Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Fiona McCrae
When Fiona McCrae announced that she would be retiring as publisher at Graywolf Press—ending a 27-year run that will leave a trail of Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and Booker Prizes in her wake—she thought of her first literary love.
“It was Shakespeare that got me into language,” she says over Cobb salads on Smack Shack’s heated patio, near Graywolf’s recently underused offices. Now 63, she was still a schoolgirl when Shakespeare turned her on to the power of literature: the structure and the art of using words well. And as she was processing retirement and how much she loves Graywolf with the dawning belief that yes, it was time to go, she thought of a certain sentimental turn of phrase. “I’m thinking, darn it, sweet sorrow is brilliant, and Shakespeare came up with it—it’s so simple, but nobody put those two words together. And once he did, people have been saying it for hundreds of years.”
Between arriving at Graywolf from the much larger British publishing house Faber and Faber in October of 1994 and departing this June, McCrae will have published 1,000 titles exactly if you include both print and e-books.
“Two-thirds of publishing is about failure,” she says. “You’re always striking out, and you don’t know in advance what will hit.”
But in her 27 years, McCrae’s positioned Graywolf as one of the smartest, most exciting small publishing houses on the planet by developing a strategy for courting authors who have the ability to influence culture. She leaned into types of books—essays, poetry—that previously weren’t considered the most commercial, and she discovered bona fide stars like Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and Maggie Nelson. Her first love is reading, so she still works as an editor herself, while also nurturing the talent of her small editorial staff. And before leaving, she provided them with the resources to continue to do their best work (she recently finished a $3 million fundraising campaign).
“I just think Graywolf has grown with the times,” she says in the British accent she’s retained after almost three decades living in Minnesota. “When I got there, it was still one of the largest of the independent presses, and it’s still one of the largest independent presses.”
Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Fiona McCrae
Before you took over Graywolf, you were at Faber and Faber in London, and then you moved to their Boston offices. How big is Faber and Faber compared to Graywolf?
When I was there, I think they were publishing about a hundred titles a year. In the last five years, we’ve averaged between 30 and 32 at Graywolf, divided equally between poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. So, Faber and Faber is much larger. And they now distribute some smaller presses, which is kind of interesting. They’re an interesting independent force in British publishing, and they managed to stay independent partly because of Cats.
You mean the T. S. Eliot book that Andrew Lloyd Webber based his musical on?
Yes. It was Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. It’s a popular children’s poetry book. I grew up knowing that book. Anyway, that’s a side story.
It is interesting, though, how text seems to influence culture first. There’s a big movie out now that addresses the racism in America through the lens of Serena and Venus Williams. But Claudia Rankine engaged these ideas in Graywolf’s Citizen back in 2014. Pop culture always seems to be preceded by literary culture.
My experience at Faber showed me that the literary side of a list can be such a driver for the publisher, and that very interesting, surprising things can happen out of poetry. I never had this feeling of poetry being off to the side or an afterthought.
So, even though poetry is rarely a best seller, poetry books can catch fire?
And never go out of print, never. Poetry can be the bread and butter of a list. And people that we’ve published at Graywolf, Tracy K. Smith, Vijay Seshadri, they stay in print year in, year out.
Book images courtesy of Graywolf Press
the book Homie
Twin Citian Danez Smith is among the powerful poetic voices McCrae’s Graywolf has elevated.
How did running a small, independent publishing house end up on your radar?
When I moved from London to Boston, there were not that many large publishers, but there were a lot of nonprofits and literary magazines. There was the Harvard Review and Ploughshares out of Emerson. So, I met a lot of writers who were going to those events, but I was the only editor there, and then I ended up publishing some of them. And then when the Graywolf job came up, I thought it was a chance to run something.
How have you had the most impact on the publishing industry at Graywolf?
For years the word “essay” was not commercial. And it wasn’t just Graywolf—don’t make it sound as if I’m saying just Graywolf, please—but with the success of Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and Leslie Jamison, Graywolf was at a leading edge of the success of the essay. And I think George Floyd has woken the larger houses up to previously underrepresented voices. And I think there’s a diverse younger generation who are doing interesting work, and poetry is selling more than it used to.
Because of younger poets or because of younger readers of poets?
I think both. And I think even with the essay, the internet had an effect. Because someone like Roxane Gay tweets out about one of these writers, and then thousands of people hear about it. A long time ago, someone on our national council said, “Graywolf doesn’t need to change. Graywolf’s doing the right books; we just need more attention.” And it’s as if we were slightly working under the radar, and then there’d be the odd thing, like, “Oh, look, Graywolf won a prize or something.” And then the spotlight swiveled. And it’ll change again. Those things, it’s always cycles, but we’re going through a cycle where the small-press field in general is going gangbusters. You’ve seen Coffee House have big success with Valeria Luiselli and Milkweed with Braiding Sweetgrass. And quite often I would say in the last five, six, seven years in the prizes, it’s quite often not just Graywolf, but a lot of small presses are coming up. So it’s an exciting time, I think.
You were publishing books of essays that were critical of systemic racism from all kinds of diverse perspectives for years before the reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. You anticipated what people are interested in reading now.
We didn’t publish in the background of the tumult; we published into the tumult. Our books are confronting the tumult. A meaningful emphasis of our list is contemporary. Which is not an objective judgment on history—like Hilary Mantel is clearly super talented. We’re not saying there’s no place for that, and I do understand that history is very relevant today, but we thought, on the whole, we’re always going back to the stories of today. And if we’re getting these nonprofit dollars, it’s not to reissue a classic; it’s to get the money to that newcomer or a new idea or a new book. Therefore, let’s have books that are talking to the current moment, because you’re bound to then have something new, aren’t you? So, we put more of an emphasis on 21st-century stories.
two books, On Freedom and The Swank Hotel
Two of the more recent Graywolf titles published during McCrae’s tenure—which will total 1,000 by the time she retires.
How else has Graywolf changed during your tenure?
We were looking at other ways to diversify on the staff side, on the board side, on the national council side in a more deliberate way where, let’s say, the list was diverse before the staff was that diverse. We’ve spread the word, but we weren’t active enough in retrospect. And now we have a more diverse staff, so it’s like, “Well, are we still behaving in the right ways? Are there still other ways that we can be less hierarchical, more welcoming?” So, we’re creating a whole different world in which to operate. And someone with my profile is welcome, but we’re not going to cater to me, if that makes sense. Our writers, they’re not looking to copy things that have happened before; they’re looking to redefine.
One of the most interesting books that Graywolf put out in 2021 is Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, which thoughtfully analyzes the impulse, often on the left, to censor speech and art.
Maggie has a very profound approach. I feel like she’s not saying this critic is right or this critic is wrong necessarily, so much as saying this critic’s argument relies on looking at art as a function, is looking at art as a fixed now. Whereas Maggie is saying, “I think it’s more helpful to look at art as a speculative proposition, as an invitation.” I haven’t said this out loud, but I’ve been thinking recently—just how any situation, there’s 360 degrees of it, and we’re always only ever in our own slice. And there are certain approaches where you keep reiterating what your slice looks like, but you have to look at the other slice.
Is part of your job to help writers anticipate how the world is going to read their work?
Yeah. But nobody has got that 360-degree view. I have no idea what I look like right now. You know. I don’t know how my words are striking you, and I know how your words are striking me. So, there’s always that gap. But yeah, the writers can fill that in, and reading a good book can bring you both sides and you can say, “Oh, that’s how people think of people who…” or “Oh, thank God somebody else said that, because I totally agree.” All those discoveries, there’s some profound information gathering that goes only with reading, don’t you think?
Empathy is the most profound by-product of reading a great novel.
I just read The Swank Hotel by Lucy Corin; it’s a novel by us. And it’s so intense with this internal life of these characters. It’s a little bit about mental illness in a certain way. But along the way, a character goes to the bank, and there’s a woman there who just empties the whole contents of her bag over the counter. And that character never appears before or again, but it’s just to show that the texture of this one woman’s life, she’s coming up against stuff that doesn’t make sense on a weekly basis. And so much fiction gives you an ordered world. But I read that, and I’m like, How did she get the vocabulary to be so precise about what’s going on right now?
Is Graywolf trying to make the world a better place, or is it trying to find the most interesting writers and help their work to be better?
I would say that good writing, it doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place, but I think it helps. I think it helps people understand, it helps you think, it helps you not be alone with something, it helps you to understand how layered something is, how complicated something is. So, I think just publishing interesting books like Danez Smith’s Homie, where they’re talking out love and community—and so is Natalie Diaz, and so is Layli Long Soldier in her way—they’re not afraid to pour things out, the corruption or the injustice, but not in a kumbaya way but in a very profound way. Layli says art and writing can exist so that the people who are hurt can heal and the other side can be freed from denial.
Who will be your successor in June?
The board has set up a hiring team. We’ve got a really strong team. I wouldn’t be leaving if I didn’t think it was actually the best thing for Graywolf that I leave. I think that the one good thing is that they’re not looking for another Fiona. To run a small press, you probably need an extra dose of the versatility that the younger generation has. I think someone who’s fluent in that, who doesn’t have to think 10 times before getting the pronouns right—when you think about my reading when I was younger, it wasn’t a very diverse canon. So, somebody who’s open.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
