Q&A: Savannah Brown Launches Doomsday Press and Announces Upcoming Poetry Collection ‘Closer Baby Closer’
CONSTANTLY GIVING WRITERS ACCESSIBLE OUTLETS TO SHARE THEIR WORK — while writing her own poetry collections and novels, writer Savannah Brown is making an incredible impact on the literary world. This year alone, Brown has shared many exciting announcements — she is currently on tour sharing new and selected poems, and recently announced the creation of Doomsday Press, an independent publisher based in southeast London.
Doomsday is the perfect publisher for young writers, open to poetry and literary fiction and “interested in the youthful, the weird, the uncomfortably honest, and the genre-bending.” But this press is not the first creation Brown has made to improve the writing community — in 2019, she founded Escapril, an annual challenge to write a poem every day in April, with new prompts created by Brown each year.
The first book announced by Doomsday Press is Brown’s newest poetry collection, Closer Baby Closer, out Feb. 14, 2023. Brown has come a long way since self-publishing her first poetry book, Graffiti, in 2016, since then releasing two stunning mystery novels, The Truth About Keeping Secrets (2019) and The Things We Don’t See (2021), and her beautifully apocalyptic sophomore book of poetry Sweetdark (2020). In addition to her written works and creative community spaces, Brown is continuously evolving her YouTube channel, currently releasing videos that blend aesthetically pleasing visuals with her unique musings on her life and the world around her.
Read below to learn more about Doomsday Press and Brown’s upcoming poetry collection, and take a look at Doomsday’s website for a peek at Closer Baby Closer and information regarding submissions.
LUNA: First off, how are you doing at the moment?
BROWN: Peachy!
LUNA: Congratulations on your new press — what an incredible accomplishment! How did the idea of Doomsday Press come to be, and how long have you wanted to create your own press?
BROWN: Originally, Doomsday was just intended to be a lowkey catch-all body for my own work, but the more I thought about it the more that felt like a wasted opportunity. I felt I could curate a genuinely cool list of beautiful books and because of my position had a greater tolerance for risk than other small presses typically would. The process has been reminiscent of all the guild-running I did on Neopets circa 2010 (my peak).
LUNA: Doomsday is an amazing name choice. What inspired it?
BROWN: I continue to love a good apocalypse.
LUNA: What do you envision Doomsday looking like moving forward?
BROWN: Output-wise we’re aiming to publish three to four titles a year, forever. I’d love for there to eventually be some in-person community motives — open mics, events, parties, tours, whatever.
LUNA: Do you have any favorite presses that influenced your ideas while creating Doomsday?
BROWN: I read a great interview with the founder of Penned in the Margins early on, which really helped me conceptualize Doomsday in its infancy. Also Influx, Cipher, SPAM, Black Ocean and Not A Cult, off the top of my head.
LUNA: Is there anything you want writers interested in submitting to know?
BROWN: I pretty much know if I’m going to ask you for a full within 20 seconds.
LUNA: Another congratulation for your upcoming poetry book! How does Closer Baby Closer compare to your past poetry collections, both in its content and the process behind creating it?
BROWN: It’s my most personal collection by far. This is the first time I’ve felt able to respond honestly to things that have happened to me instead of just writing about things in the abstract.
LUNA: How has writing a book for your own independent press compared to publishing your two novels with Penguin?
BROWN: Both of the novels were accepted on partial, which means I wrote them under Penguin, effectively; my editor and I were collaborating pretty much from the get-go. In that set up you can sometimes feel like you’re making concessions for the sake of marketability. Meanwhile nobody read a word of Closer until very late in the process. It felt very much like an experiment in trusting my gut.
LUNA: Will you talk a bit about the cover design of Closer Baby Closer compared to your previous books?
BROWN: I was feeling itchy about all my covers kind of looking the same and it was important to me that Closer’s cover felt like an evolution. Zoe Norvell designed it. When we were deciding what direction to go in, I couldn’t stop talking about lips, and what she came up with was so elegant and on the money. Up close it’s just a girl’s, like, sexy mouth through a kaleidoscope, but from far away it fully looks like her face is melting, which rocks. The title being in iMessage bubbles was Zoe’s idea too, to incorporate the collection’s digi-elements. It’s awesome. I love it.
LUNA: What is one thing you can share about the poems in this new collection?
BROWN: Everything in them is true.
LUNA: What was your favorite part of creating it?
BROWN: Writing it, which was done mainly last November, in pubs.
LUNA: How does your process of writing novels and poetry collections compare?
BROWN: Both processes are like making a Rube Goldberg machine but one machine turns on a lightbulb and the other machine turns on a bunch of little lightbulbs, which eventually also end up looking like one big lightbulb. You know?
LUNA: Can you talk a bit about your upcoming tour?
BROWN: I’m very excited! I’ve basically spent the past six months studying (watching) stand-up comedy to prepare, which is, um, not what I thought I’d be doing.
LUNA: Is there anything else you’d like to share, either about writing or other things going on in your life recently?
BROWN: My favorite Twitch streamer laughed at one of my comments in the chat recently and I’ve been thinking about it for three days.
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