163. Cita Press & Sui Sin Far with Juliana Castro Varón and Victoria Namkung

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes, and today we’re circling back to our “lost lady” from almost three years ago (Episode No. 15) — Sui Sin Far (a.k.a. Edith Maude Eaton). 

AMY HELMES: Our guest from that episode, Victoria Namkung, is back today to tell us about a new volume of Sui Sin Far’s work, but before we get to that, we’re also excited to tell you about the feminist indie press publishing this work — they happen to share our passion for forgotten women writers. So I’d like to first welcome another guest, Juliana Castro Varón. In addition to being the founder and design director of Cita Press, she is also a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and she’s the author of the 2022 Spanish-language essay collection Papel sensible. 

KIM: Juliana, we invited you onto the show because we think what you're doing is going to be of interest to most, if not all, of our listeners. You founded Cita in 2018. Do you want to tell us how it originally came about?

JULIANA CASTRO VARON: Yes, it is built upon two demoralizing statistics that I found when I was in grad school. Um, I'm going to tell you those two and then you're going to think they're really unrelated, but what we ended up doing was kind of like the Venn diagram of those. The first one is that at the time, this is 2017, women comprised only 5 percent of people working in open source, that is, people building open-source software, uh, apps, and putting it mainly on the kind of major platform for that, which is GitHub. And also, of the kind of top public domain books lists, for example, Goodreads has one they put one every year, um, at the time there were only five women in that top 50 percent books, um, and there were 11 books, and most of half of them were by Jane Austen, who we love. But of course that, it was just like, overwhelmingly men. So I decided to kind of tackle both of these issues by creating a web-based platform that would allow us to publish things that are in the public domain, that is, they don't have copyright, but doing so by putting kind of design and code first, making them accessible, available, and free for people using the internet. And that's kind of how Cita came to be.

AMY: Okay. So explain open source, that first part that you were talking about. I don't even know what that is.

JULIANA: That's people who put their code visible and editable for anybody to use. So we've used an online reader. We don't use that anymore because now we're building our own online reader, and so we used things that other people had designed or written, such as the books themselves. And we put everything on open source. That means anybody can see it. And within some rules, we use Creative Commons licenses, people can share it, and they can share it without having to pay, without having to ask for permission. So everything we do, every book, with a couple of exceptions, is open access. Meaning anybody can see it, anybody can download it, anybody could reprint it if they want it. You go to Citapress.org and you find all the books we've published since 2019. Uh, right now you can see it online, we have a reader, meaning like a platform that allows you to have the size larger or have some highlights. We are about to launch a new update to the website that will allow you to download it in ebook, in a PDF. We also sometimes build educational guides for some of the books so people can also use that to teach in a classroom or for a book club or something like that. And sometimes, not for all of them, depending on the kind of like the size and the scope, we also do printable things that people can print at home, fold at home, um, in like either tiny versions of 'zine like versions and everything is free. We run a design studio and we have grants in order to keep every single book that we publish free. And when we sell them, we sell them at cost. So like these, um, we have some ‘zine versions of books that are like under a hundred pages. And those are five dollars, which is how much it costs us to print them.

AMY: Got it. And Juliana and I were talking before we started recording here about, you know, sometimes you go and you can find a public domain book for free on the internet, but once you start reading it, it's a mess.

KIM: Yeah. Or they'll have a picture that totally doesn't relate on the cover.

AMY: Oh, totally. Like really hilarious, bad cover art. Yes, which and, and Juliana, you're a designer yourself, so great design really seems to be a key part of your mission as well, right?

JULIANA: Yes. Thank you. We love talking about this because very often due to kind of scale and resources, open source places such as Project Gutenberg, um, they do a wonderful work of putting these books online at a scale. They put many, many books at a time. But they very often don't have the capacity to edit that book, that is read it, make sure that it doesn't have weird breaks, uh, make sure that the cover art relates, as you say. So what we do is we pick these books. We find a good book that we like, and then we find an artist and we commission a unique cover. And we also find a writer, which in the case of the book we're going to talk about today is Victoria, to write a foreword, an introduction to this book for contemporary readers as a way of landing the book in the present. Very often these books will deal with, like, extremely contemporary issues and very often even they would be written very freshly. So, yeah, design is very crucial. The cover art is so beautiful. We very often would have posters and other things made out of the cover because we like it. And we hope that this kind of lure the reader into finding these books charming and interesting.

KIM: So basically, other than doing Lost Ladies of Lit, this is like our other dream job. I mean, it sounds absolutely amazing. I love it. I mean, I hope at some point maybe we can collaborate on something because that is just so cool. So about how many titles are you releasing each year? 

JULIANA: We usually do between three and four. Three is kind of the sweet number per year. So we have, uh, around 16 books. Those books, not all of them, but many of them are both in English and Spanish, so that's two editions of each book that we produce. And what we cover really ranges in genre, we have from poetry, essays, memoir, so the, uh, the, the kind of the range is large.

AMY: I'm just going to name a few here, um, to entice people. So Cita has already published Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which I think probably many of our listeners are already pretty familiar with those. But their catalog has in it also, a lot of titles that you'll maybe be less familiar with, but also very intrigued by. At least that was the case for me when I started browsing the list. So here are a few that jumped out at me. Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask. Haven't read that one yet. Elizabeth Gaskell's gothic ghost story, The Poor Clare, which, I mean, perfect for Halloween, come on. Um, and then there's an Edith Wharton short story, The Old Maid, and a poetry collection by Amy Lowell, um, a little book on aesthetics by Violet Paget. And we talked about Violet Paget, um, she was also known as Vernon Lee, we talked about her a little bit on our episode about Amy Levy a few years ago. So lots of good stuff. Kim, I know you'll love this one. They have the work of a visionary, and I mean that literally, she had visions, 16th century nun, Santa Teresa de Jesus. That seems like that's something you would instantly go for.

KIM: And that's totally up my alley. I love the nuns with vision. Great.

AMY: So lots of good stuff to go check out. I think everybody listening would be, you know, this is all in their wheelhouse.

KIM: Yeah, Juliana, you really cover a lot of different types of authors from different places and time periods. Does your team have any specific criteria in terms of which books you end up publishing? How does that process work?

JULIANA: Um, yes and no. Generally we have some logistic restrictions, for example, if a book is more than 200 pages, it's very hard for us to print it. The Awakening, for example, is a long book, and so we don't have printed versions of that one. So far we haven't repeated any author. So we try to kind of have one book per author. If the author is very famous, like Louisa May Alcott, we would do a non-known book of the author, and we'd not do, like Little Women, for example, which, editions of that book abound, but it's not the same case for others that are equally worthy. In general, the majority of the books that we publish are in the public domain. Because of that, the majority of our books are old. One exception is the collection of the Nobel lectures, which we published last year with the permission of the Nobel Foundation. But that one is not in the public domain. The Nobel Foundation continues to have the copyright, but they allowed us to do this free book for people to read. Um, we do books that are originally written in English and Spanish just because then we don't have to find an open access or public domain translation or translate it ourselves, which is expensive. Uh, but that's kind when I started Cita Press, it was only me, so it was just books that I was reading and wanted to publish. Right now, we have a little bit more time to do more exploration. And Jessi Haley, the editorial director, spends a lot of time thinking about what books should be put in the front of eyes of readers that have been overlooked or underpublished or that are just simply not available in an edition such as the one we're putting out. And this is the case for An Immortal Book, which I'm very, very excited about talking today.

AMY: Okay, so let's switch gears now and talk about this new title, An Immortal Book: Selected Writings of Sui Sin Far. Why did she seem like an obvious fit for Cita, Juliana?

JULIANA: Here I must credit my colleague Jessi Haley for finding this wonderful book, but well, there are a number of things. The first one is the historical context. Um, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which is the most known piece by her, was the first published book by a Chinese American author and the only one for, like, multiple decades. She wrote fiction that was realistic about Chinese characters that were not what most people had been publishing at the time. This was a time, as Victoria points out in the introduction, which you should all read, it had many historical racist parallels. I mean, the family separation policies of the present and with the racism that we saw with COVID. So I think that the historical context is important for this book. Solidarity between women, queerness and other topics around the characters in her fiction. The ambition of women, which is something that is portrayed throughout and not shyly. And her own career as a writer. She was very famous at the time, but she's not very famous now. She wrote so much, and she was also very funny. Like she's witty. 

KIM: All right, so let's loop our friend Victoria Namkung into the conversation now. In addition to being a terrific friend of mine, Victoria is a journalist and author. She's been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Vice, and The Washington Post, among other publications. She's also the author of two wonderful novels, The Things We Tell Ourselves and These Violent Delights. And she has a degree in Asian American studies from UCLA. Victoria wrote the introduction, as we said, to Cita Press's Sui Sin Far title. Victoria, welcome back to the podcast.

VICTORIA: Thank you. I'm so happy to be a return guest. And congratulations on the hundred plus episodes you've done since I was last on.

KIM: You started us off.

AMY: Yeah, I think you came on the show maybe even before we were even airing. 

VICTORIA: Yeah, I had lots of faith, but I'm very impressed with how much you guys have grown since then.

KIM: You started us off right. So you set the tone.

VICTORIA: Yeah.

AMY: So how did this collaboration between you and Cita come about for you to write the introduction to this book, and how did it feel to get to revisit Edith Maude Eaton again?

VICTORIA: Yeah, well, um, you definitely play a role in this story. So Cita's editorial director, Jessi Haley, who Juliana mentioned earlier, she heard the episode we did back in 2020, and she was already researching Edith Maude Eaton for a potential new collection. And I think because I'm also a biracial Asian American journalist and author, and just such a big fan of Eaton, um, also known as Sui Sin Far, I just still remember how excited I felt when I first read her work in college, which was like 25 years ago. So getting to write this introduction is such a full circle moment, and it's thanks in part to Lost Ladies of Lit.

KIM and AMY: Yay!

VICTORIA: So in addition to the stories from Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Cita's new collection also features some personal essays about her life. She writes really candidly about her identity and racism she experienced. Also her career, which is so interesting. There's also an early sketch that bridges her fiction and her observational journalism entitled A Trip in a Horse Car. And that was definitely one of my favorites. It's published in 1888 and it starts to highlight her attention to subjects like class and gender, which we see later in a lot of her work. So I thought I could read a really short excerpt from this story, which has Eaton observing a man who has dropped a parcel that's full of sugar and it's starting to spill out in the horse car. 

AMY: Okay, let's do it.

 VICTORIA: A couple of fashionably dressed ladies are just behind him, and I think it would be kindness on their part to let him know he is losing his sugar, but they take their seats unconcernedly and allow the conductor to notify him of the fact. They choose a seat as far away as possible from the beggar girl, whom they regard with faces of disgust, and after they are comfortably settled, begin a conversation about some mission for which they are collecting contributions. They are rich ladies, good church members, charitable in many ways, but I am afraid they will not have the same position in the next world that they have in this. 

So that passage is a preview of the not always sympathetic mission ladies who appear in a lot of Eaton's later stories. We see that in Mrs. Spring Fragrance as well.

AMY: And just the sharp observation skills of her characters and her as a writer too, right?

VICTORIA: Yes. Juliana mentioned earlier how Eaton is really funny, and I think you see that there's these little jabs, you know, that can be really entertaining and humorous throughout her work.

AMY: And also I think we should make losing his sugar some sort of euphemism. 

KIM: Yeah. Totally. I was thinking the same thing. It's so perfect. Yeah. Did either of you walk away from working on this project having gained any new insights about Sui Sin Far?

VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I learned just how prolific she really was as a journalist and a fiction writer. Um, Professor Mary Chapman, who you had on the podcast to discuss Edith's sister, Winnifred Eaton, she had found more than 150 uncollected texts, so that brings Edith Maud Eaton's body of work to more than 260 texts, which is quite a bit. Um, you know, she's best known for her Chinatown fiction that we see in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, but the majority of Edith's fiction and reportage actually has nothing to do with Chinese people or the Chinese American experience. So she really covers such a range, going from fashion to fires, if you can believe it. So, um, yeah, I just was shocked with how much she actually produced at a time when you would think that would be quite unusual. 

AMY: Yeah. So all the more why we're excited that somebody's still publishing new versions of it, that we can get our hands on. Juliana, is there anything we haven't touched on yet that you just would want listeners to know about what it is you guys are doing?

JULIANA: I mean, I think your listeners would be interested in generally many of the things we do. So just read our books. Uh, we've started playing around with social media too, and just kind of adding content about and around women's writers. So just follow Cita Press and read our books and share them with people. They are free and they will be free forever.

KIM: Yeah, listeners, if you saw the viral video going around with Doris Lessing responding to winning the Nobel Prize, that was Cita Press's social media. So you're already doing great.

AMY: Well, thank you guys both for coming on to tell us about this new project and what it is that you're doing, and I'm sure we're gonna be back in touch with you, Juliana, and Cita, to get the word out about some of these other books you're doing.

JULIANA: Thank you for having me. I look forward to chatting again in the future about anything and everything.

AMY: And Victoria, as always, we love having you. Thanks for stopping in.

VICTORIA: Thank you so much. I look forward to listening each week,

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast if you enjoy it. 

 KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.