Describe the women who have most influenced your life and the formation of your character.

My mom's an English teacher. She gave me Langston Hughes to read in 4th grade. And Allen Ginsburg in 8th grade. And by the time I was in 10th grade, I had read John Keats and Shelley and Blake and all that stuff so I grew up on poetry from the time I was very small. And my Grandmother was a librarian and my grandfather was an English major and could quote Shakespeare so I was pretty saturated in books and the love of writing since the time I was small.

My mom was a first wave feminist. I grew up with two sisters. It was all girls in our house. My mom was the first on our block to subscribe to Ms. magazine. She would protest against the Vietnam War, Women Strike for Peace, and take us with her to march in demonstrations when we were very small. My parents got a divorce in the mid-70s, when she went back to work and wanted to have her own career. He had some issues with that. We were already in high school by then.

I think that one of the best things about being raised in a feminist era was that women of our generation were never told, "You can't do this." That we really felt like, in my house anyway, that we had the support to do whatever we wanted. To make our own choices, to choose who we would like to be and what we would like to do, so that we had our own identity. We were not identified by who we were married to, or who we were dating. So that by being women-identified as opposed to male-identified, that really allows one to be a whole person.

I know that my mom, in her own upbringing, felt like her own brothers were treated very differently than how she was treated. So I think that in bringing up her own children, she made sure that, we were all encouraged to do what we wanted to do, to be as strong as we could be.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

I'm still a feminist. It means that in every aspect of one's life one is striving for equality in every way, socially as much as anything else. My husband is not a partner in my business but he helps out a lot. He's in book sales and he has a lot of input as far as marketing and sales. When we first started working with our major distributor, a couple of times my husband came to the meetings. But I found that the men in the room would talk to him, even though it was my company, because men naturally talk to other men when it comes to business. So I had to leave him at home because it's my company, even though he was very interested in what was going on in the meetings. The men in the room didn't even realize that the men were talking to the other men, that they were directing their focus towards him, even though it was my company. So there are certain things that are very subtle that still go on that women have to have an extra consciousness about to counteract. It's just conditioned behavior. We have to raise our sons as feminists as well as our daughters. We can raise our daughters to be strong and raise our sons to respect women as equals.

What would you most like to tell your daughter, son, the next generation about your hopes for women of the future? How would you advise a young woman to go about finding her own voice?

Just to try and be whoever you are. Don't let anybody say, "You can't do this." When I said I was going to publish poetry, you can imagine, my father had a heart attack. He was like, oh my god, she'll be living at home when she's 40. How are you going to have a career publishing poetry? My friends said that too, though. It's like a "they all laughed at me" kind of thing. Certainly one has to bear quite a bit of ridicule when one's a poetry publisher, just because one can't imagine making any money at that. I would just say, find out who you are and be who you are, and even if it takes you awhile to try on different things. You know, I was in a rock band 15 years ago. It was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I'm so glad I did that. You have to do different things and enjoy all of them.

How do you define success for yourself? How would you define success for the next generation?

I think success is happiness. If you feel that you can wake up in the morning, well, here I am in San Francisco. That in itself is a success. I'm surrounded by people I love and who love me. I have a job that I'm very happy to do even though a lot of it is very stressful. I spend a lot of time yelling at printers and distributors and all that. But I feel very successful. I've created a career for myself, what I do is something that I've created. I've created this poetry reading series at the Paradise Lounge. I've created this publishing company and I get great satisfaction out of the fact that I've created a career for myself out of nothing. And I also feel very successful, in that, my goal for the publishing company, as well as for the reading series, as well as the writing I do for the Bay Guardian, is to encourage other people to be writers. Manic D publishes people who haven't been in print before, who don't have connections to literary agents, or anybody at Details magazine or any of the access to the commercial New York houses and recognizing and encouraging their talent. People we publish, like Justin Chin, and his manuscript that we published, Bite Hard, was rejected by five other publishers before we published it, then his second book came out this year from St. Martin's. His book won several awards and was a finalist for several other awards. By recognizing people's talent and encouraging them, they can move on to furthering their careers, so that rather than Manic D being an end in itself, it's part of the larger process of things.

What made you decide to pursue a non-traditional occupation?

I started this company when I was 21 years old. The first couple of years I was in San Francisco I spent a lot of time in cafes writing poetry and then decided I wanted to have it published, just to put it in a book so it would have some place to live outside of my notebook. I'm from New York originally. My mom was friends with a well-known literary agent and I had coffee with him. He said "Don't even try to get your poetry published. No one publishes poetry anymore. You could be Shakespeare and you wouldn't get your writing published. The way commercial publishing works now is a marketing board reads it before an editorial board. Forget it. Take up stamp collecting."

There was a really good book called the Publish-It-Yourself Handbook. I also went to City Lights and actually analyzed how the look of their books were laid out. This was before Macintosh computers, so everything had to be typeset and laid out on mechanicals by hand. I paid attention to what font they were using and how it was laid out and what the covers looked like, and applied the information, I learned myself, to publishing a book.

I always felt like books were objects of art. So that when you're publishing something in a book, it's transcending the medium of writing and it becomes a whole other object. It's not just the writing itself but it's the whole: it's the cover, it's the way the book feels in your hand. It's a whole experience. It wasn't just the gumption of, oh my writing's good enough to be in a book, but the feeling of, a book is the proper place for words to live. Just as one would like to have a nice apartment in the city and furnish it with something beyond milk crates. It just seemed like having a nice place for the words to live was what I felt like I wanted for my writing.

What challenges have you dealt with at work or at home due to your gender? What benefits?

I run the company out of my house. My daughter's in preschool and she still takes a nap in the afternoon. When I'm in production, when I need to get something to the printer, it's a little challenging. When I put her to bed, I turn on the computer and I'm on the computer from 8:30pm until one in the morning. But it's a joy to stay home with my daughter, to be there in her young years and enjoy all of that. And it's also lovely to have a home based office where I can be flexible about getting my work done.

What woman (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with and why?

There's my younger sister who is married to a Republican. I love having dinner with her. I haven't had dinner with her in awhile. We have a lot in common. We share the same sense of humor. So it's a lot of fun hanging out with her. In terms of historical women, there's a poet named Alta. I really enjoyed her book. She published it in the early 70s, I am Not a Practicing Angel. She published it herself, a very early feminist. I think she lives in Berkeley. I ran into her at the Bay Area Book Festival a few years ago. Diane di Prima is kind of a pal of mine. I wouldn't mind having dinner with her. She's brilliant. She's just a remarkable, incredible person.

If it were a historical figure, I'd like to have dinner with Penelope, Odysseus' wife and find out how she kept it together for all those years. Sewing things and unraveling them at night. And how she put up with all those suitors in her house. She didn't have a choice about them. She must have been really strong. It was only because she was really smart that she was able to say, "When I'm done knitting this, I'll choose a suitor. I'll choose who's going to be the next king."