From the Founders: The Fork Apple Vision

We envision The Juice as a place to feature the thoughts of writers and readers, both including and beyond the staff of Fork Apple Press. We see these posts as being more interactive than other publishing mediums, and to that end where we encourage our readership to write to us and each other in the comments, and continue the conversation begun in the blog post. While the Q&A below is quite a different format than the content that we plan to publish in future posts (op-eds, book reviews, craft essays, etc.), it made sense for us to use the space of our first blog post to reflect on the past few months developing Fork Apple and its different projects.

We hope our Q&A is an expansive view into the motivations behind Fork Apple Press and its vision beyond our mission statement. Perhaps for some readers, it'll offer insight into an aspect of the literary community separate from writing, submitting, and reading. For us, looking backward and forward has further generated our excitement for what's to come!

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Why start a small press?

Katie: Working on past different editorial projects in the literary community has personally been extremely rewarding. As a writer and poet myself, as I've gotten more involved with literary journals and small presses, being able to peel back the curtains on the independent publishing world I think not only enhances my connection to the literary world, but also my understanding of this community and how my own writing connects and sets itself apart in this landscape. With that personal interest being said, as I've worked more in this field I truly believe that small presses are able to provide a place for creativity, expression, and discussion that resists capitalistic influences of literature just as a means of production and product. I wanted to facilitate a space where writers and readers could engage with authentic, vulnerable expression, support sharing voices across a range of experimentation, and create a reciprocal discourse community for topics in literature that deserve to be questioned and expanded beyond oppressive traditional boundaries.

Nico: As rewarding as it is, I find writing to be a pretty lonely endeavor. Writing workshops have been my biggest crutch when it comes to navigating the quality time with self often required to write. If I'm alone with my own work for too long, I get stuck and seem to forget that my writing problems are shared by others. Or I lose the ability to tell what is working and what is not. So my writing is definitely energized by community, and the archetype of the suave individualist poet is definitely not me. Reading other writers' pieces in a workshop setting, and now reading the submissions we've been getting, helps me improve as a writer, and always makes me feel like I'm not the only one pursuing this craft. And beyond editorial business, I enjoy the new and unexpected tasks that have come with starting a small press. Creative problem solving and collaborating has been fulfilling in itself, but there's also the greater purpose that's come with knowing that the work we're doing is enriching the greater literary community. 

Vivian: I was introduced to the world of literary journals and indie lit as an undergraduate in college, where I joined my campus's undergraduate literary magazine. As a young writer who hadn't yet found her voice, literary journals and collaborative publishing projects became an instrumental way for me to find my footing in the literary world, and integrate myself into a vibrant and diverse community of artists and writers passionate about not only sustaining creativity, but pushing for creativity to thrive. I often think of my life as an artist as being about finding places where I can slip in between the hyper-capitalist and masculine spaces that often dominate the horizon to find more expansive, organic spheres that allow for the coexistence and variety that is necessary to a thriving artistic community. I feel that small presses are a great example of these spaces, as they are often navigating between the emotional, spiritual, and intrinsic values of art and creation, and the more practical and substantial worlds of money, business, and organizing. Instead of being resistant to the contradictions of these two realities, I'm excited to dive headfirst into both, and build bridges between them, helping to clear a space for others to join. I'm interested in the dichotomy of collaboration and competition, and I think that a small press is a great way to synthesize those two approaches into something that evolves as it grows.

Why the fork and the apple together?

Vivian: As do many brilliant ideas, the fork and the apple started as a sort of nonsense pairing, developed by Katie and I while thinking about the cover art for our graduate literary magazine that we worked together on previously. We quickly realized there was something expansive about it, and that this strange couple lent itself to seemingly endless associations and connections. I enjoyed hearing the different ways that people related to it, or the images or ideas it brought to people's minds. I think that the fork and the apple are a perfect symbol, because they don't quite mean anything, and in that they mean everything.

Katie: We were thinking about the intent and impact of publication names; what started in a lighthearted brainstorming conversation, laughing over the idea of eating a whole apple with a fork, began to unfold layers of meaning. The image is surprising and bold, and with it came a start of endless interpretations for us: literally putting a fork into the flesh of the apple, getting right to the core of a thought or action, approaching and adding surprising elements to themes of consumption, body, gender, etc. These two images, ones that some may find common in day-to-day life, hold a lot of weight and significance in some associations, but also offer a lot of openness and room for expansion of those interpretations. We felt that this would be the perfect symbol for our press; finding the unexpected and bold in this common pairing made uncommon. Plus, the name has a nice ring to it.

Nico: Vivian and Katie get full credit for the name, which has always been at the center of this project's development. Despite our attempts to think outside of "Fork Apple Press" for potential alternative names, we never really strayed from Fork Apple. We’re balancing being prescriptive with these two objects paired together — one mechanical and based around human utility, the other organic and ripe with cultural significance across temporal and geographic histories — but I think there’s a lot of ways to play within the bounds of this symbology.

What are you excited for with Fork Apple?

Nico: I've enjoyed the opportunity Fork Apple has allotted on social media, where I feel like I can engage more actively with other magazines, presses, and writers on Instagram while representing our press. It’s a platform I’m comfortable using already, but having a space exclusively dedicated to the writing world has been uplifting and regenerative. Obviously, I hope we can establish our place in the writing community outside of the digital world. I'm perhaps most excited for us to get our name out there in early 2025 at AWP!

Vivian: Truly, I'm excited about everything. But perhaps what I'm most excited about is working together with our team, and connecting with the rest of the literary community. Nothing feels as rewarding to me as being in artistic communities. It's where I truly feel that I've found my people, and I'm so thrilled that Fork Apple Press is joining that space, and building new spaces for us to interact and enjoy each other's work and dedication.

Katie: I'm really eager to see how contributors expand this discourse that we've introduced. I hope to see associations challenged and literary traditions questioned and reexamined. I want to be surprised and read perspectives different from my own and what I've read before. I look forward to seeing the fork differently from past forks, and the apple differently from past apples. I'm excited that the press is bringing together three different avenues of publishing, all that aim to build more community and space for the sharing and discussion of exciting new literature and the ways to write it.

What challenges have you faced already?

Katie: A lot goes into the back end of a small press. Making sure our branding was consistent and inviting was crucial for us, and something we put a lot of time and thought into. It was important for us to hit that balance of a theme without it being too prescriptive or fall into cliché. We also wanted to make sure our processes simultaneously sustainable and equitable.

Nico: I can’t complain too much because Vivian, Katie, and I have somehow managed to sustain our energy for this project over the summer, despite all of the small hurdles that come with establishing a small press. We've had to spend a lot of time creating systems that will sustain certain activities, mostly through the use of calendars and deadlines and standardized how-to guides. It's a lot of labor that we've ultimately agreed is worth doing, because it will set us up for success in the longterm. 

Vivian: Beginning anything is a challenge. If you're a writer, you know the daunting feeling of a blank page. I'd say that starting a small press, or any similar publishing project, has that same feeling of uncertainty. Perhaps the hardest part is not the work itself, but questioning if you're good enough to do the work, if you can see it through. Trusting yourself to build something is often much harder than not doing it at all, and it can be easier to slip into complacency and inaction. But that choice isn't authentic to the self, to the muse, or to whatever you identify as your core creative self. And so doing the work is the challenge, but it's also the reward.

What writing are you excited to read? Hopeful?

Vivian: I'm beyond excited to read short stories for our Slice Contest. I can't wait to see a collection come together, and honor a writer and their journey through those stories. 

Katie: I'm really excited to see pieces that question an understanding of how a symbol associates with a particular theme. I hope to be unsettled, to find myself asking questions, to read writing that is curiosity, passionate, and layered.

Nico: As the creative director I’m really hopeful for visual narrative pieces. Within the definitive limits of being a literary press and The Core Review publishing literature, I’m hopeful that we can create a literary space that encourages writers to further explore the visual plane of the page, rather than just the written. It’d be rewarding to bring artists who don't typically publish alongside writers into this space through their visual narrative works.

What are you reading right now? What inspires you?

Nico: I've been binging Alison Bechdel, re-reading Fun Home and now Are You My Mother? I also have a few decades worth of Dykes to Watch Out For to catch up on. I've always been drawn to graphic narratives with a strong literary impulse.

Vivian: I'm currently in the middle of Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, which isn't surprising if you know my emphasis on environmental lit and climate change fiction. It's really nature's cycles that inspire me, the way it breathes and bends as we stretch it to its limits, and the way it flexes its power. I'm so interested in reframing nature not as a victim, but as an arbiter, and reaching for that narrative is really what drives me to write.

Katie: In an interesting combination I'm currently reading a lot of 21st century contemporary poetry collections (thanks to the August Sealey Challenge of reading a poetry book a day) and coupling that with some fun sci-fi and fantasy. I've been thinking about world building and suspense and how that parallels with association as landscape and surprise in poems. The most inspiring thing is when I am confronted with an association that feels so unexpected, but at the same time expresses an absolutely inevitable truth. I love how that can show up across genre.

We'd love to hear from you!

We're so excited to have you here with us at the start of this journey. Comment below, what are you hoping to see from this magazine? What are you excited to read? What are you currently reading?

If you've read this and are looking to create a press in the future, or already work on a press of your own, we welcome you to connect with us. We'd love to expand our network and build connections with you!

Interested in writing for The Juice? Click here for submission guidelines!