Under Her Wing, Red Bird Takes Flight

On alumna Sarah Hayes and local publishing house Red Bird Chapbooks

Words and photos by Franki Hank

“The whole press was inspired… by a Hamline class.” Sarah Hayes, sipping a short chai tea latte at a table piled with hand-crafted chapbooks, traces back the roots of the non profit publishing house Red Bird Chapbooks she now leads as editor-in-chief.

Peeking at the back covers of each of the poetry collections, otherwise known as chapbooks, scattered over the coffeehouse table, there’s a similarity between all of the different designs: in the corner in the back of the book is a pendrawn doodle of a red bird, the tradition of Red Bird Chapbooks.

Before

Red Bird Chapbooks was started before Hayes was involved. Back in 2007, Professor Regula Russell of Hamline University’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program asked Dana Hoeschen, in her bookmaking class, to come up with the name of a personal press. Hoeschen chose Red Bird.

The exercise in class grew into a true publishing house under Hoeschen’s leadership until three years ago when she chose to step down. The other board members didn’t want to see the press close.

Hayes rose to the occasion. Since taking over the role of editor-in-chief, which Hayes has added to her work as a book designer and editor, her first interaction with Red Bird came well before 2015.

In fact, Hayes was first involved with Red Bird before her graduation from Hamline’s MFA program in 2011.

“It’s a great program. I’m glad I went there for that,” she said.

Then

Initially, she hadn’t entered Hamline to complete the MFA program. She’d come to complete the now retired Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program, which focused on diverse courses that wouldn’t often fit in traditional graduate programs. For Hayes, the MALS program was attractive to her creative side as a multimodal artist following a very strict, fact-driven undergraduate degree.

“I actually work in finance and business, and I didn’t expect changing that—and I didn’t,” Hayes said. “My master’s degree was kind of a treat to myself, my gift for all my hard work.”

Once in the program, Hayes found the crossover between the MALS and the MFA reignited her love of poetry.

“I’d written poetry since I was a child,” she said.

So, she switched programs. There, she would connect with Red Bird, through an invitation to submit work.

“My first interaction…was making a piece of art to go along with a poem.”

Since that first taste of Red Bird, Hayes stayed connected and once she became an integral part, she’s grown the press from fewer than 10 volunteer members to around 20. Under her leadership, the press has taken flight.

I was not the founder, but I was one of the founding.

Now

Today, Hayes is involved with book production from end to end, overseeing and partaking in every step of the publishing process, which starts with initial readings. The process starts when a piece, like Noah Stetzer’s Because I Can See Needing a Knife, is received.

Initially, works are submitted to the team of editors who read blind, and a collection is only picked up if an editor volunteers to handle it. Essentially, an editor snatches up and claims the collections that call to them and promises to invest the time to take that author through the entire process. Hayes remembers reading and liking Stetzer’s work, but passed it onto the editors.

“I fell in love with this collection,” she said. “But I sent it on to my team.”

Another editor claimed Stetzer’s work, which deals with the diagnosis of HIV and the dramatic life changes that follow. However, Hayes saw Because I Can See Needing a Knife once more as the designer for his chapbook.

Hayes and the Red Bird team take the design process exceptionally seriously. The question is how best to complement and enhance the contents of the chapbook. For some, a clever solution can be simplistic; a collection of paired paintings and poems titled Catalpa by Jamie Lynn Buehner, for example, features a clear binding string to avoid any distraction from the visual elements inside.

With Stetzer’s work, the challenge was a single poem with abnormally long line breaks, which required more ingenuity. As a poet herself, Hayes knew the importance of those long lengths, but Stetzer reached out, knowing that they wouldn’t fit on a regular page and offered to change the breaks.

Instead, Hayes designed a book with a fold-out page, encompassing the long lines of his poem so he didn’t have to adjust his intention.

“He really appreciated the care of having another poet who figured out a way to honor that and understood the importance of those line breaks,” Hayes remembered.

That relationship between Red Bird and their authors is unique because each of their volunteers is an artist themselves.

“We all approach it understanding what it would mean to us if the work were our own words.”

After

That passion and care for other artists is the driving force for Red Bird Chapbooks, but behind it all is Sarah Hayes. She works a day job for another non profit in finance and runs the publishing house additionally. They produce from 12 to 30 books in a year, building the printed pages into books together by hand every Wednesday. Beyond the time investment, Hayes has sacrificed her own voice to amplify others.

Following a chapbook of her own as part of the editorial series, where all the Red Bird editors produced collections, Hayes has had two collections resting on a shelf, but it’s a sacrifice she says she made willingly in order to work for the authors Red Bird is publishing.

“We have some collections that are about incredibly human moments,” Hayes says before describing the challenges of designing a book for an author who passed away and working with his estate to tackle the raw, powerful writing capturing the experience of seeing an abuser across the cash register buying groceries.

Without Red Bird, those voices and stories might not reach anyone. Red Bird is allowing authors to find more publishing opportunities, end up in the Poet’s House in New York City, or receive tenure. For those successes, and the community that experiences them, Hayes doesn’t regret her sacrifice.

Instead, she talks with nothing but love of her work, their authors, and the tactile relationship with a crafted book. She’s the person stalking through a Jo-Ann’s craft store, holding prints of cover art and searching for the correct shade of red for the binding; digging through the tool box from her aircraft mechanic life to find a hand drill to punch holes big enough in a thicker manuscript; or driving to the warehouse to feel and compare the weights of paper. She’s the one who completes each book, adding the bird in the back as a small touch of her influence on each and every one.

So far, Hayes has drawn over 4,000 birds in the corners of chapbooks, each year with a different species in the same red pen.

You can imagine it’s unique in every single copy.

Like their authors and the poems they share, each of the birds tucked inside the bound pages are a bit different, yet they are all the same, all red birds of Red Bird Chapbooks.