Announcement: Flooded Pine Press!

I’m very excited. My friend Brianna Cunliffe and I are beginning to lay the groundwork for a soft open on a micro publishing house based in Durham, New Hampshire. We will be publishing essays and anthologies on transformative futures, starting from the local and regional levels. Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Rush’s Rising, we are calling our venture Flooded Pine Press.

This idea was born the day after the 2024 election. I was reeling in my apartment in Venice, having cast my absentee ballot weeks before. That day I had plans to meet my dear friend Matilda, who was in town from Helsinki, and she invited me to walk the Ponte della Libertà (Freedom Bridge, an apt name for the day of mourning) that connects the mainland to Venice. The sunny distance, with cars and trains swooping past us for all three miles of our walk over open lagoon, was ritualistic for me. Helped to focus on what’s important, what was to come, in great company.

We were later lounging in the sun on Campo San Lorenzo. Literally, coats spread on the stone steps of this hallowed, decommissioned church. I wondered if I could respond to rising fascism in the world by being a connector piece between wise writers and a reading public hungry for books that actually reflect their worries and dreams. And my fried encouraged this line of thought, but gave it a helpful reframe: start small, start with essays. Essays are the attempts that build into blows. They are powerful instruments that can be tucked into your pocket. We sat in silence for a long time, watching the birds jump from step to step.

I’d been working part-time for the fantastic publishing house Wetlands in Venice. The founder once told me that he started the non-profit “because making books is the most beautiful thing in the world!” I had also heard a story from a mentor of mine, that when he was my age he couldn’t find the book he was looking for — about German clocks — and so he decided he would be the one to write and publish it. He became an expert on clocks, compiled a text, and then moved on to become a respected professor (outside the field of horology).

Books are vehicles of critical thought, or they can be, I’ve long believed. But when I think about my home region I don’t see the beautiful publishing culture that I saw in Venice, where local presses and local authors could put together a manuscript and get their ideas circulating through speaking engagements and presentations and the art of passing a copy from hand to hand in a chain of readers. Can a single press make a difference? We have to start somewhere.

In addition, we know that global ecological crisis — and the politics that enable destruction, disrespect, dispossession, not to mention the precarious futures that are apparent to most everyone — is not being talked about. It should be, but it’s either disavowed or off to one side. That is to say, it’s not in our culture to talk climate change. See Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s anthology What If We Get It Right? for more.

A small and nimble press aims to fill that void by inviting young voices to publish high-quality, low-cost essays with us. On all sorts of themes, but especially action for the future. We hope that this experiment blossoms. And if it fails, we will have failed extremely well.

Keep an eye out for our social media, website, and calls for essays, coming soon.