In anticipation of the Missouri Writers Guild meeting in April 2013, Margo Dill of the guild has created and posted an interview with me. I’ll be delivering a talk called “How to Parse a Press.” Here’s a sample from Margo’s interview:

MWG: Welcome, Steve, thank you for talking with us today about what you are offering at the MWG Conference in 2013. You are going to be speaking about working with university presses. So, what’s your experience working with a university press?

Steve: My collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, is the winner of the 2012 Juniper Prize in Fiction and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in April 2013, right about when we meet. So you can read more about my working with UMASS Press at https://fictionandhistory.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/working-with-my-better-angels-on-the-value-of-publishing-with-a-university-press/ , and my impressions about entering fiction contests are at https://fictionandhistory.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/place-horse-syndrome-finalist-again-the-oddities-of-short-story-collection-contests/ .

But I don’t just work with university presses. I work at a university press, since 1998 at the University Press of Mississippi, where I am now assistant director and marketing director, and before that from 1994 to 1998 at the University of Arkansas Press, where I was publicist and then assistant marketing manager.

MWG: What types of books do university presses generally publish?

Steve: That question is exactly what I am hoping to help your writers answer. “How to Parse a Press” is a presentation I have been honing at University Press of Mississippi’s eight supporting state universities, helping scholars, writers, and faculty to understand better the many ways to divine what a university press is looking for and what it does well. Each of the 134 university presses in the Association of American University Presses is a niche publisher with often very different core competencies. I want to show seekers in the Missouri Writers Guild ways to determine what those core disciplines and competencies are at a press, and how to perceive the right working fit for a manuscript.

You can read Margo’s full interview here.

And if you are a Missouri writer and/or a guild member I look forward to helping you Saturday April 27, 2013, in St. Charles, Missouri.