Pitymilk Press Brings DIY Spirit to Publishing

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Photo: Pitymilk Press

Pitymilk Press

Pitymilk Press

Pitymilk Press is a chapbook and online publication specializing in strange yet beautiful writings through zines, chapbooks and illustrations. Launched in 2012, their materials encompass love letters, break-up letters, poems, ramblings, affirmations and more. Pitymilk Press is run by Chelsea Tadeyeske and Edie Roberts.

Tadeyeske explains that it all started a decade ago through a combination of several things. “I was living with a bunch of punks at The Laundry Chute, and they were hosting variety shows in their living room that were mainly music and it was right next to Woodland Pattern Book Center. I was also an undergrad taking poetry classes and I took a zine class; one of the folks living at The Laundry Chute at the time is co-editor now—Edie Roberts—and they introduced me to a lot of that scene.

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Chelsea Tadeyeske and Edie Roberts of Pitymilk Press

Chelsea Tadeyeske and Edie Roberts of Pitymilk Press

“People at that time had a lot of that DIY feel, and if you had some crazy idea you’d just do it. What really was that extra push for us was when we decided to curate the Midwest Small Press Fest in Milwaukee; it was like a zine fair but for poetry chapbooks specifically. We felt that we had a lot of connections in the Midwest and we wanted to bring them together in a non-prestigious way. Having a lot of friends I admired who were making poems, I decided to put all of that into practice together and made a couple chapbooks that we released for that book fair. From that point the rest is history.”

Roberts has since moved back to Michigan where they’re originally from although they and Tadeyeske still co-edit the press together. “It’s still very Midwest … it never left the Midwest,” Tadeyeske laughed.

In their curation process, they recently started moving away from submissions in favor of soliciting from folks they admire. “We try not to publish anything that’s super academic or overly referential; we also try to center voices that aren’t just traditional white cis hetero men. At one time we were really into more experimental forms but that can be tough when you’re making a book that’s kind of complicated design-wise. We want something that’s challenging emotionally or that has something outside of itself to say about the world at large.”

Recurring Series

Pitymilk Press have published several recurring series; one such series is “DUETDUET.” Tadeyeske explains, “A sister press of Pitymilk’s is Bathmatics Industries—that’s more of Edie’s baby. They put out this limited pamphlet of two short stories by folks they were going to grad school with, and they oriented it upside-down so when you’re done with one story you flip it and it’s a new story so one wasn’t the first story or the second story—you kind of choose your own adventure. I wondered how that would work if we paired poets and asked them to send a few pieces like kind of a blind date, then we’d design it, put it together and then they’d meet one another through that process. A lot of really cool and surprising collaborations came out of that.”

Another series of theirs, “Gritty Silk,” was created resulting from a high volume of submissions. Tadeyeske recalled, “We were trying to figure out ways we could accommodate more work. For a while we were soliciting work that was more suited for a digital platform and could incorporate audio or video. It was fun and I’d really like to do that again.”

Midwest Mini-Tour

Pitymilk Press went on a Midwest mini-tour this summer. Tadeyeske said in reflection, “Before COVID we used to tour extensively with our own poetry. This year we had this vision of going somewhere for two months and just making and doing a lot of things, so we got accepted into this artist residency in Iceland and went there for the month of April together. We wrote there what I would call an anti-monogamy text called “What if Loving You Wasn’t About Me?”, and so this mini-tour was kind of the release for that project. We went down to Chicago and linked up with buds there like Annie Grizzle and Ursus Americanus Press. Then we went to Madison to this cafe called Mother Fools and there was a full house of people there which was really cool; we had no idea how it’d be received but it seems like people are really starved for these types of shows. The last show was the inaugural Bell Tower show, which was here in my apartment.”

That said, Bell Tower is a new DIY space that Tadeyeske hopes to use for future events. “If you make a chapbook, we want you to tour with it,” she said. “We want to meet you. We want you to meet people we know. We want you to introduce us to people you know. We want it to be something where you can travel and connect broader artistic communities. Poetry can be a hyper-solitary thing sometimes, but we really want it to be a vehicle for connection.”

Pitymilk Press just opened up a call on Sept. 1 for spotlight submissions. For future issues they plan on returning to their roots with creative exploratory designs. Visit their website here.