Almost daily, in my teaching life and out of it, I am reminded of the lamentable dearth of publishers interested in taking on slant fiction. Poets, bless them, realized years ago that some serious do it yourself was in order if interesting work was to have a place to live and circulate (and by God have the presses and prizes sprung up like mushrooms in a damp basement!); slant fiction writers (despite the great example of the Fiction Collective (now FC2) and others (like the folks at Starcherone, Omnidawn, Chiasmus, Clear Cut, etc.)) haven't been nearly as proactive. Some find homes with presses largely devoted to poetry or poetic prose (like Futurepoem, Krupskaya, Atelos...), some find spots with the longer-standing indies, a lot, alas, have trouble placing/can't place their work because there are only so many slots to go around. Every now and again someone with some experimental cred. gets a book taken by one of the big houses and everyone starts seeing big fat carrots in the sky. I've written on this elsewhere (see last Summer's Fence -- the one with the topless model on the cover), and will say again, that fiction writers who write weird shit, of any variety, need to stop imagining (I mean really) that they are the next Ben Marcus or something and that big house New York is waiting for them. It may be there, it may happen, but IT IS NOT waiting. And the reality is that the bigger indies only have so many openings, and that a lot of deserving people want a spot. Sure, we're not all meant to be publishers of journals or presses (I hear that a lot), but a few more of us better start doing something besides sending letters out to agents, etc. Otherwise, it's just going to get grimmer and grimmer for a field that is filled, from where I'm looking, with amazing younger/new fiction writers, who have very few places to go with their work. No?