By Allan Stevo
February 17, 2025
There was a time when small presses were an important part of the lifeblood of American culture.
The pressures of entrepreneurship were part of what made 1.) farmers great, 2.) small businesses great, 3.) doctors great, 4.) teachers and tutors great, 5.) local newspapers great, and many others great.
These entities meant much in the life of a community, as did anyone else who had to interact with real people daily and had to balance the checkbook weekly. There are considerable pressures in life pushing us away from those realities, pressures we must guard against in each of our lives.
Literary pursuits were a normal aspect of the work of small presses. Poetry might appear in newspapers or magazines that were not considered "literary." Book serializations might appear in publications that would be considered mainstream by contemporary standards. Drawings and art might be commonplace. Drawings, in the form of political commentary, continue to be commonplace in mainstream publications. Such stark lines have not always been drawn between literary and non-literary the way they are in our era of over-specialization.
That was especially true in the United States, where, try as they may, the establishment figures had the hardest time insulating themselves from the pressures of reality the way the European establishment so successfully seemed to do.
While it is unfair to point to one specific figure since the trajectory of American culture has always had a prominent anti-liberty subset of influencers, the establishment of New Deal era programs around "protecting" the arts and "establishing" the arts under the watch of four-term president Franklin Roosevelt has come to impact American arts and letters for nearly a century.
Under the influence of guaranteed "protective" federal funding, literary magazines went a different way than what would have been typical for a small press dependent on their supporters. They became establishment. They became not just part of some local establishment. They became part of a national establishment. This trend was more wide-ranging than literary magazines. Schools popped up increasingly to teach writing the way the establishment wanted it. The same became of art. Such schools even came to perform a gateway function, helping to sort out who belonged from who did not belong. Schools became institutions that provided secure salaries for establishment voices who could not attract audiences through their brazen pursuit of truth, but who instead attracted sinecures, awards, and honors from those who wanted to hear not from truth-seekers but from the establishment. The publishing industry and all forms of media grew increasingly stultified.
Among the greatest losses in this process was the adjusting of the notion of small scrappy presses and small scrappy literary magazines into the mindset of being a part of something called, "the publishing industry." The two ideas could not have been more disparate.
What a loss for America that was. But in all likelihood it was more of a loss for publishers of literary magazines and for small presses, for they stopped being relevant. They continued to scrape by, to pay their dues, and some of them ended up with some comfort and some success and a legacy.
But to what ends? What was it a legacy of? What was its purpose?
The purpose was to perpetuate more establishment thought.
That was what became of thousands of burgeoning renegade writers who became a successful literary magazine publisher from the New Deal to the present: they became a vehicle for more establishment thought.
They let their dreams be derailed to become a vehicle for more establishment thought.
I ask you to consider that background as you read the following from Tupelo Press:
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SUBJECT: Our Take on the New NEA Grant Guidelines
Dear Friend of Tupelo Press,
Many of you have asked about the appalling new NEA guidelines for literature grants ( click here to view link). Tupelo Press takes the strongest possible stand against:
- "The applicant will not operate any programs promoting"diversity, equity, and inclusion"(DEI) in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173." - NO!
- "The applicant understands that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." - NO!
- Applications must be built around or feature some aspect of American triumphalism ("Funding priority will be given for projects that celebrate and honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.") - NO!
- All applicants are required to sign a "Certificate of Compliance," including Draconian reprisals for failing to comply with "all Executive Orders." - NO!
Under no circumstances will we suspend our DEI based writing fellowships at Gentle House in Port Angeles, WA;
Under no circumstances will we be dissuaded from building our Spring 2026 list around (a) Jennifer Jean's dual-language (Arabic/English) anthology of Arab women's poetry, (b) Naoko Fujimoto's anthology of Classical Japanese women's Waka poetry in translation, (c) Ming Holden's "Fire Alarm," (d) Avia Tadmor's "Song in Tammuz," (e) Preeti Parikh's "Blue Selvage," (f) Ángel Garcia's "Indifferent Cities," (g) Diana Cao's "Slipstream," (h) Stelios Momoris's "Perishable," along with six additional, equally important titles.
For 25 years, Tupelo Press has been devoted to widening the audience for contemporary poetry and literary prose by emerging and established writers of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including, especially, women and writers of color, the LGBTQ, immigrant, and Native American communities. We aim to develop wider audiences for, and deeper understanding of, innovative, multi-cultural writing by essential participants in this conversation.
If our position means no more NEA grants for Tupelo Press, so be it. To act otherwise would be immoral.
Meanwhile, our heart goes out to the dedicated professional staff at the NEA for having to put up with this crap.
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If you ask me, this is all pretty milquetoast. On one hand, you have Lenin's useful idiots insisting they are not well-funded and comfortable tools of the system, but are instead free-thinkers. Ludwig von Mises, for the record, much more charitably called them, "useful innocents." On the other hand, you have a US President who still is not willing to take it as far as he needs to. To be fair he has only been in office 26 days.
This would be a preferable time to totally eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and ELIMINATE ALL FEDERAL FUNDING FOR ARTS, LITERATURE, AND EDUCATION, but Trump may still be too concerned with what the swamp thinks of him for a move like that. His mandate, after all, is to close the porous border, end the wars, and stop the bleeding out of America, not to close little Suzie's summer ballet camp. But perhaps that mandate too will come. Time will tell.
There's good news
Thankfully you and I have no need to even take note of such pathetic nonsense. Something really cool happened in the late 1990s, a no one from nowhere noticed that a Washington bureau editor had cancelled a story about the President of the United States and a White House Intern having an affair. Under business as usual, the story would just disappear, as a favor to the politician involved, totally ignored by the rest of the editors of prominent publications. (My appreciation to the late Dr. Gary North and to the Mises Institute for that story from North's August 2009 speech " Calling and Career as an Austrian School Scholar | Gary North .")
But that day was different. That day, the no one from nowhere shared the story with his email list and the Bill Clinton and Monika Lewinsky story remains known to this day. And that no one from nowhere was Matt Drudge, that man who would come to run the most important news aggregator on the internet.
That day in the late 1990s was the day that the establishment media reached peak relevancy. And they have only lost relevancy continually from that day. It took Washington DC about 3 decades to catch up with the rest of us. A politician is finally re-arranging federal funding to more accurately reflect what the American people want.
Of course, it is too little, too late, and those of us who get what has happened and what is happening are not all that concerned. Those of us who write to move the hearts of warriors, do not care what The New York Times thinks about us. Those of us who write to inspire virtues, do not care what the academy thinks of us. Those of us who write because that is simply what we must do and are grateful to have an audience eager to read us - we care not what the National Endowment for the Arts thinks about us.
We just write. We write and publish in the limitless environment we live in, one in which every single one of us has a virtual printing press that can reach any corner of the planet in ten minutes or less.
My latest book is for the poets and for the authors. Quit holding back. Our era needs truth-tellers like you. Get it here for free Do Not Apologize For The Words You Use. And in case you are curious, if you are reading this website, you are likely one who fits my definition of poet mentioned in that book. "He who goes out to the outskirts of society and brings back to that society the essential truths he has found." It is a very weak era that has convinced us of a definition of poet that is less than that, a definition that has something to do with rhyme and rhythm.
But I should not get too far from our original theme without handling a matter...Thank you to Trump for finally doing away with some of that nonsense at the NEA. Gratitude is in order. And it is funny to watch sell-insulated liberals get triggered when the fallout of 1997 finally comes to affect them. That is how insulated they have made themselves from reality. They consider themselves entitled to your tax money and balk at the idea that you should be able to place any conditions on that. They do not understand how their press offers little more to the world than the website you are reading this on, a website which does not exist on government largess. Theirs is, in fact, a net negative.
All this can be insightful and make for fun conversations with normies.
There are more important things to focus on though as a writer, such as this question: How are you going to be inspired today to write the most powerful, truthful, mind-blowing thing you've ever written? How are you going to get that in front of the reader who needs to read it? Essentially by doing those two things, I am asking, "How are you going to change that person's life for the better today?" And then, how do you wake up tomorrow and do the same thing again?
I am a writer.
I get it.
If you are a writer, you get it too.
Never has a better time existed to be a writer.
Welcome to this special, special time.
Only now, you are without any excuses.
Today is the day.
Sit, write, share, change a person's life, perhaps even your own, wake up and do it again tomorrow.
Dear writer. Never has such a special time existed to write. Never.
Let the MSNBC and the Fox News talking heads debate the details of NEA funding. Such things are irrelevant to you and me. The more a person talks about it, the less relevant that person is as a writer. They are meta-writers, talking about writing, not writing. They are teachers, chattering and not doing.
You live in a time as a writer like one that has never existed.
Nothing can stop you from reaching your audience.
That means it's times to get to work.