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Small Press Traffic’s Executive Director on Place-Keeping in San Francisco

For decades, San Francisco has illuminated the United States and served as a beacon for artists and radical thinkers. It’s where Joan Didion traveled to document 1960s counterculture, it’s the home of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, activist artist Ruth Asawa’s hometown, and the city where California’s first openly gay public official, Harvey Milk, served on the board of supervisors. 

San Francisco’s new economy and shifting demographics, as a result of the ballooning tech industry, have elevated real estate costs to the stars – spiraling arts and cultural organizations that once served as the city’s backbone into a state of crisis. 

I spoke with Samantha Giles, Executive Director of Small Press Traffic, about the ways that the historic literary arts organization has created and kept space for radical thinkers in an otherwise untenable climate for the arts. 

Sara: What is Small Press Traffic?

Samantha: Small Press Traffic is what I normally describe as a literary presentation organization which means that we provide a continuum of support for writers, particularly those who publish with small presses and who consider themselves experimental which generally results in some kind of presentation of that work. That continuum of support includes things like workshops, lectures, and readings and other events to celebrate and promote experimental writing. I’ve been the director of SPT since January 2009.

Sara: Tell me a little bit about Small Press Traffic’s origins.

Samantha: Small Press Traffic started in the mid-seventies, 1974, in the back of a bookstore called Paperback Traffic. The idea was basically to make small press books available for purchase inside the larger bookstore. The main urgency around generating this collection of small press books was that it was the mid-70s and there were lots of people making cool artist books and experimental presses and there wasn’t really a cohesive venue for that, but the economy was such that people had tons of space and tons of time. There was a curated space within this bookstore that was about promoting these small press books. As that community started to coalesce around that curation, there were events in that bookstore around that started to be more of a community. What was then SPT later moved to its own space for a number of years and then did all sorts of things like intergenerational writing workshops and events and also the selling of books. When that bookstore financially became unsustainable, the organization moved entirely to a presentation organization in the early-90s and has been housed at different academic institutions ever since. We were at New College for a while and we’ve been at CCA for a while. That affiliation has moved into primarily about providing an address and a virtual location, although we do still have occasional events. There’s no financial reciprocity in the institution at all, but we have a home there.

Sara: How have changes in the Bay Area effected Small Press Traffic?

Samantha: When the organization first started it was a completely reasonable goal, from what I understand, to work half-time in a bookstore and halftime on your art practice and your art practice might include things like insurrectionary politics and new forms of identity and new forms of community. It’s not an entirely unknown argument that the demography and the economics of the Bay Area have changed drastically since that 40 years ago moment. The tech industry has changed the economy in extraordinary ways and the access to space has been really affected and the time and energy available for insurrectionary politics. What might be considered experimental literature and art has drastically changed as well, and so, I think that the impact that SPT has felt in terms of its access to space has been felt by lots of arts organizations in the Bay Area. Particularly those who are keen to promote arts practices that are not traditional, populist ones. There are lots of organizations who no longer exist, largely because of the access to space and the access to an interested audience, but also the economies around that art, the energy and capacity to fuel the fires of that kind of often anti-capitalist art and that kind of community that generates around those aesthetics and politics, are largely gone.

Sara: Is that change good or bad?

Samantha: Oh it’s horrible. I think it’s really sad. I think art is a necessary survival skill for human beings and for cultures. That’s the point of culture. I think that it’s really sad that the Bay Area has been known for decades and decades as a space for weird, exciting, enriching culture and that culture is really deeply homogenized now in a way that is sad and depressing. The inflated tech industry has descended on the Bay Area and the people can pay a ton of money for their entertainments, but their entertainments are restaurants and fancy apartments not supporting grassroots arts. There just hasn’t been the level of philanthropy and attention to the reason why San Francisco is an interesting place to live and it’s really devastating that so many artists are forced to move out of the Bay Area and/or give up their practices or arts organizations, forced to move or die because there isn’t a healthy ecosystem of economy and culture brewing in its scobi. It’s just economy right now. I mean, all sorts of people are being forced out in ways that are equally or more brutal, but of course, we’re talking about the arts right now.

Sara: How do you think that we can get philanthropists to start putting money there?

Samantha: I think that’s a larger question. I mean, people don’t go to college to become erudite, knowledgeable citizens. They go to college to find a practical skill to finance their lives. And assume an extraordinary amount of debt in the process. The whole system is broken. There’s definitely a push-back in the ways that people craft their DIY spaces and their Pinterest pages or whatever, but, I think that it’s a much larger cultural issue. I don’t know that I have much faith in the individual conversion of one person or one organization to support art. Art is so personal! To say, “Oh Oracle should give a bunch of money to the LAB and SPT and Yerba Buena.” I mean, who’s to say that that’s the right organization to promote or the right ethos to promote? There’s a general deterioration in the understanding and appreciation of arts and culture for arts and culture’s sake. I’m not necessarily sure that I have the right answer for that. Is it… break capitalism? We should break capitalism. Let’s do that.

Sara: Over the last nine years that you’ve been working for SPT, what are the ways that you’ve leveraged the organization’s identity as a space without a space to its advantage?

Samantha: Well, I definitely think that SPT would have died if we’d had to pay rent. And yet, there’s a huge disadvantage in not having a physical space. The sense of building a community and building a cohesive feeling around the organization is deeply compromised by the fact that we don’t have a space where people can just pop in and take communion.  We can’t build the sense of hominess like the Poetry Project in New York, where it’s like “Oh! I always know that on Mondays and Wednesdays, there’s a thing.” We’ve been deeply impacted by our inability to negotiate an audience and build an audience because of that lack of consistency. But we are a deeply elastic organization because we don’t have to pay rent. There’s an organization called Artist Television Access, where we’ve been presenting for the last...I want to say five years… It’s astounding that organization still exists in the Mission District of San Francisco because they are a grassroots, almost 99% volunteer-led organization that is dedicated to experimental film and other, mostly experimental visual and performing arts forms. The Lab is another organization devoted to experimental art, also located in the Mission. And both of those organizations have deeply struggled to stay afloat because of gentrification. The Lab’s building was just bought and they don’t even know if they are going to let the Lab and the other organizations who rent that space stay because the real estate is so high. There’s just no way, with the size and the scope of SPT, that we would be able to have events if we had to pay rent. That said, it’s hard to be a place without a place and it’s also really exciting to be a place without a place. We’ve been able to do stuff online that I don’t think we would have done were it not for the lack of a physical location and there’s a way in which we’re able to collaborate with physical spaces, organizations, and entities that we probably wouldn’t seek out if we weren’t forced to do it. There’s an exciting electricity in that.

Sara: What are some of the projects that you’ve done that are examples of Small Press Traffic’s position as an organization that doesn’t have a space?

Samantha: We have a few things that I think are at some level born from the fact that we don’t have a physical space. We do these sporadic online workshops. They allow a teacher, who may be academically affiliated, and may not, to teach a class. I encourage people to bring a syllabus that they wouldn’t be able to teach in their institution. They’re allowed to do these experimental classes and to cull students from all over the world. As a result, we’ve had teachers and students participate from places like Australia and Ohio. We also do an in-person fundraiser, similar to the Poetry Project Marathon, called Endless Summer, and we’ve had people participate virtually in that. We do try as much as we can to have an online presence. We are re-launching an online magazine called Traffic Report and that is an online space. Also collaborating with different organizations but also venue support, for example collaborating with the San Francisco Museum of Art, which was all about poets talking about poetry and poets talking about contemporary art and I’m not sure that we would have done that collaboration if we’d  had a physical space. We are able to think outside of that curatorial reliability is what I’m trying to say, and I think that in that mode we’ve done some of our most interesting projects.

For example, this past year, some students from UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley collaborated to create a suite of programs acknowledging and celebrating the New Narrative genre of writing. New Narrative was a school of writing that was actually kind born and bred at Small Press Traffic. It was really exciting for that to have that tribute to this school of writing manifest and for SPT to stay involved. Since the programming was somewhat traditional conference fare: it was a conference, there was a symposium and talks, it was born in a physical space of people doing this academic performance of academia around New Narrative writing. Of course, there were performances and readings as well. Because we didn’t have a physical space, but also, because it didn’t feel that energized to replicate that model or at least I guess it felt more energizing to think outside of that model (and the conference coordinators were generous to let us do this experimenting) - we did a walking tour. It lives online but it’s a physical thing that one can do where one walks around San Francisco and at particular points in the map of San Francisco one can stop and press an audio clip and listen to a New Narrative writer talk about something about that space.  That sound clip could be writing that they’ve done already about that particular corner of San Francisco or them talking extemporaneously about their writing practice and their New Narrative work in San Francisco. That’s located on our website at smallpresstraffic.org. You don’t have to be in San Francisco in order to enjoy the experience. You can be in the San Francisco of your mind.

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Samantha Giles is the author of deadfalls and snares (Futurepoem Books, 2014). She is the director of Small Press Traffic and lives in Oakland, California.