BookBlast interview with Ra Page, Comma Press founder and CEO
Ra Page, tell us a bit about yourself. Are (were) your parents great readers?
Absolutely, both of them. My parents hoarded books, and they read to us every night as kids. My mother is a voracious reader of novels (although she never allows herself enough time to read them). My dad came from that great working-class tradition of self-betterment, investing in his own education throughout his life. He stockpiled political and historical texts, was a huge fan of EP Thomson and Eric Hobsbawm in particular, and loved Strachey’s Eminent Victorians so much he named one of my brothers ‘Lytton’. He left behind a library of books about Nasser and Middle East history that none of us really know what to do with. Dad was more of a history and non-fiction reader, Mum more fiction. There were some writers they both agreed on though: Lawrence, Hardy, Orwell.
Also, I have to say, in the context of our new release Protest, that this book is effectively my ‘thank you’ to my parents for the extraordinary political education I got from them. I was privileged to grow up in the eye of a whole cluster of political storms. As kids, we stood on picket lines outside coalfields in North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, took day trips to Greenham, were greatly involved in the 1984 Chesterfield by-election that returned Tony Benn to parliament, marched with the country-long anti-Apartheid march that culminated in the two Free South Africa concerts, and saw a newly freed Mandela address the world at the second of these. We were beyond lucky.
As well as being a thank you to them, this book is also a potted journey of protests that Mum, Dad, and two grandfathers I never knew were involved in, as well as much earlier ones that I heard mentioned in hushed reverence. Mum and Dad got to know each other on an Aldermaston march; both were linked with the Hornsey sit-in, both were at the anti-Vietnam demo in Grosvenor Square, 1968 – where Dad was wrongly arrested and defended himself in court. My grandfather also marched with the Jarrow marchers as they entered London in 1936 and fought against the Blackshirts on Cable Street the same year. That’s the thing about this book – it’s not just me. Scratch the surface, and everybody has a connection to not one but multitudes of these stories – because it’s our history, not theirs. To quote my friend, Dinesh Allirajah: “It’s political, but it’s always been personal.”
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
No, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do; I tried journalism for a bit, but I hated it. I hated what I needed to be to become a journalist. Comma kind of grew out of walking away from journalism. It sort of gathered around some of the other interests I had.
Has your vision from when you founded Comma Press in 2005 changed?
Comma has always been about giving a platform for short stories. It might always be about simply that. So, in some senses, no. That said, my sense of what the short story can do, how it can converse with non-fiction, assimilate new ideas, and traverse cultural and linguistic boundaries – all of these things have changed and grown drastically since I first set Comma up. Publishing Hassan Blasim changed my whole view on what a small publisher could do, and therefore should do. That discovery, combined with what happened in 2014, when nine of our writers were trapped in Gaza during the bombardment of that summer, changed everything. Short fiction can play a role, not dissimilar to citizen journalism. It can speak truth to power, challenge the offensively patronising, ever-simplified, self-affirmed narrative the media give us every day, and offer alternative narratives.
How do you balance originality and profitability?
We’re not-for-profit, so we’re firmly in the camp of originality. We’re also supported by Arts Council England, which has been extraordinary from day one. We have ACE to thank for allowing us to develop writers and projects at their own speed. In that long view, originality always wins through, always proves itself to be not just vital but sustainable too. Sometimes it just takes a while. It took 11 years, for instance, between Comma publishing In Another Country and the film based on it (45 YEARS) getting an Oscar nomination. It’s taken almost as long for Matthew Holness’ story Possum (first published in The New Uncanny in 2008) to make it to the big screen (out later this year). These things take time.
Your views on writing? What books have had a lasting impact on you?
Oh, where do I begin? There are too many to name. Here are three that I haven’t named in previous interviews: Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III, Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium, Edgar Allan Poe’s A Man of the Crowd.
What makes you decide to publish one writer and not another?
Again, where do I begin? These questions are getting harder! 🙂 It’s impossible to define, but it’s that sense that the writer is doing something completely independently and indifferently to what you might need or want or expect from them as a reader. That sense that the writer is being propelled by a momentum you can’t begin to fathom. A writer that’s coming from somewhere completely alien and knows exactly what’s needed to do justice to that momentum.
Why short stories?
In his essay The Lonely Voice (1962), Frank O’Connor famously distinguished the short story from the novel in terms of the types of characters you find in each: “The short story has never had a hero,” he argued. “What it has instead is submerged population groups.”
Publishing short stories is an act of giving voice to these characters on the margins, individuals like Chekhov’s Iona Potapov in Misery, who have no one to tell their story to, no audience that will listen to them in their daily lives. In this sense, publishing short stories is an attempt to democratize literature, ensuring voices and characters aren’t excluded from the narratives we tell ourselves.
Who are your five favourite short story writers of all time?
Mark Anthony Jarman
Ray Bradbury
Stanislav Lem
Anton Chekhov
Philip K. Dick
What are your five favourite books of all time in translation?
L’Etranger (The Outsider) by Camus
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka (especially The Hunger Artist) translated by Edwin Muir
Candide by Voltaire
Beowulf translated by Michael Alexander
Madman of Freedom Square by Hassan Blasim
Do you enjoy reading e-books? Will the physical book die away eventually?
Of course not. Johannes Gutenberg didn’t blow all his Christmas vouchers on a Zune!
How do you relax?
Recently, watching election coverage till 6 a.m.
Your favourite qualities in a person?
Erm, that they’re human. I’m well into humans.
For what faults do you have the most tolerance?
Erm, being human. I’m well into humans.
Your chief fault?
Impatience.
Your favourite heroes and/or heroines in literature?
I always like the Joker.
A penguin strolls through the office door wearing a sombrero and shades. What does he say and why is he visiting?
I have no idea where to even begin with this one.
Your motto?
I always find George W. Bush is good for a quote. How about: “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
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