Index for Continuance is a podcast about small press publishing, politics, & practice. Hosted by Hilary Plum & Zach Peckham.
Index for Continuance celebrates the book as a technology for collaboration, hope, and radical engagement. We host conversations with editors, writers, publishers, critics, booksellers, and organizers involved in independent, small press, DIY, and community literary work. We hope to build an archive of grassroots knowledge that serves the future of publishing. Join us to share old and new ways to make small, free culture in a big-tech, climate-destabilized world.
Thanks to Silk Duck for the use of our theme song, “Frustration.”
Episode 30: Danny Caine - “Fight the Real Enemy: On Data Centers and Book Bans”
We talk with writer, bookseller, podcaster, and activist Danny Caine about data centers, book bans, and the recent local and national waves of organizing against them. Danny is a pal from Cleveland (now based in Columbus) and steadfast friend of the show, whose writing on Amazon and bookselling in the age of the algo has long figured into our syllabi and conversations, so it’s about time. Occasioned by his recent podcast series The Data Centers Are Coming, hosted through the Institute for Self-Reliance, and his latest work of nonfiction How to Defend Books and Why, just released in June 2026 from Microcosm Publishing, we cover the ways these issues and resistances to them are fundamentally, ideologically entwined via the dubious value and obvious cost of GenAI, declining literacy and surging bookbans, mounting anti-humanism and assaults on academic freedom.
To borrow a rhetorical device: How big money and big tech undermine democracy and what we can do about it; How to build a broad coalition, or How to talk to your neighbors, or How to go to the bar; How anti-intellectualism and enshittification enable the rise of fascism; How to fight the real enemy (s/o Sinead); How not to engage with nihilist political opps; How small press publishing matters; How bookstores matter; How libraries matter; How to embrace difficulty; How to be cool. And why.
We talk about book ban attacks on the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman. In episode 18, Joe Hall thoroughly documents the problems of PEN America's response to the Gaza genocide, if you'd like to follow up on this episode's discussion. Hall also has a new essay on that here. More here on South Florida State College professor Vinita Prabhakar getting fired for teaching an Ottessa Moshfegh story. We mention Muhlenberg College's firing of tenured professor Maura Finkelstein—more here from The Intercept.
Finally, this episode is brought to you by the Social Room (who have not given us money but without whom we’d be spiritually destitute), a bar in Cleveland where we hope you are now. You could pick up Danny’s latest chapbook Jewish American Dream and read it there. Maybe you’ll make a friend.
10 Aug 2026
Episode 29: Nick Sturm - “Small Press Histories, or The Productivity of Friction”
We’re joined by the literary scholar, educator, and poet Nick Sturm for a pretty incredible conversation on small press historiography, alternative/oppositional publishing practices, and the radical potential of small press pedagogy. Nick guides us through periods of post-World War II small press history, from the New York School to Newt Gingrich and beyond, getting into the heterogeneity of “small press,” its institutions and anti-institutionalisms, its professionalization wars, its ongoing productive frictions, what we can learn from the past, and what work happens beyond the horizon of the canonical. We talk about success vs. legibility, growing larger vs. staying smaller for longer, the difference between “do it yourself” and “do it now.” We think about what it could mean to embrace an “organizational fervor” and to un-invisibilize administrative work.
Many things get mentioned including Annulet magazine (check out episode 25 for our interview with Alicia Wright), the New Orleans Poetry Festival, and George’s, which is a bar in Iowa City where we hope you are right now.
Look out for Nick’s book Publishing the New York School: Small Press Communities and American Poetry, forthcoming in 2027 from Columbia University Press.
The mysterious book Nick and Zach talk about without ever naming is Green Isle in the Sea: An Informal History of the Alternative Press, 1960–85, ed. Diane Kruchkow and Curt Johnson.
9 Jul 2026
Episode 28: Live From Cleveland with Two Dollar Radio
On September 12, 2025 we sat down with Eric Obenauf, founder and Editorial Director of Columbus-based indie press (and bookstore and vegan café and bar) Two Dollar Radio to talk about publishing. Recorded live at the Cleveland Public Library during Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference, our conversation spanned the history and guiding spirit of the beloved Ohio imprint, their steadfast commitment to Midwesternness, their new relationship with Seven Stories, and how they keep surviving. We talked acquisitions, distro deals, and the longstanding relationship between literary production and foodservice, with all our usual curiosity about the time, space, money, and energy involved in sustainably publishing books and also running a business with your closest friends and family for twenty years.
Then we lost the recording. Or thought we did. Until a couple of weeks ago when we found the file just sitting in a weird part of our shared drive. Obviously we are professionals and know what we are doing. So here it is. Cellar-aged. Our first and only live episode. Thanks to Danny Caine for setting up this conversation.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
12 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
9 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 24 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
27
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
51
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