to see the symbiosis

The work, in the small press, is more than the poem you are trying to write. To be engaged in the small press is to be intimately involved in a network of activities, and it is to direct those activities to a communal project. Small press writers are also small press editors, and publishers, and readers, and booksellers, and reading series coordinators, and audience members, and researchers, and, and, and. To be engaged in the small press is to see the symbiosis of these activities, and not to draw any hard lines between them. Each is part of the work of small press writing because there is no small press without this messy piles of activities (however it is that you ultimately define the small press for yourself). Some years you may be all of them, and others maybe just one or two, but within our individual resources we each endeavour to keep some small corner of the whole thing going.

...

Your thing, the thing you put your best literary self and resources into, is going to be forgotten. The question of posterity is how long that process will take, not whether it will occur. But that's ok. You helped the whole big, unwieldy, dispersed thing along, and because of that work - acknowledged or not - the next kids will show up to find something vibrant and alive and worth investing themselves in. They'll call out all the blind spots from the previous iterations (yours among them) and they'll make their own mistakes, but they'll keep it alive too.

-  Cameron Anstee, from his essay/chapbook, Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt. 9 Press, 2024)