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 Vogue 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 open mic nights with people like Jemima Kirke, Candace Bushnell and Carole Radziwill in places like Burger King and New York’s Penn Station.
In April, Matt and Dream Baby Press are coming to London. It’s where most of the Vogue 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 Edgar 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.
