PROFILE: Deep Vellum, Dallas TX
Riley Rennhack on delivering Deep Vellum's mission to be the heart and soul of DFW's literary community.
When people ask Riley Rennhack how she became the bookstore director at Deep Vellum, she says her career emerged from reading too much. After leaving Texas and moving to New York for college, she kept a watchful eye on the literary developments back in Dallas. Riley would then discover Deep Vellum when they published Texas: A Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa. Then an undergraduate studying Spanish and translation, she sent the publisher and founder of Deep Vellum, Will Evans, an email about how much she loved their first release.
Riley and Will stayed in contact after their initial correspondence. In 2017, Riley invited Will to an event she organized in New York to celebrate Deep Vellum’s then newly published Heavens on Earth, also written by Boullosa. Four years later, the pandemic struck, Riley left New York and returned home to Texas. She was taking care of family and teaching in the country when she heard news of Deep Vellum shutting down their bookstore. She emailed Will again, asking if she could help clean out the warehouse. He countered: “Do you want to reopen it?”
Before Riley arrived, the bookstore existed separately from the publishing house. Upon Riley’s management, the two merged into a single entity. Today, Deep Vellum also encompasses the imprints Dalkey Archive Press, Fum d’Estampa, Open Letter, Phoneme Media, La Reunion, and Strange Object, which have cumulatively published more than 1,200 works from over 100 countries.
Their storefront sits on the corner of Deep Ellum’s Commerce Street. On the day of my interview with Riley, my friend and I park a block away, twenty minutes early. To kill time, we rifle an arrangement of books on the table labeled “Women in Translation month.” Four staff members sit in the corner of the store, cataloging a stack of damaged books. Soon I’ll learn the employee with cropped brown hair and dangly earrings is Riley, but in the moment she’s a happy stranger typing on a laptop, intermittently pausing to drop lore about particular poets and magazines, then characterizing the personas of readership for said poets and magazines. I am introduced to Riley when she sees me examining an Edouard Levé book, asks if I have any questions. I say I have many, since I’m here to interview her! She gives introductions to the booksellers, begins a tour of the shop that momentarily pauses when we reach the wall of polaroids with shots of book club members, billy woods, Mircea Cărtărescu, and other patrons. Riley notices a customer holding a copy of Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Her eyes glimmer and she informs the woman it’s her favorite book. I’m positive the customer can’t help but be tempted to read it after witnessing the conviction in Riley’s smile.
I can’t help but smile too as I listen to Riley beam about all the other books and authors she likes to recommend. Lately she’s been pushing Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine and Rita Bullwinkel’s short story collection Belly Up. And she doesn’t think she will ever tame her impulse to sing praises for anything by Carmen Boullosa. In recent memory, she enjoyed reading the Undelivered Lecture series by Transit Books and Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance. Riley also shares details about the recent release of Juvenilia by New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird, a collection Riley helped acquire and edit. The team of booksellers have been loving Ethan Rutherford’s strange and haunting North Sun (of which Riley informs a comparable title to be Moby Dick because both feature whales, though truthfully the similarities end there).
“There’s a throughline of this space daring to carry the books you can’t find somewhere else. We want to be the thing that no one else thinks exists in Dallas.” So Riley fills the shop with anything that personally resonates with her, along with carrying projects by Deep Vellum authors, books from other indie presses, and anything loved by the booksellers, who are each granted with all of Riley’s trust and adoration. “The thing I’m most proud of are the people I’ve hired here… They’re all perfect little nerds.”
This year, Riley started an initiative for her booksellers to learn more about accessing the literary industry. “It’s a way to insert ourselves into the literary conversation. It’s important for [them] to see the value of being a part of the literary scene at large, what that can mean, and how you can access it anywhere.” She hosts weekly meetings that alternate between reading texts like “The Critic as Artist” by Oscar Wilde and meetings with guest writers, many who began their literary careers as booksellers.
In addition to stocking the shop’s selection of books and managing staff, Riley hosts the events at Deep Vellum. Her approach to curating these events involves bothering to ask: “Why don’t we just bring these fuckers here?” For instance, Riley emailed Zona Motel’s Mesha Maren because she was one of her favorite writers. Deep Vellum then hosted a conversation between Mesha and Fernando Flores to discuss Mesha’s Perpetual West, an event that led to Riley becoming acquainted with both Mesha and Fernando: “I’m a huge fan of their work and now… we’re friends?!”
On Eileen Myles’ initial visit to Deep Vellum in 2023, Riley admits she fully slid into their Instagram DMs. Eileen had read multiple titles by Deep Vellum before and happily agreed to visit for an event celebrating their collection Pathetic Literature. Unlike the events for Pathetic Literature that took place in New York, the authors featured in the collection could not deliver readings because they weren’t based in the area. So Riley improvised. After a conversation between Eileen and Riley, the event shifted into what Riley describes as “a karaoke of pathetic literature.” Readings of the collection’s passages were delivered by local fans of the poet and regulars in the audience. Eileen adored the precious celebration. “It was pathetic, to use their term.”
Though Riley acknowledges the bummer of living in Texas in its current political state, she also recognizes and appreciates the eccentric, “fuck you” quality of living here. As a literary organization, Deep Vellum can also be characterized in this disregard for the status quo. Riley explains how “what’s trendy at bookstores in New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago doesn’t fucking matter to Texans. [We’re] outside of the mainstream without even knowing what the mainstream is.”
The physical shop validates Deep Vellum’s commitment to bringing worldly conversation through literature by literally placing readers in proximity with the production of literature. “The publishing industry is not here, so people don’t know about it. It’s a hard thing to understand unless you’re around it or you’re a nerd.” Many locals still wouldn’t be able to identify a writer from Dallas who isn’t a journalist. Certain readers don’t claim to become obsessed with a writer until they receive the institutional validation of a Nobel Prize or a critic in New York City notices them.
That’s not to say Deep Vellum hasn’t garnered such notice. External validation has undeniably accrued. In 2023, their author Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Other works recently published by Deep Vellum have been recognized by the Los Angeles Times, National Book Award, PEN America Literary, and more. Last year, a New York Times story featured them in a piece with the Wild Detectives. In the five years Riley’s been at Deep Vellum, they’ve experienced an explosion of growth. She’s certainly grateful for the new attention, but she wants to know what might blossom if Dallas learned to adore itself on its own.
Regardless, Riley will continue making compelling and creative decisions as she manages Deep Vellum’s bookstore. Whether it be because it hosts events like “Joan of Arkansas” where artists perform dramatic retellings of a genderfluid Lord navigating the age of the internet, runs book clubs where folks can ruminate on the concept of a “concept novel,” or releases the weirdest literature you can find, Deep Vellum is the nerdy, eccentric haven readers can’t find anywhere else.
Great profile! Deep Vellum is a shop and publisher that I've been intrigued by for a while, so it was nice to learn more about them! I hope to visit the store one day.
Love this.