Five Years In, I Think I Finally Know What We're Publishing

Friends, a professional update here.

Five years ago, I started Lake Drive Books. Hyponymous Literary had begun just before that. At the time, I knew what kind of books I hoped to publish, but I wasn’t sure about so many things.

I think I’m finally beginning to understand.

One of the privileges of publishing is that you spend years sitting with other people’s questions and you realize they’re yours as well. You read proposals, edit manuscripts, have conversations with authors, watch readers respond, and eventually you start to see the emerging patterns.

For a while, it seemed we were publishing books about faith deconstruction. There’s an undeniable need right now for those who are shifting away from their handed-down traditions; it isn’t some temporary movement.

Many of our authors are experiencing this widespread shift. They have written courageously about spiritual abuse, patriarchy, racism, purity culture, authoritarian leadership, and institutions that no longer earn the trust they’ve been given. This work really has no end. Put another way, deconstruction will take as long as it needs to take, and it remains difficult work.

But over time, it’s become clear that this isn’t really the whole of what we want to do. Deconstruction is where so many stories begin. It isn’t where they end. The questions our authors ask, whether explicitly or implicitly, go further.

Who am I when an institution no longer tells me who I am? What parts of my past do I carry forward? How do I do the work of repair? What does community look like now? What kind of life am I trying to build? What are the things that I can discover?

Those are life-giving, creative and varied questions, not merely critical ones. They are exciting questions, which still lead to difficult work but also involve energy and joy.

I’ve become less interested in “reconstruction” as a metaphor. Sure, it’s a natural choice juxtaposed to the word deconstruction. But reconstruction too often implies putting the old structures back together to preserve them much as they were, as with the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris. When it comes to religious culture in the United States, reconstruction feels sneaky. It feels like we’re trying to save something we really don’t need, and I know most of my authors have resigned from, and have a healthy suspicion of, work that tries to “save” things, or people.

Much of life doesn’t work that way anyway. The personal and collective past isn’t something we rebuild. It’s something we inevitably carry with us and incorporate as we create something new. Not re-construction, but new construction.

This is what we learn from the psychology of grief and mourning, as well as mourning religious structures. Just as the life-long impressions of a lost loved one are always with me, I am always going to be Christian in some fashion, not some other tradition or no tradition whatsoever. To deny that is to pretend the past never happened, which gets us into trouble. But what Christianity looks like in a present life that is progressing will look different from what it did for our parents or grandparents or for people living centuries earlier, or later. Things are always changing. Tradition is always there, but it also came from somewhere, itself a change from the past before it, and future traditions will inevitably change. That’s new structure.

What I’ve come to admire in our authors is not simply their willingness to name what failed them. It’s their desire to imagine what could come next.

That’s also how our publishing has matured.

Some of our books are explicitly about religion, even theological. But they are also always about more, including mental health, identity, relationships, authentic storytelling and real history, and soon, fiction. That isn’t because we’re drifting from the mission. It’s because the mission is becoming clearer.

I’m interested in books that help people build new structures for living: structures that are more honest, more relational, more accountable, and more fully human, interrogating but incorporating the past.

One of the unexpected joys has been discovering how similar these journeys can be across traditions:

A Southern Baptist memoir. A Seventh-day Adventist memoir. A forthcoming Mormon memoir and a forthcoming Black spiritual memoir.

On the surface, these traditions appear worlds apart, don’t often talk to each other, and you won’t usually find all four at one publishing enterprise (if I may, I’m quite proud of that). Yet the stories echo one another in surprising ways. The same repression. The same trauma. The same search for healing. The same desire to belong, to be in community as a unique, wild human, without surrendering oneself.

Publishing across those seemingly different worlds has convinced me that we are all struggling with bigger forces that will use our different traditions, our sworn allegiances, as levers, often for bad. At the same time, we see equally large human forces emerging, for good, and it’s creating more focus than ever.

Not because we’ve figured everything out. Quite the opposite. The world is changing quickly—religiously, culturally, politically, technologically, even within publishing itself. Institutions everywhere are struggling to adapt. The temptation is to cling to familiar explanations simply because they’re familiar.

But the best work of publishing is to help us see what is actually emerging, not create derivatives, or worse, insist the world remain what it once was.

That work is exciting. It’s also exhausting. Independent publishing and agenting means wearing too many hats. Editing. Acquisitions. Contracts. Marketing. Metadata. Accounting. Distribution. Problem solving. Starting over the next morning.

I don’t say that looking for sympathy. I say it because worthwhile work usually asks something of us, and the work lately has felt more worthwhile than most professional work I’ve ever done, and it’s taught me about the costs of such work.

Thankfully, none of this has happened alone. Authors have trusted me with deeply personal stories. Strangers have become exciting coworkers and collaborators with whom I’m so grateful to work. Readers have taken chances on books from a tiny independent publisher and a startup literary agency. Little by little, a genuine community has formed around this work.

It’s still a small community.

Yet I’m increasingly convinced that small organizations can see things that large organizations often can’t. When you’re close to authors and readers, you notice unarticulated needs looking for expression, long before they become categories or markets.

As I look toward the next five years, I’m interested in simply publishing more books, to get these businesses to the next level, but also in publishing with a better focus, doing a better job of imagining fuller ways of being human, refusing simplistic answers, making room for accountability, grief, curiosity, beauty, courage, and surprise.

If you’ve been reading along, buying books, recommending authors, subscribing to newsletters, or simply cheering us on from a distance, thank you.

You’re not just watching a publishing company grow.

You’re helping shape the kind of publishing—with books that help you heal, grow, and discover—that we’ll need and want in the years ahead.