Thirsty for publishing

Three brave men are currently in the middle of the swaying tides of literature:

 

Ko Norderisk: who claims to be an abandoned member of the Saamii, a people of nomads travelling in the North of Europe. As punishment for ‘something’ gone wrong, he has to fill his days with writing until he may one day return to his people.

 

Joris Lenstra: a writer who studied literature at university and who writes and translates. He has a sassy publication on Walt Whitman out and is working on his own poetry.

 

Ruben van Luijk: historian by profession and the first book Nadorst published, was signed by his name.

 

Joris: Rotterdam is very interesting, literary speaking. A lot of young writers are roaming the streets here. Ruben and I have lived here for years. Our roots became intertwined with the city, so to speak.

 

Ko: In the South-part of the city (below the river) there’s a lot of artistic activity. I often read my poetry by surprise at gatherings and in cafés here and there. Rotterdam has a bad name in this country because people are daunted by the space and modernity here. But the arts are interesting here, more differentiated than elsewhere.
 

Ko, the abandoned Saammii.
 

Joris: We were a foundation at first, a group of friends helping out eachother and other artistically-minded people we knew. Secretly we were just making the things we wanted to. At one point, we realised that the board of the foundation consisted mainly of writers. Then we decided to become our own publishers.

 

Ko: Ruben was turned down at every known publisher, just like me. That’s a good thing though, if the people in charge would approve of our work, we’d doubt our own quality. It’s good to not be understood.

 

 

Joris: It has been quite a venture to get everything going, it took us at least a year to get everything straight. What the criteria will be of your publishing company is always difficult to get straight. We extended the existing statutes of the foundation to publishing and needed a starting capital. That was the paper obstacle. Then comes the exposure-part. We make books and from the profit we make off them, we print more books. The municipality is welcoming our initiative and Ruben’s novel was supported by an independant fund. But also without such subsidies things have been going well.
 

Joris, pausing for dramatic tension.
 

Joris:There is not so much wrong about them, but they have a different focus. Our friend and founder of the Nadorst foundation, poet Silvia Hubers, started her career at a small publisher. All her books were sold and she got a lot of personal attention, which ensured her to bloom as a poet. Currently she is residing at one of the biggest Dutch publishers and feels like she’s ‘one of the many’ and has a low priority for the publisher and it shows in her selling-rate, too.

Being your own publisher, you have more feeling with what happens and you get to have your honest say in it. The personal aspect is a big gain for us.

Joris: We have a philosophical basis. Each of us are making art and want to accomplish something with that. We judge works by their drive and need to come into being. We love being part of the birth of a literary work.

Joris: What I would recommended, was once said to us by the poet Daniel Dee. ‘If you want to achieve something, you have to do it yourself’. You can wait your whole life for someone else to push your wheelbarrow into the sun, but that will only make your life miserable. That’s why we do it ourselves, it’s our publishing motto.

 

Ko: Well, the three of us will come in the office in the morning and 50 clerks will be sitting there behind their laptops, working. Then we check the breath of every one of them, because they all are obliged to have nadorst after a good night of heavy drinking.

 
 

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