A publishing house for fiction that treats systems as material.
The Means of Production publishes fiction that operates at the same level as the research — work that investigates the systems producing ordinary life by inhabiting them from the inside.
Not political fiction in the didactic sense. Fiction that treats institutions, bureaucracies, and social machinery as the actual subject of human experience, not the backdrop to it.
The press is an independent operation run by Victoria Mansberger Schoen, based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It publishes under its own name and under the imprint The Worst Words Worth the Work.
Titles current and forthcoming
Books stay here. Projects and portals have their own marked sections below, so readers know whether they are buying a title, submitting work, or entering a separate world.
The Load-Bearing Unit
Stories about structures that ask the body to carry what the institution refuses to name.
Explore The Load-Bearing Unit ↗Container Metaphors
A collection on boxes, borders, vessels, rooms, and every enclosure that pretends containment is care.
Explore Container Metaphors ↗Post-Occupancy Diagnostic Report: The Standardization of Erasure
A diagnostic file for buildings, systems, and forms that make disappearance look like procedure.
Explore the Diagnostic Report ↗The Prevailing Myths of Productivity
A management manual for the myths that turn exhaustion into virtue and compliance into common sense.
Available on Amazon ↗Handbook for the Recently Deceased
A forthcoming guide for those still learning which forms of life the system has already declared over.
Archive of unwanted offerings — accepting submissions
A publication project for work that has had difficulty finding a home because it was misaligned, over-aware of the machinery, or too strange for the available gates.
Every offering is read by three editors and audited in three layers. The Archive asks not whether the work is good, but what happens when it enters the room — where the tension appears, which readings hold, what the encounter changes.
The work then lives in The Archive, published in full with its editorial conversation and myth audit. Residency measures impact, not rank: work that keeps shaping later discussions earns Permanent Residency, and the rare Foundational Myth changed the Archive itself.
Before you offer, consult the conditions: Submission Weather is a live forecast of the climate at the gate.
Landing pages for publishing projects
Separate worlds live here as clear entry points: small, legible cards that tell readers where they are going before they leave the press page.
Detective Oblivia Appropria
Privileged Eye
The name does the work. Oblivia: oblivious, incurious about her own position. Appropria: she appropriates — the labour, the knowledge, the grief of communities she passes through.
She solves the case. She is the case.
Murdercari
Listings from the scenes we can't forget
A true-crime marketplace where every listing is a piece of a larger story. Three storefronts — an auction house, a finds shop, a dossier — each selling evidence and ephemera from scenes the record couldn't quite close.
Everything is for sale. Nothing is resolved.
Favorite
A Series
Two cousins, one grandmother's estate stuck in probate, and a summer of escalating dares — a roof, a beehive, a water tower, a train, a silo. Each dare is really the same question, asked five ways.
Who did she love best? Nobody answers.