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Congratulations on Microcosm's 30th anniversary! Could you share the story of how Microcosm Publishing & Distribution began, and how it has evolved over the years? JB: Microcosm started as a reason for me to get out of bed every day in the 90s. I had been publishing stuff by my more creative friends for a few years. I knew someone who worked at a Kinko’s and someone who could ship things for me for free through their work. So I would set up behind the bar at local punk shows at the Euclid Tavern and Speak in Tongues as I was growing up in Cleveland. Around 1996, I had been doing this for a few years and so I guess I decided to give it a name, to be more official. Or maybe it was the general confusion that people would write for a catalog but always ask for it under a different name, so a single name to tie it all together made sense. Anyway, the idea was to make resources like the ones that were lacking in my own life. By the time that Elly and I met, a little over ten years later, Microcosm had grown in a really awkward way. It was never meant to be a “job,” but it could consume hundreds of hours per week just from keeping up with the letters and the orders and keeping things in print. I think the intentionality of it is why it resonated with people. It was meant to be a reason to stay alive, never a business. And I think that echoes with people much more than I ever realized. EB: When we got together in 2009, Microcosm was a scrappy, troubled operation that couldn’t afford to buy envelopes. By the time I officially joined up in 2015, we were growing every year but still had that scarcity mentality, with every day spent putting out fires. We called our workplace culture “fixing the Millenium Falcon in the middle of battle.” We made a huge effort over years—necessitated even more by our massive growth after we took back our distribution in 2019 and then during the pandemic—and stabilized both the company and our own mentalities. Our readership changed along with us, as longtime readers grew up into middle age with us and new people with new ideas and perspectives joined the team and found our books. We’ve entered a new cultural moment of heart-on-sleeve earnestness that reflects that of Microcosm’s first heyday in the early 2000s, and we’re thriving in it. How is it that you are so consistently innovative in your publishing offerings, and, well, in everything that you do? JB: Wow! Thank you! We want everything that we do to empower someone to change their life and the world around them. That takes many forms but mostly it's in projects and ideas that we could never conceive of on our own. We need our hive mind to bring the best concepts. We think the best projects are topics that most people think they already understand or consider boring but can be brought out to shine in new ways. That could be anything from the history of Hawaii to coping skills for freaking out to how to bookbind to feeling less alone. Perhaps it's coming from a world of performative* concepts, but all of that makes sense under the same tent to me. When we're tightening the screws on a project, we ask "Is this an audience that we can reach? Will this help people?" and that's when we green light it. *Everything in punk rock is putting on a character to make a point EB: A lot of the best ideas come from within our team—idle asides on Slack or jokes that escalate quickly in the warehouse. We have a relatively flat hierarchy, and a lot of communication channels that are shared by people who might be relegated to their own silos at a larger company. A lot of our best ideas, for content and also for how we manage ourselves, come from our shipping and receiving departments. How do you hope that Microcosm will change the world, and readers, for the better? JB: One of the earliest surprises about focusing on resources for at-risk weirdos like myself was that it appealed to lots of people who were treated as unimportant by society. So they came out of the woodwork in force to support us from the beginning. From our earliest tours, the audiences were always comprised of young trans women of color. That made things meaningful in a new way that I hadn't considered. They were just responding to the subject matter and approach. And that's pretty much the same today. Some of them grew up and landed adult jobs, which is really inspiring but mostly there's a new crop of people that relate with what we're doing every year. They send us really amazing mail every day. There's a kid who recently had us ship a t-shirt so that it's there when they're out of prison. That's something that could have happened 30 years ago too. Everyone has to have hope. In the past 30 years, the world has acclimated to our behavior. Maybe someone could argue that we met it in the middle. That's a huge relief as I was hanging on by a thread for a while there. Politics are popular in a way that they weren't in our infancy. Those titles went from marginal to mainstream. In Empire of Normality, Robert Chapman's take is basically that capitalism devalues and economically traumatizes anyone that doesn't fall into an increasingly narrower definition of “normal.” “Normal" really means completely interchangeable workers with consistent rates of productivity. The whole point of the Microcosm project is for people to feel less alone. So, in that sense, Microcosm is the Empire of Abnormality. And we're here for it. Do you have any advice for publishers? In addition to reading A People's Guide to Publishing, of course, and listening to your podcast! JB: Several publishers per week tell me that they just want to “make great, beautiful books” and not worry about the other stuff. Well, the other stuff is actually The Stuff. While many publishers have sought out the “kindler, gentler corporation” to save them, it’s mythological. You have to build and create your own infrastructure if you are going to succeed. Similarly, publishers often believe that they can achieve success by chaining themselves to our success, but the truth is that they need to find their own best practices. EB: Books can be a tough industry, money-wise. There’s been a lot of economic interference, leaving a widespread sense of scarcity and overwhelm, and it can be easy for different parts of the industry to fall into resentment and fighting each other over scraps, rather than uniting to solve our common problems. It’s never too late to pull yourself out of this mindset! Find out the things that are a success for everyone they touch and go in that direction. Create a workplace culture and set of business practices that reflects the values of your publishing program. Even if you’re a one-person operation, treat yourself fairly! Support other independents and they’ll support you back. Do you have any regrets over choices you made in Microcosm's development? JB: I wish I had taken it seriously earlier. You see, since Microcosm was always a reason for me to get out of bed every day, its success was also something of a joke in my mind. I’m staunchly Generation X. And part of that upbringing is being a success apologist or downplaying your success. I think that was a major advantage through most of my career. Toiling in obscurity is really healthy for workshopping things: twenty years where nobody cared what I was doing was really freeing to make sure that it was working. I still run into booksellers who ask, “Why had I never heard of you before?” but the people who approach me to tell me that they love what I do are the most important people in the world to me because they actually notice and listen. So we make sure that we have books that speak to those people and keep them safe. That said, it wasn’t really until 2011 when we signed with Independent Publishers Group (IPG) that I had to answer for our choices. And they really pushed me to take those choices more seriously. Amazing guidance created turning points for us to be recognized and probably are the reason that you are reading this now. How has being based in Portland, OR, influenced the business and your lives? JB: Prior to 2014, Portland didn’t have the local money to be supportive of institutions so we were almost entirely reliant on being a “national press” from our inception. This pushed us to go out on tour every year from 1997 to 2017, when we felt a little too busy and worn out. Portland has always been supportive in other ways, of course, as our cheerleaders. For many, because we started as the local publisher that had no resources but maybe could, lots of people felt invested in our story. And I think that story intertwines into how Portland saw itself, especially in the 90s—that you could found a press and have it resonate and go places. EB: It’s easier to function the way we do in Portland than it would be in many other places. A big part of that is the built environment: the city has an urban growth boundary, making it geographically small, and activists in the 1970s blocked construction on most inner-city freeways, and we have great bicycle and transit networks. As a result, it’s possible to do most things without a car or truck—we don’t own one ourselves, which means we didn’t have as much earning pressure on the business when we were smaller. We use bike trailers to haul books to events, and the community’s turned out for a huge bike move when we’ve changed warehouse locations. Another aspect of Portland’s culture is that free boxes on the curb, little free libraries, and people just generally wanting to share what they have is baked in. Nowadays we’d call that mutual aid, but there’s really no need to buy most things new here. We used to get all our mailing supplies from SCRAP, our local creative reuse project. Most of our office shelves here are built from scrap wood found on the curb. This stuff is pretty normal here, so we’re not constantly having to explain ourselves or buck against expectations of more formality or “professionalism.” Our unofficial motto is “have the most fun.” Biking across town with an unwieldy tower of boxes or the latest homemade bookshelf is definitely conducive to that! How often do you solicit manuscripts and how often do they come in unsolicited? JB: Just about everything that we publish comes in through the submission form on our website—probably about 90%. The rest of the things that actually come to light are sometimes us suggesting to an author that we have a relationship with that they might work on a specific project. The trouble with this approach is that writing a book is a ton of work so for most authors us suggesting it to them causes us to be in a position of “selling it” to them and the vast majority of those projects never come to light. So we focus mostly on what comes to us, operating more as a filter. EB: We put a lot of thought into where our authors come from. A lot of them ordered a book from us years or decades ago—or found it at the library or bought it at an event or received it as a gift—and liked it so much that when they eventually write a book they’ll pitch it to us first. We focus a bit more on brand recognition than many publishers do, and this is part of the reason why. What are you looking for in the zines and books that you decide to publish? JB: We were both teenage runaways, which I think is central to the story. We want to create the resources that were lacking for us as teens, presented in a way that would be attractive to someone like us. This had the additional benefit of being very attractive to many wide subsets of the population that hadn’t felt acknowledged previously by publishing. I wanted to create the tools for people to change their lives and the world around them, and that hasn’t changed at all in 30 years—we are just getting 5% better at it every year. EB: We’re also looking for authors who are excited to collaborate. Our ideal author is keenly focused on the reader’s experience, eager to work with an editor, and can set both their ego and insecurities aside enough to not get hung up on the wrong things. There has to be a lot of trust in the relationship—the author is uniquely qualified to write their book, and we’re uniquely qualified to get it into readers’ hands. Things go sideways when we start stepping on each others’ toes, but if we can work together well we can do things we could never achieve separately. Could you speak a bit about how neurodiversity and publishing intersect for you? Joe has spoken about identifying as autistic which is really empowering. JB: I was diagnosed as autistic in my thirties, which had already made life difficult and failure rampant. But what autism also did for me was give me a lifetime of experience to see that adults don’t know what they are talking about. This is particularly useful in publishing, where adults really don’t know what they are talking about. As such, I threw out the rules that don’t make any sense or serve the stated goals. I rebuilt mechanisms for what was best for what I wanted to achieve. Again, something that I hadn't considered is that this resonated with lots of people who have the same experiences. In middle age, I was also diagnosed with ADHD and OCD. And I think these are equally relevant. I can obsessively perform a repetitive task with attention to detail and pattern recognition long after most publishers would have given up. We are told that these are "disabilities" but that's only half the story and most of that is in how we are treated. I work harder because I know the stakes of how I am viewed in most workplaces, and this unfortunately extends to publishing. It really took proving my concepts as bulletproof hundreds or thousands of times over before almost anyone took me seriously. But toiling in obscurity is really healthy for workshopping things too: twenty years where nobody cared what I was doing was really freeing to make sure that it was working. I still run into booksellers who ask, “Why had I never heard of you before?” but the people who approach me to tell me that they love what I do are the most important people in the world to me because they actually notice and listen. So we make sure that we have books that speak to those people and keep them safe. EB: I recently found out I’m neurodiverse too—an auditory processing thing that I’m still learning about. My own experiences over the last few years have helped me be a better manager and work better with our authors. I’m able to listen to people and really hear what they’re telling me for the first time in my life, which has been extremely cool. I set up a lot of Microcosm’s HR and management systems and they’re very much informed by my growing recognition that different people need (sometimes vastly) different things at different times. Joe and I co-wrote the zine Managing a Neurodiverse Workplace during our big zine-writing frenzy last year that shares everything we’ve learned so far. I hope it inspires people who know even more than we do to write their own books about it, to normalize this sort of thinking. How do you find time to rest and have fun? Or are you always working 24/7 and having fun because work is fun..? JB: I think we both really enjoy what we do. We rest more now than we did years ago, believe it or not. We both walk and Elly lifts weights. It’s the quiet observation of the world that is fun but more than that, there was a point where I asked Elly at what point she wouldn’t want to do this anymore and she just looked at me like the question was absurd or I was trying to tell her something. EB: Adopting a puppy in 2021 has kept work-life balance real for me. I have the capacity to keep my head down and work 12-16 hour days, but the dog will not tolerate that. He requires exercise, adventure, going into local businesses to see if they have treats, and stopping to greet every single person we encounter. It’s hard to argue with those priorities. How do you find time to balance your own writing with publishing? You both seem so prolific! JB: The "Year of Zines" was something that Microcosm announced casually without thinking about it too much. But most of our best ideas are like that. And it turned out to be truer than we thought possible. Zines were massive in 2025. I think they help to make people feel like reading is something other than homework or an obligation. It shows you how cool the world is and you don't have to look at a brick of a book on your nightstand and feel guilty every night. So we're doing more of that in 2026. Somewhere around 2022, we increased our scale considerably, tripling our staff. Elly and my jobs turned into taking care of everybody more than doing our own work. And quickly we found that we weren't doing much in the way of creative work. So I started spending my weekends going to the tea shop and researching and writing new work. It was something that I did for me. And then by 2025, I convinced Elly to do that with me every weekend. And perhaps that worked too well because to hear her recall it, she convinced me to do it with her. Which is 100% the culture of Microcosm. Someone has a brilliant idea and credits it to someone else. So anyway, we started writing and publishing a new zine every other weekend. The first one was a gift for our friend who was in the hospital with sepsis to make her feel better about having to slow down. But we kept it up most of the year. And we want to expand that into making 2026 more about our own creative work so that we aren't just on the bureaucratic side of things. Elly is a fantastic writer and reporter and has done a ton with that, so I don't want her languishing by just submitting paperwork to the IRS and making sure that our staff have what they need. Our idea is that writing is a hobby and publishing is work, so there is a separation there. I think a certain amount of public expression really helps someone to feel less alone in the world. EB: When I wrote a weekly column fifteen years ago, I quickly realized that I got paid the same flat rate whether I spent 10 minutes or 10 hours on each installment, and that my editors were happy when I wrote things that brought in a lot of clicks and comments. To make it fun for myself, I would think of the most hackneyed, commercial ideas possible and then quickly write the most unhinged treatment of each one that I could come up with. It was a winning formula, and that’s the spirit behind our most successful zines. For instance, it makes zero sense for Microcosm to publish a Christmas title, so we came up with a zine about the sordid history of Santa Claus and had the best time researching and writing A People’s Guide to Santa Claus. We still have spirited arguments about some of the ideas that came up in it. It’s doing well enough that we’ll turn it into a book. What are your thoughts on growth and scaling for Microcosm? Are you always actively trying to grow, do you have more of a slow growth, going with the flow mindset, or does this ebb and flow? JB: At one time, growth felt simply impossible. Then we were doubling each year and it felt like we couldn’t stop growing. We tried to actively slow down. We’ve found a healthy medium this year where we are seeing growth but it’s not exponential. Part of the reason for this is that you break things when you grow. You are rebuilding the wheel instead of making books at a certain point and that’s not fun. EB: When our growth slowed dramatically after 2022, we hypothesized that publishing more books every year would increase our growth again. It just increased our overwhelm, and it turns out that we have historically done the best financially publishing about 35 titles a year. We can focus more on each book at every stage, and everyone is happier, from our own workers to the equally overwhelmed bookstore buyers who have to wade through an increasing onslaught of new books each season. When we decided to make this change, it was like a burden lifted—birds sang, people laughed giddily, the air felt cleaner. The numbers got us there, but even without them it was clear that it was the right decision. What are some of your future hopes for Microcosm and just in general in life? JB: We want to remember what is fun about this every day while we take care of our people. We want to see the Microcosm project outlive us so that other people feel less alone in the world. EB: I’d like Microcosm to keep growing, but at a more reasonable pace. My biggest dream is that Joe and I can become nonessential, and that the business would still stay strong and flourishing and true to the shared core values that brought our team together and keeps us all willing to work hard and challenge ourselves. Part of that is the constant battle to keep wages and benefits in pace with the cost and complexity of living. Another part is our ESOP—employee stock ownership program—that enables people who work here long term to become co-owners of the company, and is the seed of our succession plan. Another part is continuing to improve our leadership practices so that everyone feels empowered to understand what needs to be done and step up and do it. It’s all enough to keep us occupied for the foreseeable future! Do you have any advice for young writers? For publishers? JB: There is no “kinder, gentler corporate savior.” You are responsible for building the infrastructure, systems, and identity that breeds your own success. It’s not going to be a single agreement or relationship that delivers you. You’re on your own in the best way possible. EB: We’re living through a polycrisis and it’s raised the bar on what we need in order to function as people in a community. Go to therapy, go to meetings, have honest conversations, read, figure out whatever your stuff is and address it head-on as soon as you can. It might feel like your insecurities, suffering, or addiction are what’s fueling your art or making sense of your identity, the plot twist of recovery will put everything that seems impossible directly within your reach. This isn’t just true for the struggling writers among us—publishing is all about relationships, and the better you can do relationships the better you’ll be able to do the work that matters to you.
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