By James Tookey.
Meike Ziervogel is the founder and head of Peirene Press, an independent publishing house ran from her study in the hills of North London. Since 2010, with the publication of their first series of books, Peirene have established themselves as one of the forerunners in the small press scene that has blossomed in London over the last decade. Peirene Press publishes three novellas a year, always loosely based around a theme, always three first-time translations from European languages. As with many small presses, the stable of titles can be seen as a map of the publisher’s taste, and for the reader of Ziervogel’s novels it is no surprise to find that Peirene’s books indicate a preoccupation with voice and the disconnect between the thought and the act. They are also ripping good yarns.
Ziervogel’s enthusiasm is clear to see, and she is evangelical on both the translators’ and the publisher’s role: both are mediums, bringing the books to wider audiences, operating as loudspeakers on the novels’ behalf. And no-one is a more tireless exponent of literature’s ability to cross ideological and cultural boundaries than Ziervogel herself.
3:AM: You’ve published a novel a year since 2013, and you’re currently writing your fourth. Do you consider yourself an author who has a publishing job in order to fund your writing life, or a publisher who writes novels?
MZ: Initially I was a reader, then I became a writer, then I became a publisher. Now I’m an author and publisher, and do not consider one to be an add-on to the other. It can be hard to strike the right balance, though. When I first started Peirene I stopped writing for about a year and thought perhaps I had been born to be a publisher, and that’s what I should be concentrating on. But I soon realised this was silly, and that I wanted to write, and needed to write, and now I try to spend equal amounts of time and energy on both. So I spend Mondays and Tuesdays in full Peirene mode, and the rest of the week I write in the mornings and do publishing work in the afternoons. On top of that, I spend five or six weeks a year in a rented cottage in Norfolk, away from everything, where all I do is write.
3:AM: Did you always know that writing was what you wanted to do?
MZ: I wasn’t a prodigy; you hear stories of writers who claim they wrote their first novel at the age of six. I wish I could say the same. Instead, as a child I spent hours copying stories from magazines. It was the act of writing itself that I loved. My parents weren’t readers and we had very few books in our house, but I always read. I think my interest in language and stories came from the realisation that words are not only used to make connections or express truth. They are also used to cover up what we cannot or don’t want to face. In my family, for example, they were employed to cover up a huge silence, in connection to German history and the second world war. When I was 13, my English teacher told me to forget it, that I’d never speak another language. So at the earliest opportunity — aged 14, I think — I dropped English at school. This meant when I arrived in London, a few years later, my English wasn’t very good at all, and when I started studying Arabic soon after, I was learning it from English, as it were. I’ve often wondered why I put myself through this. It’s almost as if I had to remove myself twice over from my mother tongue in order to find — through my writing — a language that not only allows me to express myself, but also to search for truths that I feel are often hidden underneath all the words we produce.
3:AM: So translation as a mode of being has always been of interest to you?
MZ: The moment we speak, we translate. Even if it’s our mother tongue, we are adapting internal emotions into words. The mistake people tend to make when learning a new language is that they try to transfer their way of thinking in their first language into the new one, and it all ends up a huge muddle. The longer you learn languages, the more you realise that this doesn’t work. What you learn is that even if you only have 50, or 100, words in your new language, these are the words you have to use to express yourself. And it’s incredible what you can say with such a small pool of words. This makes me so conscious of the fact that what I’m saying, even in languages I am fluent in, is not really what I mean; I am just using the words I have in order to communicate. There are studies which suggest that only 7% of what we pick up from one another comes from the words we exchange. The other 93% is made up of body language and tone of voice. I’ve learnt English, Arabic, and French, and each time you start with all this knowledge, all these concepts and emotions inside of you, and you cannot express them. You have 100 words and it’s not quite enough, and then 200, and then a thousand, but there’s always a gap between your pool of words and all this stuff inside you. So whether you have 50 or 50000 words, you are using such imperfect means to get across your thoughts. I’m acutely aware of this.
3:AM: In the context of literary fiction becoming less popular, do you feel that as a publisher you have some sort of duty to maintain standards of taste?
MZ: Not a moral duty, but a personal belief perhaps. I only publish books that I can truthfully stand behind and defend as excellent, and I think a publisher does have something of a moral duty to believe in what they’re publishing. To publish, for example, Fifty Shades of Grey is absolutely defensible if the publisher then comes out and says, ‘Yes, I think this is one of the best books about sex I’ve ever read, and it’s improved my own sex life tremendously’. Everything I publish has initially made me feel enthused and alive in some way.
3:AM: What do you mean by alive?
MZ: Language is not a box of jewels that you put in a cave to preserve. It’s a living creature, and changes continually. This means that as a writer I am aware that you cannot nail meaning. Meaning — and truth — is fluid. As a writer you use the act of writing to search for a truth, a meaning that eludes you. You use words, plot, character, rhythm, imagery to build a scaffolding for yourself — and the reader. And a good scaffolding encourages the reader to use their own imagination to climb to the top in whatever way they like. That’s what makes me — as a reader — feel alive.
3:AM: According to a Literature Across Frontiers study, in 2013 only 3% of all books published in the United Kingdom were translated works. What do you put this down to?
MZ: There’s no doubt that Britain is an island. It really does struggle with being part of Europe. However, you can’t just sit on your island and pretend you don’t have to look at the way other people tell their stories. On the other hand, there are more books published in the U.K than anywhere else in the world. My favourite statistic says that last year more than 20 books were published every hour. This is an insane amount. But only 5% of all published books sell over a hundred copies. So if you put the 3% into that context, it means that there are probably quite a few books being translated. Whether they find a readership is a different matter.
3:AM: And finding a readership is where the publisher comes in, right?
MZ: Precisely. You can’t just throw your books out into the market and step back. I have to build a community of readers and booklovers.
3:AM: Do you find the marketing side of publishing fulfilling, or an annoying, necessary task?
MZ: A book that sits unread on a bookshelf isn’t a complete work. It needs to be written by a writer, published by a publisher, and then read, by readers. Without the completion of this process, the work has no life. The publisher is helping the book reach its potential. That’s the job and duty of a publisher. Perhaps there was a period of maybe fifty years last century where a publisher could sit back and churn out books, throw them onto the market and they’d sell. But that’s not possible anymore. Nor was this the case before the 20th century, when publishers would often run an office in the back of a shop, where they’d sell what they were producing. The fact that we are now in a situation where this proactivity is needed again in order to keep a publishing house financially viable is not a cause for despair. It’s really important to keep in mind that people don’t require art, like they require food and water, so what do you expect? It’s fantastic if we have the money and the time to buy and read books, but we need to remember it’s a luxury, and therefore it’s a pleasure to work in this area. I feel so lucky to work in an industry which I’m passionate about.
3:AM: You publish three books around a specific theme each year. How important is this structure to Peirene’s output?
MZ: I knew about Stone in a Landslide and Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman before I set up Peirene, and very much had those books in mind when thinking about the sort of literature I wanted to publish. When I had bought the rights to both, and was in the process of acquiring Beside the Sea, I took a step back and was struck by the similarities between the three stories. They’re all female voice-driven narratives, with narrators who live inside their own heads, clashing with reality. Now, I wasn’t surprised by this, because I was gearing up to work on Magda, my first novel, which is another narrative of this sort. So I was obviously at a stage in my life where these stories appealed to me, and I realised I often tend to read in this way. I get excited by a topic, and read a book, and that book will lead me to others; it might be an idea, or a structural thing, or a voice, but I definitely find my reading will follow a thematic pattern.
3:AM: What are your reading habits?
MZ: I read as a writer. Anything I don’t read with my Peirene hat on, I’m reading in order to further my current writing interests. I often think about what I’d do, in a desert island situation, if I were given the choice between an unlimited library, or unlimited writing materials, which I would choose? I’d write. Nowadays I read because I write.
3:AM: I’ve done a couple of these interviews with publishers and asked this question about whether it’s possible to read without connecting it to your work, and I’m realising it’s a pretty ridiculous question. It’s like asking whether one talks for pleasure.
MZ: Can a painter look at the world without connecting it to creating images? You are what you are, and it informs everything you do. The pleasure and the work is all wrapped up together.
3:AM: Can you tell me a little about breach, your new project?
MZ: breach is the first title in a new Peirene series, Peirene now! This series will consist of books commissioned by me. I love translated fiction, and that’s Peirene’s core business, but it does mean that I’m always publishing books a year or two, at least, after they originally appear, and breach is an opportunity to directly respond to the current moment. I’ve asked two writers, the Nigerian-German Olumide Popoola and Zimbabwean Annie Holmes, both living in the UK but not originally from the UK, to visit the refugee camp in Calais and interview refugees. Drawing on these interviews they will create a work of fiction with six voices. Literature allows us to produce a space where emotions can be tested that can’t surface in everyday life. So I’m hoping this book can do just that, without the hype of media thinkpieces on the crisis, where the left and right shout at each other. I think a work like this can take a more dialogic approach.
Disclaimer: The interviewer currently works for Peirene Press. He didn’t at the time the interview took place.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
James Tookey is a reader living in London, after studying in Canterbury and Geneva. He splits his time between mixing martinis and metaphors.
