Help us publish Familiars by Holly Wren Spaulding

The campaign is complete. Thank you for your support. For more information, please visit the Alice Greene website 

Help us publish Familiars, the new poetry book by Holly Wren Spaulding. For a donation of $20 or more, we will be happy to send you a copy of Familiars  as a thank you, later this month, October, when we get it back from the printer.

The Poetry Book: Familiars 

Evocative and intimate, the linked poems in Familiars arise from questions and observations in the more than human world. In her characteristically compact lyrics—little essences—Spaulding writes about trees, flowers, magic, touch, memory, erasure, power, and her grief over the changing climate. 

Some of the poems in Familiars were first seen in public during Holly's artist residency at the Leelanau Cultural Center in 2017 (see photo above). This was not long after the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped a number of common words, names of flora and fauna, as they needed the space for newer words from the world of technology, such as 'chatroom'. The title of each poem displayed was one of these displaced words.

Familiars now brings you a selection of these poems in which Holly takes us on a three-part journey, a travelogue of sorts, providing close observations of the natural world and our relationship to it. Each poem still provides a word from nature as its title and a jumping off point for the poem; what does it feel, how does it look, what tales can it tell. A story for this and all times.

The Author: Holly Wren Spaulding

Holly is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and residencies, and in 2017 she was named the Ann Hall Artist in Residence at the Leelanau Cultural Center, and so began the journey to what is now Familiars. 

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Poetry Northwest, The Ecologist and in Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction (Wayne State University Press, 2018), among other places. 

She is the author of If August (2017), Pilgrim (2014) and The Grass Impossibly (2008). The founder of Poetry Forge, she also teaches for Interlochen Center for the Arts. A native of Michigan, she now lives in coastal Maine.

The Publisher: Alice Greene & Co.

Alice Greene & Co. is a small press based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We publish poetry books that focus on the environment and sense of place. We strive to create beautiful and intimate books. The “& Co.” expresses the many collaborators and helpers who contribute their efforts and works to make the books as excellent and special as possible: editors, book designers, illustrators, photographers, artists, technology wizards; they are typically not employees of the company but they are all more than deserving of reward for their contributions. 

Before 2020, our authors typically promoted their books through live events in bookstores, galleries, and so on. This formed the backbone of our distribution strategy. It worked well until Covid-19, and now we turn to other methods of supporting our authors and the publication of their works. We are turning to fans of the press and especially of Holly Wren Spaulding to help launch her latest poetry book, Familiars, into the world. The primary goal of this fundraiser is to finance the printing.

Timeline and Risks

All the editing and almost all the design work on Familiars is now complete. We plan to send the finished files to the printer in September. We hope to have books by the end of October, but there is always the fear that another lockdown will mean a delay to production. After publishing 13 poetry books, we are confident of seeing the project through to shipping, but hesitate to give a date earlier than November 2020.

Rewards

R1 - If you  just want to support the press, we would be grateful for any donation you choose to make.

R2 - In thanks for a donation of $20 or more, we can send you a copy of Familiars (we will pay postage, and sales tax if you live in Michigan.)

R3 - In thanks for a donation of $30 or more, we can send you a copy of Familiars plus a copy of Holly’s previous book If August (we will pay postage, and sales tax if you live in Michigan.) 

Please use the Contact button below to let us know which reward you are interested in and where we should send it. 

Beyond

If we raise money beyond the cost of printing, we would use that to help pay our collaborators. Should we be so fortunate to raise even more money, that will make it easier for us to work on books for authors who are perhaps less well known than Holly, as well as paying for expenses such as the website and publishing software. 

If you want to get news of further developments at Alice Greene & Co., please sign up for our newsletter .

Thank you

Thank you
Jill Peek
Publisher, Alice Greene & Co.
www.alicegreene.com


"Holly Wren’s interactions with language and the natural world are like a light that is always new, or a bird’s quick and stunning song—look, here, look here, here, here."
—Anne-Marie Oomen, author of Uncoded Woman: Poems