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Tue 7 Oct 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Posted by: Gavin

I’ve been enjoying the Consortium Corner microinterviews with various Consortium people as they celebrate their 40th anniversary. We signed on with them in 2007, latecomers!, after starting with Pathway Book Service for a couple of years and then SCB Distributors. We’d talked to a few distributors and although not everyone at the company really got what we were up to enough people did that we felt comfortable among the other literary and poetry presses. At some point they were subsumed by Ingram (the other 800 lb gorilla) but they’re still based in the Twin Cities and they still have their own identity. Long may they run!

Julie Schaper, the president who brought us over to Consortium, recently announced that she’d be retiring next year and it was fun to read her interview which includes a shout out to a truly indie indie bookstore and a wedding photo (not the only one in these pages!). She and her hubsand (ahem), Steve Horwitz, are  also “both involved with the Minnesota Prison Writers Project and We Are All Criminals.” Good people.

I’d write more but this is longer than some of the interviews. Each interviewee lists a few books they love and the range is beautiful to see. We all contain multiverses!

In one of the interviews Lise Solomon — always one of the first I used to send ARCs of our upcoming books to — includes Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog in her recommendations along with the amazing reason she first read it:

What are 5 Consortium titles you love and why? Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House Press) This short book about Valeria Luiselli’s work translating for immigrant children will make you sob on the BART train. Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller (Small Beer Press) After learning that former rep Bob Harrison named his dog Carmen for this book, I knew it would be a great read. So true! I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (Coffee House Press) Epic, brilliant blend of real and imagined history of SF Chinatown. Blue Marlin by Lee Smith (Blair) I’m not from the South but the family dynamics and life seen through a young teen’s eyes is so perceptive and universal. Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello (Sarabande Books) Learned a lot and laughed a ton, damn she is funny.