about
books
writers
events
blog
contact
“Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn.”
—Lydia Davis,
“A Mown Lawn”
“Lawn mowing feels like copying the same sentence over and over.”
—Michael Pollan,
“Why Mow?”
“Literature has always been a step away from ignominy.”
—Roberto Bolaño
clock… root?
A clock is the puffball head of a dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), a delicate invader whose seeds sow themselves in even the most inhospitable soil. A dandelion’s root is stubborn, penetrating, wilier than spades.
A dandelion is a spot of wild, of sunny disorder in the vast green American lawn, an assault against its propriety and “perpetual state of vegetable adolescence,” as Elizabeth Kolbert calls it in the New Yorker.
As there’s a movement of late to return lawn to meadow and wildflowers and vegetable gardens, so we’d like to see the sameness of much of what’s championed in American contemporary fiction ruffled by the disorder of literature that’s wilder, inevitable as a dandelion spotting the lawn, clarifying as its bitter greens at the end of a long winter.
what we publish
Though we take works in translation as a starting point, most importantly, we are looking for writing that confronts us, that feels urgent, disorienting, vivid. We are interested in work that makes its particular innovation in form and language palpable; we also welcome work not necessarily “experimental” but that compels in other ways—perhaps in how it bears the traces of another place, language, politics.
directors
We agreed with the lament a while back from Helen DeWitt in Paper Cuts, the New York Times blog on books: why shouldn’t “great efforts” be made, she asked, “to match writers with editors with whom they have intellectual rapport”? We hope that through this site, our blog, and our own writing, we can convey something of our aims and predilections for those thinking of submitting a manuscript.
interns
Our internship program and partnerships with the five area colleges are important parts of our mission—they express our roots in the Pioneer Valley and our desire to make connections between literature as it’s taught and as it’s published.
Interns help with all stages of the publishing process, bringing to their work with us their own interests and passions. Our first year’s interns were from Amherst and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Sarah Morse, an English major at Smith, divided a Praxis internship between us and Metamorphoses, a journal of translation. Amy Huang, from Amherst College, split the summer before her senior year between Clockroot and the Oxford University Press in New York. Echo Bergquist was with us as she finished her thesis in Italian at Smith College, on the creative struggle between the author and reader in the novels of Elena Ferrante. Lauren Hill came to Clockroot after her graduation from Amherst College, where she has stayed on to work at the college’s Center for Russian Culture. Michelle Fredette, a senior at the University of Massachusetts, spent the spring of 2009 with us, while she also copy-edited the university's paper The Collegian.
For the 2009–2010 academic year, we’re joined by two MFA candidates from UMass: Miranda Dennis and A'Dora Phillips. Miranda is a poet with an eye for color. A'Dora, a fiction writer and essayist, is the author of Mortal Saints and Immortal Callings .