A Midwest-centric publishing imprint founded by Todd Kimm, Steve Semken and a small group of Iowa Writers’ Workshop grads and Plains enthusiasts. Join us. Facebook page. Read all about our current fundraiser, and information on those involved here.
(Established in memory of Barry and Brent Kimm)
Maintenance Ends begins with the notion of exploring and discovering what lies beyond the path of the familiar. In that spirit, we aim to expand the notion of that most underestimated of safe zones, the Midwest.
Funds raised here will go toward publishing our first books, as well as contributing toward author advances, marketing and distribution.
As an imprint of the respected regional publisher, Ice Cube Press, Maintenance Ends is devoted to emerging and overlooked literary works of the Midwest. We will present works of the Midwest by Midwesterners (and not), drifters, decoys or anyone whose work lays claim to the territory while demonstrating the elasticity of its boundaries. We regard no work as too experimental, too complex; no genre as out of bounds.
Maintenance Ends founding supporter and author Prasenjit Gupta, who served on the staff of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, observes, “…in various ways, Iowa and the Midwest are at the crossroads of the world’s literary traditions.” A current State Department diplomat posted overseas, Prasenjit says, “the more set in regional bedrock the literary work is, the wider its transcultural appeal.”
Maintenance Ends founding supporter and bestselling author Trenton Lee Stewart says the founding credo of the new imprint “in a sense allows the works of the Midwest to define and re-define the meaning of place, the Midwest, yes – and the universe of being where it resides.”
So join us as we seek to extend a tradition that contains such divergent voices as August Derleth and William Gass; the stark urban works of Upton Sinclair and Nelson Algren, the sharp satires of Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut, works quintessentially Midwestern by migrants like Marilynne Robinson and Bharati Mukherjee; and the acerbic howls of Bob Dylan and David Foster Wallace.