Every recollection is an imaginative act. Even when serving the matter of facts – such as a recording, a video, or a photograph – the illusion of reality is created by an interpretation in the present moment. To remember is to create. Any testimony I can bring about the conversation I had with Sarah Shin, co-founder and director of Silver Press and Spiral House, is a fictional one. Luckily for me, Sarah concurs with this notion. So much so that, when I ask her about her projects, she says:
Sarah Shin: I was interested in forgetting and remembering, and the experience of knowing how strange it is to have a consciousness – in the nature of what we perceive to be reality, and how fragile that really is.
We sit down to have a conversation about voice, about what choosing a name entails, and about how it feels to be an echo. We both work with these concepts, but such work is in and about the everyday experience. In order to gather a common language, I bring up the biography of Silver Press, and I ask her to tell me more about what it means to be an independent, imaginative publisher that began from a feminist perspective.
You are right in wanting to make explicit and foreground the fact that people don't share the same meanings around words. When we began in 2017, we easily settled on a description. And maybe as you keep doing things, it becomes harder to fix something in a word. I've always been wary of accepting ‘reality’ as stable and unitary. And being imaginative, being surreal, means that there's a questioning of those terms: we can never change things if we accept the terms that we are given.
I have trouble thinking about anything separately from other things, and I would connect that relationality with a feminist approach. If we think of patriarchal thinking as connected to a worldview that is based on empiricism, quantification, that divides things from each other, separates and dominates. I would say that a holistic way of thinking, and a hybrid way of thinking, is allied with the kind of feminism that I'm interested in. [At Silver Press] we really believe that imagination has a role to play in feminism, and we were comfortable with bringing it together.
And the independent part is a nod to our community, like our friends, who are also independent publishers and cultural producers. And we like that world.
Spiral House is defined as an imprint of Silver Press, yet both explore ways of knowing. Before them, Sarah co-created a project titled Ignota Books, which she referred to as “an experiment in techniques of awakening”. I was interested in hearing more about these epistemological perspectives, their meaning, and evolution.
I want to bring uncertainty into public life – that's what the experiment was gesturing to. It is about a level of vulnerability, and honesty, and trying to move away from preconceived ideas of knowledge.
I'm really interested in the role that language plays in shaping reality and tend to work with storytelling as an organising principle. I think that that's also the work of feminism – to visit, to make visible what has been invisibilised through, for example, colonialism. A question I would like to ask, and learn about, is: What structures and practices can support the storytellers or the memory holders?
Spiral House published Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Grandma’s Story, which has much to offer for thinking about storytelling, theory, knowledge and the creative presence of absence: what is forgotten or cannot be told. Thinking about stories as threads – ‘what grandma begins, granddaughter finishes’ – what stories for the future can be told today as a form of ‘breaking open the spell’? How can we braid or pattern stories that remake the present, past and future all together?
I have seen three different levels of voice in the work done by Silver Press and Spiral House. The first one is voice as a theme, or a subject, in the writing itself – people who write about voice, and about words, like Anne Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and many of the authors in the anthology Bodies of Sound, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin. The second was the voice of the authors and what they know it can do for the text, like Toni Morrison, Audré Lorde and Hélène Cixous. And then, there is a third level, which specially calls for my attention. This is the voice as praxis – the voice of a publisher does not work the same way as that of an author – it has a shared materiality with the writing, but it appears to exist behind the text – so I wonder how it is constructed. Sarah listens to me attentively, as she takes a moment – a deep breath – to braid an answer.
One of the key questions that Irene Revell articulated while we were working on Bodies of Sound was: Why, in the history of feminism, has speech been privileged over listening? Perhaps one answer to that is because people have felt that they had no space to speak, or that there were unequal accesses to being able to be heard.
I like Ursula K. Le Guin's commencement speech at Bryn Mawr, published in Space Crone, in which she tells the students about two ways of speaking and voicing, and she calls it the mother tongue and the father tongue. She says that the father tongue is the language of bureaucracy and the ways in which you have to exist as a person in society and its official discourse. And then, she says, the mother tongue is essentially a language of relation, of care. This is the language or voice of the questions I used to think were frivolous from my grandmother like, have you eaten? – always, have you eaten?
Le Guin points to the history of publishing as reifying one kind of voice, or one kind of tongue, as public language. That, then, connects to this question of, well, why in the history of feminism has speaking been privileged over listening? And it connects to the relationship between the oral tradition, or spaces of oral relationality, to the printed matter of a book. So then, as publishers, at Spiral House, we are trying to open up books and connect back to multiple voices.
Throughout the conversation, the concepts she mentions become disclosed – a skill Sarah has for veering between the apparently different aspects of discourse – the mundane, and the esoteric, with the same strand of voice. She has decided to play with the multi-materiality of books – words as a place so concrete, yet ephemeral, never thing, always the space around it.
One of the things that I love doing about publishing is how to make the book live in the world and be part of conversations, be catalysts for engagement, and explorations of ideas. In some ways, that's partly programming, curating, creating spaces such as exhibitions.
Irene Revell, Roy Claire Potter, and I, organized a conference called Channeling Voice. I realized on that day, during the conference, that there are all these ways of asking questions about what channeling voice is. And the voice itself is channeling.
What is the voice channeling? Where does it come from? I like the implication, or the gesture, towards something supernatural or outside of intention – conscious intention – because, again, you know, inspiration, the muses – there's an interest in where does language comes from? That can be quite esoteric. Italo Calvino, on the other hand, asked whether permutations of literature – in trying to escape language – could unleash something from beyond its system.
I'm also interested in, not the voice channeling as a verb, but the voice as a channel. And I think that that's what the publishing house is – we are a channel for allowing other voices, and other aspects of reality, and reality-creation to come through. The channel is when you empty yourself out.
The voice of the publisher as a channel led us on a tangent about placentas, umbilical cords, and belonging. We shared with each other the efforts of our parents to preserve the symbolic nature of such short-living, and yet vital, channeling organs. Sarah said it is a custom in Korea to save the placenta after one's birth, to keep it at hand for other moments of liminalities, such as illness or death. I told her my parents kept a tiny piece of my umbilical cord, and that the origin for the name of my country was in the belly button of the moon. Both parts of ourselves are now lost, or misplaced, which felt like a strong metaphor for two women, with lineages from other continents, having a conversation in English, in the middle of London.
We know through quantum theory that things are moving in and out of existence all the time. And so, how do we occupy that space? How do we perform the identity? It's always both. Silver Press or Spiral House is a publishing process and they are also nothing without the things they contain, and that they are a channel for. That is also, I would say, part of a feminist methodology, or a way of thinking about community and collaboration. We are nothing without each other.
As I listen to her, I can trace a cohesive feeling in what she offers – the literary references, the personal questions about reality, life, and death, and the reflections around what it takes to keep an indie publishing house afloat. I agree, we are nothing without each other. I was curious to know how that other is thought of in the projects she cares for, so I asked her about readership, and how it is described, or wished for, at Silver Press and Spiral House.
Many of our readers have been with us since the beginning, and they know that we do unusual books. None of them are particularly conventional in structure and form. We want to be loyal to our readers in that way. We want to do things still with our twist, whatever that is; I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, I'd love it if you could tell me. But I would like to sort of maintain that quality of being slightly eccentric.
Sarah had experience with a more traditional way of making books while she worked at Verso, where she learned a lot about publishing. However, she seems to be rhizomatic by nature, and so are the books she publishes.
There's an undifferentiation between us as publishers and as readers – we are our own readers, as much as we want to find our readers; we basically want to make friends with everybody. Why make books or write? Anne Carson puts it this way: language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.
In 2025, a number of independent publishers from the UK posted an open letter on social media enlisting the difficulties they were facing, making a call to action to institutions and decision makers. But I wanted to know, what can we, the readers, do as well?
The key is that you can't think about these problems in isolation to everything else that's happening in the world – the combination of things that the letter gestured towards through the lens of the economic and existential issues that some publishers are facing. We have to be able to think about cultural production in relation to everything else, and within everything else. So what people can do is start thinking more holistically about things.
I think that the call to action really is to keep asking questions, and to really challenge the terms of given reality. Because we will never win within these terms. And so that's sort of opening up ways of knowing that I think we're trying to do a Silver Press and Spiral House, understanding our world as being inherently relational.
Because you become a shared community when you read something. Anyone who's gone into publishing, especially independent publishing, has gone into this because they're readers. It all comes from a place of love, yes, and I fully believe that love is the most important thing, even with books.
Note:
UK Small Press Futures is a collaborative consortium of independent and UK-based publishers and editors, including Silver Press, founded in 2025. By November, 2026, they'll be opening a bookshop at Copeland Park in Peckham, London. If you want to support them, you can add to the fundraising efforts here, follow them on social media, or visit their experimental bookshop run by the publishers themselves.
Cover image: Collage courtesy of the writer.