Ooligan Press is an important part of the Portland State experience for any student pursuing a career in publishing. Located on the third floor of Neuberger Hall, the press is run by university writing students, mostly graduates.
“The publishing classes are where you get concepts, historical context and theory. Ooligan Press is where you get the practice,” said publishing graduate Cooper Bombardier, who works at the press. “We are able to make decisions, take risks, mess up and feel really good about our successes in the press. It is an amazing way to learn.”
Bombardier added that the work of Ooligan is very collaborative: “You find yourself learning by doing and learning from your fellow workgroup members.”
Abbey Gaterud is the interim director of the publishing program.
“We have real contracts with authors of real books for real markets,” said Gaterud, who is also the publisher and de facto faculty adviser of Ooligan Press.
The press was founded in 2001 by Dennis Stovall, who became the director of the book publishing program at PSU that year, according to Gaterud. Stovall wanted to put into practice what he had written in his 1992 book, Classroom Publishing; that the process of book publishing, from editing the books to selling them on market, could be used to teach.
Students at Ooligan Press are divided into different work groups, each one corresponding to different areas of publishing, including editing, marketing and book design.
“It’s a safer environment to learn how to be a member of a book publishing community without it being your first job and your paycheck being on the line,” Gaterud said. “You sort of get to play around with what publishing actually means.”
These work groups meet with student managers in publishing lab and studio courses, where they receive assignments and report about their projects, according to Bombardier.
“It is really amazing. There are people in this program from every walk of life and background, and there really is a spirit of camaraderie and teamwork that was instilled by Dennis Stovall and Abbey [Gaterud],” Bombardier said.
Ooligan Press is a publisher of trade titles. It publishes fiction and non-fiction books with Pacific Northwest themes.
“If the books sell, then we can make more books. If they don’t, then we have a problem,” Gaterud said. “But that’s a great learning experience, to be restrained by the real world.”
With the closing of Borders, Ooligan Press lost one of its main retailers. Like the rest of the publishing industry, the press has had more trouble selling books this year than in previous years. It is currently in the process of making all of its titles available in e-book format.
“E-books are a new source of revenue that we have never dealt with before,” Gaterud said. “It’s another way of getting the books into the customers’ hands.”
Gaterud also mentioned that the authors of the books come from just about anywhere and are not restricted to PSU students and faculty. The staff of Ooligan Press also attends a variety of writing and publishing conferences in Oregon.
Ooligan Press will host its annual Write to Publish conference Saturday, April 28, 2012. The goal of this annual conference is to teach the publishing process to writers and also to show them how to find publishers for their books. Gaterud said that the event is open to anyone that wishes to attend.
Bombardier said that Ooligan Press is currently working on three titles: Blue Thread, a novel by Ruth Tenzer Feldman; Close is Fine, a collection of short stories by Eliot Treichel; and The Pacific Poetry Project.
Blue Thread, which is about a young girl in Portland in 1912 at the height of the women’s suffrage movement, will be released winter 2012. Close is Fine will be published next fall. The Pacific Poetry Project, a collection of poems by authors from Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, British Columbia, will be published winter 2013.