Today we’d like to introduce you to Kate Gale.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I started in a barn under the moon raising sheep and goats, raising vegetables in New England. In the winter, I shoveled snow. My mother had joined a cult when I was a baby. At eighteen, I took dog and harmonica and hiked. Found college, California, and poetry. Decided to start a press which I thought would turn Los Angeles into a literary city like Paris, but only really made me stay poor, but I liked raising my kids at the beach with sand toys and in the forest with books.
We built the press with nothing and then with many years of hard work, it became this intersection of intellect and imagination. A lot of trips to New York convinced us to go international and we started going to the rights fairs–Frankfurt, Guadalajara, Beijing, London, where we realized there are so many readers in the world. We now publish 25-30 titles/year with ten staff and work with PGW and Ingram International to distribute the books. We continue to visit New York for galley drops and bookstore meetings. We are part of a national conversation about indie publishing and I am writing this at Heathrow on my way back from the Frankfurt Book Fair.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Los Angeles is a challenging place to start a press. Most of our funding comes from outside California, but we are hoping to change that in the next few years and raise money in the Bay Area. Also, we have to make many trips to the East Coast because all the major media outlets are there. Los Angeles is a city of stories, but most of those stories are becoming movies. But, the upside of all this is that nobody tells you that you can’t start a press. Nobody sees you at all. You can just work your heart out and before you know it, nearly thirty years have passed and you have published six hundred titles and have the biggest indie press in the Southland and people in publishing in New York are impressed. You have made a splash somewhere. It’s good to remember that you got into publishing to make good books, and that’s what we’ve done, and some of the authors we have worked with have been amazing.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a poet and a librettist and I have a memoir that my agent, Kim Witherspoon is sending out. It’s about growing up in the cult. I’m best known as a poet and a librettist, but I think this memoir will change all that. My latest book of poetry The Loneliest Girl seemed to really touch a nerve with people. It was about the challenges women face, all the different kinds of shaming, and the ways we as women can turn that narrative around. We have to claim the right to change our narrative. When I left the cult, I had a story. I was the trauma victim. The cult victim. I changed my story. I became the person who victoriously overcame my past, got a PhD, raised two amazing kids, founded a publishing company in Los Angeles, I am swimming on the ocean of blessing. I am not drowning. I am blessed.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
The Red Hen team is amazing at collaborating. I could not ask for a finer team. Red Hen has some great authors as well. I generally think the literary world lives on grace and gratitude, and we always need more of both. It takes so much work for a book to be published, and I always wish for writers who understand how much it takes and have grace in working with us. We are doing our best burning our candles.
But we believe in magic, and together we make it. We are not the little red hen making bread alone. Like our author, Florencia Ramirez, who makes tamales with the whole family, we are making books happen collectively. I have come far from my days of walking between snowbanks to feed the orphan lambs and being an orphan myself. I have my own family, and I have a group of like-minded citizens at Red Hen, building literary culture, threading it into our everyday lives, going home with books to read, waking and sleeping with ink our fingers, stories on our breath, ready to make another book, face another challenge, throw down another obstacle, because we aren’t walking under the moon alone, there are ten of us. Most of the group are young smart people of color who see the world differently and want to change it so that when someone says it can’t be done, our team says, Watch us. Our story is so much bigger and better and more exciting than just the Kate story, and I am so proud to be part of it.
Contact Info:
- Website: kategale.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drkategale
Image Credits
Alfred Haymond
