The Big Idea of Starting a Small Press

I want to tell you about how Toad Hall Editions came to be. I want to tell you about my long-standing resistance to the word “serendipity” but how, nevertheless, this all feels very serendipitous. I want to tell you about the bustle and hum of our kitchen table. How it is always covered with piles of mail and puzzle pieces, pens in rainbow colors, scraps of lists and bits of creative writing, a basket of pieces of pottery and rocks and shells we find when we walk down the road to the beach, half-full glasses of water, mugs of coffee, shipping supplies, and our computers. I want to tell you how the chaos and mess of it is like compost in the garden.

I want to tell you how it feels to work on producing a book at that table. How the ideas and the conversations flow. How we push our chairs back and help ourselves to leftovers and bowls of salad and handfuls of chocolate chips. How we leave the kitchen to teach or sew or paint or clean the cats' litter box or take a walk and then re-converge and continue our conversations minutes or hours later, picking up where we left off or beginning a new thread to see where it goes. I want to tell you about rhythms and perambulations and how sometimes the content of a conversation leads us down a rabbit hole and alters the way we’ve been thinking about things.

I want to tell you about the kindness of a new friend who dropped whatever it was she was doing to bring us her beautiful book about Mid-Coast Maine, to welcome us with wisdom and share what she knows about publishing. I want to tell you about sunny mornings on the deck and the flicker of recognition when another new friend speaks the words “circles of women” and “do it differently” and “what can we shift?” I want to tell you about learning curves and research and question-asking and diving in and coming up short and sitting with the discomfort of not knowing but being brave anyway. I want to tell you about wide swaths of big ideas and then all of the small steps that brought us to this one, this big idea of starting a small press called Toad Hall Editions.