The Tamesis
Welcome to The Scoop: a weekly email series in which I ask fashion insiders about the week’s stories. This will be a way for the Vogue business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines every Friday and get a little inside scoop.
This week’s scoop is a bit like an Easter special, in that my guest is less of a businessman and more of an artist – although now one can’t really exist without the other. Matt Starr is a filmmaker, poet, and co-founder of Dream Baby Press, which you might first know from the love/hate lists they post on Instagram with the coolest people in your social circle.
But Dream Baby Press is more than just social posts—they’re a grassroots publisher slash entertainment company dedicated to bringing the fun back to reading and writing. Over the past few years, they’ve become well-known in New York circles for hosting open mic nights with the likes of Jemima Kirke, Candace Bushnell, and Carole Radziwill at places like Burger King and New York’s Penn Station.
In April, Matt and Dream Baby Press will be coming to London. This is where most people go fashion business Team life, so I called Matt to chat. We were in so deep that I forgot to ask him about the top stories of the week. This is our conversation.
Hi Matt, any scoop?
Therefore, at Dream Baby Press, we never accept submissions – so far, everything has been curated by us. But I realized at the end of last year that we had built this really beautiful platform and community and now it was time to open it up. We will be hiring our first poetry editor, Juliette Jeffers, and we will begin accepting submissions. She has been attending Dream Baby events and understands our vibe, which is important. The goal is always to find other writers among those who don’t necessarily see themselves as writers. I’d also like to work with seniors’ homes and schools – featuring prose by seniors and poetry by children. DBP’s mission has always been: to make reading and writing fun, exciting, and accessible.
Where did this mission come from?
Back in 2017, director Ellie Sachs and I made this short film inspired by Annie Hall But the main actors are all born in the 80s and 90s, and I have a very close relationship with one of the actors. Harry Miller was 94 when we met, and we remained close until his death at 99.
This relationship completely changed my life. When you spend time with someone in their 90s, you throw away all ego, all drama. It shows you what really matters. I thought if storytelling could do this for me, it could do this for others, so I started developing projects that focused on the stories of older adults.
Then the pandemic hit and killed all those jobs. So I started writing poetry completely by accident. I had no literary background, but I started discovering poets like Rene Ricard, Richard Brautigan, and obviously Charles Bukowski, Eileen Miles, and Edgar Smith. I feel like I’ve found my person.
Is this how Dream Baby Press was born?
Yes, I started reading, but they just wouldn’t talk to me. People are reading on their phones, which is beyond my imagination. Maybe I didn’t get the education that resonated.
Zack Roif and I started Dream Baby Press in 2022 as a passion project. We both had other jobs, but we wanted to read, so we read with Lydia Lunch, a punk musician and poet, and we held a reading in a gay porn shop in the East Village. We call it the Kinky Book Club, inspired by the spirit of John Waters. It’s sexy, but fun – and it’s never really about sex. We had 250 people show up and we thought, ‘Well, guess what, people are into this stuff again. ‘Then we read at Penn Station, which is considered one of the saddest places in New York City. There were 300 people in attendance. Then, new york times Wrote an article about it.
