Across 2022, the Year of Stories, we are spotlighting Publishing Scotland members, who will share their own story in their own words. Get to know Knight Errant Press, a micropublisher specialising in brilliant queer stories.
What’s your story?
It all started because we wanted to see more books about a variety of gender experiences outside academic publishing. We had the seed of an idea for an anthology about gender and its many complexities, and since we didn’t spot anyone else doing something like it in the UK at the time, we went about putting that anthology together. While in the middle of the process, it was decided that since we were publishing a book we might as well set up a press (2018). We started off queer and curious and we continue to be so. We believe the world will be better off with more stories written from an LGBTQI+ perspective. We look for stories from across the world but also love to read and publish work from Scotland, and have found ourselves in the position of a ‘discovery’ press, publishing debut works of emerging writers.
Tell us about some of your key stories.
Our list is still quite small, we publish up to 2 books a year as most of our team members manage Knight Errant tasks around other full-time commitments. It is hard to pick a ‘key’ story, every book was an important occasion for us, a journey and a lesson.
The book that started it all – F, M or Other: Quarrels with the Gender Binary – taught us a lot about publishing, crowdfunding, working with authors and the community. It also introduced us to a lot of great writers and publishing folk, many of whom we later published or collaborated with. This anthology introduced us to the world, readers and paved the way to building relationships with booksellers.
Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz by Ely Percy had us moving away from collections to single-authored work and to a novel at that. It was an entirely different publishing experience, we delved into Glasgow’s LGBTQI+ history in a way we never expected to and learned a fair bit about editing dialogue in Scots and the LGBT scene in the ‘90s and early ‘00s Scotland. It has been a pleasure to see Ely’s recent work, Duck Feet, gain recognition and success over the past year, and we are simultaneously humbled and proud to have been part of their publishing journey.
We continue to explore formats and genres, looking for stories that capture our imagination. In October 2021 we published our first graphic novel, technically a graphic poem (sadly this classification doesn’t exist yet!), the beautiful and visually rich folklore retelling – Tamlin by Aven Wildsmith. Working with and editing graphic work was not an entirely novel experience for our team, but it is a very different process to editing work that’s predominantly written. The scale of development Tamlin undertook over the year we worked with the author was substantial, and reflects the author’s development as an illustrator. We are very proud of Tamlin and are looking forward to sharing it with our readers, and more books like it in the future!
What draws you to a story? What makes a good story?
For us, a good story is a compelling story, a story whose voice and plot draw you in and keep your attention. A story that makes you think beyond the words on the page. A story where the characters’ interactions are genuine, no matter how mundane or removed from the readers’ reality. Where no word goes spare and every detail is accounted for. It doesn’t matter what the story is about or where it is set. We all have preferences – genre, format, subject; at the end of the day, these categories do not make the story good or bad.
What stories should we look forward to or check out this year?
In 2022 we are hoping to be able to publish the second and last volume of F, M or Other: Quarrels with the Gender Binary, alongside some poetry pamphlets and a zine on creative writing and dyslexia. We have also re-opened our submissions, so are excited to see new voices and stories coming our way over the next few months.