Dara Beevas, Rekhet Si-Asar, Jordyn Taylor
In 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a Ted Talk about the danger of a single story.
As a child in Nigeria, she wrote about what she had read in other stories, which primarily featured white American or British characters. Her characters were also white and drank ginger beer, something Adichie had never tasted. But soon she found characters of color, and her stories began reflecting her own experiences. From that she discovered what we lose by hearing from only one point of view.
"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete,” she says in the lecture. “They make one story become the only story."
In the United States, the danger of a single story is still present. According to the 2019 Diversity Baseline Study by Lee & Low Books, 76 percent of people who work in publishing are white. The other 24 percent represent people of color, but within that number, only 5 percent are Black.
“It’s hard to create diverse content when the people working on the books behind the scenes aren’t necessarily diverse themselves,” says Jordyn Taylor, founder of Vermillion Ink Press. “American lives are so diverse and so interesting and there’s so many different stories out there, we should have a variety of different things to read, and watch, and experience.”
The lack of diversity in publishing is one of the reasons that the MN Black Publishing Arts Collaborative was created. Its members include Vermillion Ink Press, Wise Ink, and In Black Ink, among others, and the collaborative recently held a Zoom called “Black Writers Healing: Challenging Authors and Writers to Testify.” It served as a way for community members to come together to discuss, heal, and use writing as a coping mechanism after the murder of George Floyd and the uprising in Minneapolis.
“Black Publishers have a major role to play with the uprising and when serving artists and serving artist organizations,” says Dara Beevas, co-founder and chief strategic officer of Wise Ink. “We really are positioned with the revolution at our doorstep to be influential and to truly have our voices heard during this time.”
Courtesy of Wise Ink
Wise Ink
Creating Role Models
In Wise Ink’s office, there’s a mural splashed across the wall that says: “Those who tell the story rule the world.” Beevas believes that the publishing industry will become more equitable, and the idea of who’s ‘allowed’ to be a writer will change as well.
“I think the future of publishing, as a revolution, will be healing,” Beevas says. “I think that the narrative will be shifting about who our country is, who we are as a country, and I think that authors are going to be instrumental in reshaping that narrative.”
Many of the authors that Wise Ink publishes aren’t "traditional writers," Beevas says. Wise Ink aims to be a safe place that people of any background can feel comfortable giving their story, working with authors to coach them through the writing process, bringing in developmental editors to help structure a draft, and editing and proofreading to bring forth a comprehensive draft of the story they want to tell.
“I think the only way to thrive in your career is to see examples of folks who have done it,” Beevas says. “I did not grow up actually seeing very many Black women who led publishing companies or who edited books, but... I could imagine it because I was reading literature by Black women, and so even the imagined Black woman sitting at her office looking at books and helping to bring them to print helped me get here.”
Beevas started her career in publishing as a college student when she founded the magazine Vivation, which was filled with prose, poetry, and other writing by Black women on campus. While originally she wanted to be a teacher, in creating her magazine she realized that publishing was her passion and what she was supposed to do with her life, and has worked in the industry ever since.
Her career was not without pushback, in the form of ageism and sexism. When she was leaving a white male run organization to start Wise Ink, she encountered questions like, ‘Why not stay where you are?’ and ‘You’re making good money, why rock the boat?’
“I think the challenges for a Black woman carving out her own path on her own terms, centering herself to her stories and the stories of people who look like her, [they] will absolutely brush up against push back and a lot of doubt,” Beevas says.
Beevas wants to encourage as many people as possible to tell their own stories. Over the years, Wise Ink has sought out the work of young writers, and works to get as many of them published as possible. They began with an independently created, self-funded anthology of stories from young writers all over Minnesota called “Why We Ink,” which was published in 2015.
Since then, Wise Ink has published multiple anthologies in partnership with organizations like Green Card Voices and the Humanity Center. By doing so, they’ve been able to publish both more BIPOC and immigrant students.
Beevas grew up as a voracious reader and loved the feeling she got after writing something herself, and hopes to provide that feeling for today’s youth.
“I would write something down or have a story, or write a poem, it really validated me, like as a human. I felt validated as soon as I could see my work come on to the page,” she says. “There is something that you feel, no matter how old you are, when you hold a book with words in it that you wrote.”
Authoring Their Own Stories
In Black Ink, a publishing arts initiative based out of St. Paul, aims to keep stories from Black voices alive, including those from elders in the community.
There have been many stories that have been lost or annotated over the years, but IBI is trying to hear and record them directly from the source. Whether it’s recording elders tell their stories or creating a database of Black literary artists in Minnesota, they work to keep narratives true to their core.
“I spoke with one other elder who in tears had said that she’s 86 years, she's been afraid to tell her story because she's born and raised in Mississippi,” says In Black Ink Executive Director Rekhet Si-Asar. “There's different parts of her story that she has not been able to share because she's felt the anguish and haven't really known how to process that and or heal from it.”
When creating books or art surrounding a certain topic, IBI seeks out people with a personal connection to them. If they were working on a book involving the 1920 Duluth lynching, they would first look to hire people who are Black, and from Duluth.
“We've been almost raised to look at our own stories as something that somebody else is supposed to tell,” says In Black Ink executive director Rekhet Si-Asar. “We typically are not the author of our own story.”
With that in mind, IBI partnered with Rondo Avenue Inc. and went on to create the Rondo Children’s Book Series. Before IBI’s involvement, another author was hired to write the series, but because they weren’t a Rondo resident, former residents of the neighborhood did not think it resembled them or their stories.
When IBI entered the picture, they hired two Rondo writers who went on to interview Rondo elders, spoke to family members, and researched everything down to the street names.
“We actually want people from generation to generation to see the value in sharing their own stories and taking a hold of their own narrative,” Si-Asar says.
Adding More Voices
Taylor is working night and weekends on top of her full-time job to bring Vermillion Ink Press books into the world, uplifting voices from underrepresented backgrounds. She started the press last September with the goal of adding diversity, equity, and inclusion to the book publishing industry, both in terms of product and staffing.
“Right now we have 10 volunteer staffers from a variety of backgrounds,” Taylor says. “Our metrics look pretty different from the rest of the industry, and that’s something that we’re really proud of.”
VIP has set up an intentional infrastructure, created a business plan, recruited a team, started fundraising, sought out larger presses who might incubate them, and joined the MN Black Publishing Arts Collaborative. In short—they’ve been busy.
During their fundraising and presentations, many people came up to Taylor and the rest of the VIP team curious about the publishing process, and wanting to know more about how to get their own writing published.
“That’s another issue that we want to address with our press,” Taylor says. “In the future we’ll be looking to host classes, seminars, and workshops so that people from underrepresented communities can learn how to navigate the publishing process, work on their writing and kind of get their stories out into the world.”
One common issue in the world of book publishing, Taylor says, is that some publishers might see different books from underrepresented authors of the same background as being too similar.
“What we’re trying to show is that there’s a variety and plethora of stories and just because two people come from a similar background doesn’t mean that their work isn’t valid, and they don’t have something amazing to tell you,” Taylor says. “There’s value in that, and you don’t have to compare them directly.”
Another common issue is fair payment. Back in June, YA author L.L. McKinney started the hashtag on Twitter, #PublishingPaidMe, asking authors to share what they received as an advance for their books. The hashtag showed hundreds of thousands of dollars of differences between first advances for BIPOC and white authors.
VIP hopes to have a fiction book, a non-fiction book, and a volume of genres by either Fall of 2021, or Spring of 2022. They plan on getting their writers a higher advance, or a higher royalty rate. In addition to earning more, authors could go to a larger press down the line and more successfully secure a larger advance, Taylor says. “We’re also trying to pay creators their worth.”
Taylor has always found comfort in reading, and knew she wanted to have a job where she could help people through books. Since starting VIP–her first business–she’s been thrilled to see its reception and the outpouring of support.
As the narrative in America shifts, Beevas believes that the publishing industry will shift as well.
“I think in the space of story, we’re going to see lots of beauty that is hard to describe,” Beevas says. “I almost see it like—and it sounds corny and cheesy—but I see the face of publishing almost looking like a rainbow. Like I think it will be lots of different colors and textures and it’s not going to be pretty, it’s going to be kind of a beautiful mess.”
