Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Replica Handbag Store Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.
This week’s Scoop is a bit of an Easter special, in that my guest is less of a business person and more of an artist — though one can’t really exist without the other nowadays. Matt Starr is a filmmaker, poet and the co-founder of Dream Baby Press, which you might originally know from the Love/Hate lists they co-post on Instagram with the coolest people in your social circle.
But Dream Baby Press are more than social posts — they’re a grassroots publisher slash entertainment company, intent on bringing the joy back to reading and writing. Over the last couple of years, they’ve become well known in the New York scene for holding poetry readings with people like Jemima Kirke, Candace Bushnell and Carole Radziwill in places like Burger King and a Sbarro in New York’s Penn Station.
In April, Matt and Dream Baby Press are coming to London. It’s where most of the Replica Handbag Store Business team lives, so I called Matt for a chat. We got so deep into it, I forgot to quiz him about the week’s headlines. Here’s the conversation we did have.
Hi Matt, what’s the scoop?
So at Dream Baby Press, we’ve never taken submissions — everything so far has been curated by us. But I realized at the end of last year that we’ve built this really beautiful platform and community, and now it’s time to open it up. We’re bringing on our first poetry editor, Juliette Jeffers, and we’re going to start accepting submissions. She’s been coming to Dream Baby events and gets our vibe which is important. The goal was always to find other writers in people who don’t necessarily see themselves as writers. I also want to work with senior homes and schools — feature prose by older people and poetry by kids. It has always been our mission at DBP, really: to make reading and writing fun, exciting and accessible.
Where did that mission come from?
Back in 2017, director Ellie Sachs and I made this short film inspired by Annie Hall but starring people in their 80s and 90s, and I became incredibly close with one of the actors. Harry Miller was 94 when we met, and we stayed close until he passed away at 99.
That relationship completely changed my life. When you spend time with someone in their 90s, it strips away all the ego, all the drama. It shows you what actually matters. I thought if storytelling could do that for me, it could do that for others and I started to develop projects that spotlighted the stories of older people.
Then the pandemic hit and killed all of that work. So I started writing poetry completely by accident. I had no literary background, but I started to discover poets like Rene Ricard, Richard Brautigan, obviously Charles Bukowski, Eileen Myles, and Ed Smith. I felt like I found my people.
Is that how Dream Baby Press was born?
Yes, I started going to readings and they just didn’t speak to me. People were reading off their phones, it was going over my head. Maybe I didn’t have the education for it to resonate.
Zack Roif and I started Dream Baby Press in 2022 as a passion project. We both have other jobs but we wanted to do a reading and so we did — with Lydia Lunch, the punk musician and poet, and we held it in a gay porn shop in the East Village. We called it The Perverted Book Club, inspired by the ethos of John Waters. It’s horny, but it’s fun — and never really actually about the sex. 250 people showed up and we thought, ‘OK, guess people like this kind of thing again.’ Then we did a reading in Penn Station, which is considered one of the saddest locations in New York City. 300 people showed up to that. Then, The New York Times wrote about it.
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You have become synonymous with unconventional locations, Burger King being one of your staples. How do you choose them?
The strategy for everything with Dream Baby is ‘Do we find it interesting? Are we having fun?’ We did dodgeball open mic because I thought, ‘I haven’t played dodgeball in 20 years. How fun would that be? But can we make it literary? What if we take the open mic and stick it in the middle of the dodgeball court?’ And it became this ballet, where you had people trying to read while dodging balls.
The reason we like these interesting locations is that they make for memorable experiences. It’s about finding interesting readers, but it’s also about bringing people to a spot they would never go to. We found this three-story Burger King and I’ve become very close with the Burger King district manager, Devin. She introduces every show. It’s not supposed to be ironic. It’s actually supposed to be like, ‘Holy shit, it’s a Thursday night, and I’m with Candace Bushnell, James Frey and Mel Ottenberg in a Burger King’.
How does Dream Baby Press make money?
Money?
How do you pay for all this?
You have to be a paid subscriber to the writing club and that’s how you get access to the events. We published a book and are working on our second, which will hopefully come out at the end of the year. We’ve done a few brand collaborations, too. We worked with Valentino last year, where, for Valentine’s Day, they asked us to curate love letters that could be on offer in their stores, personalized.
We’re working on another project for this year with a different luxury brand. But at this point, I just care about breaking even. I charge for tickets and that pays for venues. At Burger King, we bring people in and they buy drinks and food. If somebody’s already doing a thing, I don’t want to do it. And I also only want to do things because they are interesting and they bring people joy. It’s why I have a day job.
You guys are also known for your Love/Hate lists. What was the inspiration behind those?
There is this list of Cher’s favorite things from probably a magazine in the 70s that circulates online every now and then. Much like everyone else, I saw it out of context on the internet one day and thought it was such a great way of learning about the people we find interesting at their core — no sales pitches involved. It’s such a nice time capsule of who she was at the time. We thought we’d try to do the same thing with the people that we revere. Again, there’s no strategy and we don’t go after the biggest names, so it moves slowly. But for me, that’s OK. I like slow growth.
And you’re coming to London in April! Where is that reading going to be held?
Yes, we are coming on April 14 and we’re going to have the reading in a boxing gym!
You can catch up with last week’s Scoop with YMU’s Mary Bekhait here.
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