Chris Fischbach, new publisher at Coffee House Press: Up from an intern

I’m married now, but when I was single and furiously looking for a boyfriend my friends were always explaining to me—imparting upon me the conservative wisdom of their parents—that maybe I just wanted it too much. While many of my friends are now married, or just not looking, many of them are jobless or underemployed and looking for their dream jobs, and now this is advice I want to toss right back to them, especially after a recent conversation I had with Chris Fischbach, the new executive director and publisher at Coffee House Press.

Just over a month ago, I attended a small get-together at Coffee House Press, celebrating the passing of the executive torch from Allan Kornblum, founder of the press, to Chris Fischbach, who began at the publishing house as a letterpress intern. Prior to the celebration I had no knowledge of Fischbach’s slow and steady transition from college student to publisher, and was delighted to see his original cover letter and interview questionnaire on display at the “Fish Party” held in his honor.

Some weeks later, Chris Fischbach met with me and explained to me that though he started his internship at Coffee House Press just six months after graduating from college with a degree in English, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. “I was an English major and I didn’t think I wanted to teach, and I liked literary things.” He says he asked some alumni from his college for advice, and they told him to check out the different publishing houses in the area, many of which he hadn’t previously known of. When he discovered that Coffee House had a lot of the same interests and liked many of the same writers as he did, he applied for an internship, and although this sounds simplistic, the rest is history. Seriously, he just continued working, moving up through the different stations until he took over (not like a hostile fungus or anything, but just as a person who liked to work hard and discovered a love for making books). That’s it. “It’s not like my dream is or was to become the head of an organization. I just know that I really liked the books that we published and I cared deeply about them. And whether or not I was in charge was not the most important part to me.”

As I, and I’m sure many of my hardworking friends who long to break in to the field of publishing, think about Chris’ amazing journey to the top of one of the most respected independent publishers in the country, the idea that it’s just that easy — to want it, then fast forward and get it (I don’t mean to simplify Chris Fischbach’s journey to my dream job, because I guarantee he worked hard to get where he is, but hey, it’s a pretty short column) — is infuriating. Still, maybe the secret is in not wanting it too much — to want the activity but not the title might be the key to success. Maybe that’s exactly what actual, long-lasting passion is. Chris had faith of a sort: in the industry, in the work he was doing, in the books he was helping to create. “I have been identified and asked to do this,” he says, blushing a little, “and I’m happy to do it because I look at it as a service to the field…to literature.” Chris reddens a little more, and laughs, “I don’t want that to sound…that’s how I look at it, honestly, because you’re not in it for the money, because you work in literary publishing.”

While Chris and his team at Coffee House have many of the same goals as the other nonprofit, literary publishers in Minneapolis—including publishing amazing works that larger houses pass by because they likely won’t provide enough meat to satisfy those giants—what makes him, and the organization, so special is that it occupies this seemingly fictional space, where someone with an education, a dream, and pure intentions, can achieve a level of success that many others impatiently consider owed to them.