Size matters to Bull City Press. The publisher in Durham, North Carolina, has managed to keep what executive director Ross White calls its “commitment to compression” for nearly twenty years. Initially founded in 2006 to publish Inch, a journal dedicated to concise verse and micro fiction “that suggested expansive worlds,” as White puts it, the press added poetry and prose chapbooks to its repertoire the following year. Inch, which is accepting no-fee submissions from March 15 to April 15, still calls itself “the tiniest magazine around,” but it has evolved into a series of micro chapbooks, each composed by a single writer rather than including multiple authors and genres in the manner of a traditional journal. Measuring 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches and containing ten to sixteen pages, a single issue of Inch holds a “constellation” of poems or at least three stories or essays. Inch has published K-Ming Chang’s Bone House, “a queer Taiwanese-American micro-retelling of Wuthering Heights” (2021); Ananda Lima’s Amblyopia (2020), a poetry collection that spans “senses, borders, and generations”; and Mariah Rigg’s essay collection, All Hat, No Cattle (2023), which deploys a “range of narrative forms.” Bull City offers an annual subscription to Inch for $14, which includes four micro chapbooks.
The press also releases three to six longer chapbooks each year and has published authors such as poets Tommye Blount and Leila Chatti; fiction writers Siân Griffiths, Michael Parker, and Laura van den Berg; and nonfiction writers B.J. Hollars and Emily Pittinos. Occasionally editors have “fallen deeply in love with a chapbook and suspected that it was part of a larger collection,” prompting Bull City to publish a full-length book, says White, the press’s preference for compression notwithstanding. With a “pay what you want” policy for select titles and an all-volunteer staff that can vary from three to more than a dozen people depending on the day, Bull City hopes to move toward a future in which “great books are available to anyone who wants to read them,” White says.
