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Welcome to the Scoop<\/a>: 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.<\/em><\/p>\n This week\u2019s Scoop is a bit of an Easter special, in that my guest is less of a business person and more of an artist \u2014\u00a0though one can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n But Dream Baby Press<\/a> are more than social posts \u2014 they\u2019re a grassroots publisher slash entertainment company, intent on bringing the joy back to reading and writing. Over the last couple of years, they\u2019ve 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\u2019s Penn Station.<\/p>\n In April, Matt and Dream Baby Press are coming to London. It\u2019s where most of the Vogue Business<\/em> team lives, so I called Matt for a chat. We got so deep into it, I forgot to quiz him about the week\u2019s headlines. Here\u2019s the conversation we did have.<\/p>\n Hi Matt, what\u2019s the scoop?<\/strong><\/p>\n So at Dream Baby Press, we\u2019ve never taken submissions \u2014 everything so far has been curated by us. But I realized at the end of last year that we\u2019ve built this really beautiful platform and community, and now it\u2019s time to open it up. We\u2019re bringing on our first poetry editor, Juliette Jeffers, and we\u2019re going to start accepting submissions. She\u2019s 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\u2019t necessarily see themselves as writers. I also want to work with senior homes and schools \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Where did that mission come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n Back in 2017, director Ellie Sachs and I made this short film inspired by Annie Hall<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> that spotlighted the stories of older people.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Is that how Dream Baby Press was born?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, I started going to readings and they just didn\u2019t speak to me. People were reading off their phones, it was going over my head. Maybe I didn\u2019t have the education for it to resonate.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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\u2019s horny, but it\u2019s fun \u2014 and never really actually about the sex. 250 people showed up and we thought, \u2018OK, guess people like this kind of thing again.\u2019 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<\/em> wrote about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n