committed to continue if there were hope for the future of feminist lesbian fiction or an influx of cash or energy. Whatever happens with New Victoria, it has played a role for many feminists and lesbians: teaching, entertaining, supporting, connecting, affirming.
Check out New Victoria’s website at www.newvictoria.com