A little more than a decade ago, a group of MFA students in creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago wanted to try their hand at producing artist books, blending text and visual design to make unique literary-art objects. Inspired by a punk sensibility, they put their own collective spin on the DIY indie ethos, dubbing it DIT (Do It Together), to guide their publishing endeavor, Meekling Press. “We believe strongly in publishing as a collaboration among the many people involved,” says Rebecca Elliott, who, along with John Wilmes and Anne Yoder, serves as Meekling’s copublisher.
The press’s first book project was The Jury of Sudden Hands (2012) by Patrick Cottrell, which consists of twelve letterpress-printed pages that imagine a surreal “world just next to ours.” On the back of each page is a woodcut print of a house with a hat, based on a drawing by Cottrell; the thirty first-edition volumes, now sold out, came signed and numbered in individual cardboard cases wrapped with red ribbon. In the years that followed Meekling produced additional artist books, chapbooks, and zines by writers living in Chicago, first with a tabletop letterpress, then with a nineteenth-century platen press. In recent years the press has expanded beyond the Windy City to publish paperbacks as well as handmade volumes by authors across the country. The press typically publishes two books a year in addition to other projects, as capacity allows. Meekling is open for no-fee submissions during the month of September. “We mostly publish works that push at the edges of genre and don’t generally limit genre in our calls for work,” says Yoder. Forthcoming in October are Sylvia Jones’s Television Fathers, a poetry collection that “reimagines the past and revels in the absurd contemporary,” and Olivia Cronk’s Gwenda, Rodney, a “genre-ambiguous poetry novel.” In spring 2025, Meekling will release The Dead and the Living and the Bridge by MC Hyland, a collection of poem-essays about grief, gender, art, and capitalism.
