A year ago, in early February 2020, I hadn’t yet heard of the coronavirus, and therefore could not under any circumstances have dreamed of how the year would unfold unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Nor would I have imagined that my response to lockdowns, border closures, and economic disaster would be to… start a publishing house.
And then came a further surprise on top of that one: that my publishing house would actually be the ideal home for any author but myself! Not long after Thornbush Press launched, the wonderful, brilliant Katie Langston put the manuscript of her book Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace into my digital hands for a beta read, and I’m not quite sure anymore which of the two of us asked first if Thornbush could be its publisher. I think I tried to talk her into at least trying for a deal with more prestige. She insisted that she preferred the authorial freedom, drastically better profit-sharing, and (I daresay) good fun of working with me instead. I couldn’t bring myself to argue. When you find a pearl of great price lying in a field… run out and buy the field!
The upshot is that Thornbush Press is now officially a two-author outfit! Look out, Random House, here we come.
There is a deeper connection here, though, than convenience and covid. As it turns out, Katie and I have both produced, at roughly mid-life (me a little more mid- than she), memoirs that try to sort out how we ended up where we are right now; both of these memoirs will be published in the next couple of months; and both of them—without knowing anything about the other at the time of writing—are a narrative attempt to answer the question: What is grace? …
Read more