Dan Slager was a wide-eyed college graduate when he moved in 1989 from his home state of Michigan to Manhattan with a futon tied to his car and “a sense that New York was where you went if you were interested in literary books.” He landed a job as an editorial assistant at William Morrow but “hated the commercial scene” and washed out after six months. Like many young idealists, Slager’s brush with the real world sent him scrambling for the cover of graduate school. He enrolled at NYU and began working as a German translator for the lit-mag Grand Street. Within two years Slager was sitting in the editor’s chair and working alongside venerated contributors like Drenka Willen, one of the world’s most esteemed literary editors. When Slager and Grand Street parted ways, Willen offered him a job at Harcourt working with her list of prized authors (including Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and four Nobel laureates: Günter Grass, José Saramago, Wislawa Szymborska, and Octavio Paz). In September 2005, after five years under Willen’s tutelage, Slager relocated with wife Alyssa Polack and their two sons to take the helm as editor-in-chief of Minneapolis’ Milkweed Editions, a leading independent, nonprofit literary publisher.
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What did you learn from working with Drenka Willen?
Here was this incredibly venerable woman who had been in the business thirty-five years when I started working with her, who still did all the editing herself, still saw the books through each step of the process, and was a fiercely protective advocate for her authors. I’ll never forget what she said to me the first day I was there: “You probably think working in book publishing is very glamorous, right? It’s not. It’s just hard work. We’re in the service industry. We’re working for these authors, to publish these authors well. I just want you to be mindful of our place in the process. The author always comes first.”

In which direction do you plan to take this house?
I plan to continue to establish Milkweed as a significant player in terms of books exploring the human relationship to the natural world. Those kinds of issues are becoming more mainstream—in a sense tragically—because the climate is changing and no one can ignore it. There’s been so much environmental degradation. How we become a more sustainable civilization is an urgent question; we want to be part of that conversation.

Does Milkweed have a particular commitment to local authors?
It’s not part of our stated mission. Both idealistically and pragmatically, however, it makes sense for us to be publishing local people because it’s much easier for us to find an audience for these writers here, and publish them well here, and then establish them nationally.Talk about the role of agents in the work you’re doing at Milkweed.
I get plenty of submissions from agents, but I take very seriously direct submissions from authors. We’re open to everything here. We take the slush pile seriously, which was not the case where I worked in New York. In fact they wouldn’t look at anything that was unagented. Since I’ve been here, out of maybe twenty or so acquisitions, there have been several outstanding manuscripts that were discovered in slush.

What are some of the earmarks you look for in a publishable manuscript?
Not everyone would agree with my decisions as to what meets a certain threshold of quality. We’re looking for books that are not just outstanding, but that are also particularly engaged with the world regarding questions of human rights, the human relationship with the natural world, and social justice; books that are not merely beautiful aesthetic objects, but that actively address what’s going on with the world around us.

What are some of the similarities and differences between operating in the Minneapolis and New York literary scenes?
There’s a little less glamour here, a little less of a cocktail-party scene, a little less bling. But Minneapolis is a great book town. There is no shortage of real books and real work and interesting thinking and people trying interesting things.

What do you miss about living in New York?
I like nightlife. I do have a young family so I’m not out all the time, but I miss being in a city that’s very much alive well past midnight. I know there are things going on here, but it’s a different level of vitality at night.

You’re a big Detroit Tigers fans. Is there a contradiction between being a literary editor and a baseball fan?
I’m passionate about baseball. I always have been. I’ve tried to rid myself of it at times, but I can’t. I’ve stopped trying and I’ve embraced it. For me baseball is baseball. It’s beautiful as such and I love it. I have eclectic interests, put it that way.

Would you like to describe some of your others?
(Laughs … )