In my last ☧ost I mentioned there might be some new life from dying seeds that had yet “To Be Announced (TBA).” As you’ll recall, I am focusing my time on LoganMIsaac.com through June of this year, then the PewPewHQ and GIJustice stuff from July to December, making up Phases One and Two of the first year of big idea/s I’m working on. In this ☧ost, I wanted to talk about the first of two remaining seedlings that I hope are sprouting. Phase Three is so exciting that it is getting four years of my time, AKA Years 2-5.
While pitching The Chapter House to landlords and lenders, I wondered whether I was selling myself short by settling for “just” a bookstore. At first, I focused on the lowest-hanging fruit—a used bookstore (for which I already had a lot of initial inventory). When it was hard to find compatible and cheap property to lease, I pivoted to a (mostly) new bookstore, using my used inventory to supplement my start-up. I got a really good business plan and solid AF financials, but not enough initial cash. As The Chapter House faded into the horizon of broken dreams, I realized that I could stop looking for the easy in and put in the time and energy I needed to launch the thing I really wanted to do.
St Martins Waffle’n Press
When Laura and I were new parents in North Carolina, we managed to have a family “date” to a coffee shop in Raleigh. I can’t remember how it started, but we had this idea for a coffee and book shop serving waffles. You could do savory waffles, sweet waffles, maybe even freeze them for people to take home… The ideas seemed endless. It wouldn’t just be about my own personal patron saint, a 4th-century French bishop; it could also be about the 16th-century reformer and 20th-century civil rights icon.
At first, the Press part named the kind of (French) coffee we’d serve. Over time, I realized that many of the most important books in my area of research were not only out of print, they were in the public domain. Instead of returning them to shelves by facsimile (i.e. photocopy), what if I put the effort into bringing classics back to life with modern typesetting, copyediting, page layout, and flashy cover treatments? What if I gave old books the respect they deserved…?
THEN I thought about mentoring other veterans through the process of spiritual autobiography. Reborn on the Fourth of July may not have sold very well, but the process of transforming the incoherence of trauma into a linear story (and sharing it with others) was empowering. Unlike Cain, I decided to master my moral pain rather than passively letting it master me. What if I could help other veterans do the same?
Why a press?
Another motivation for starting an independent press focused on veterans and military families is not just about combat stress. It’s also about the experience I’ve had as an outsider in publishing. The more I write from the social location I embody as a veteran, the more resistance I meet. To my knowledge, every editor I’ve worked with has been a civilian. Their power over me as a veteran would crystalize as soon as I asserted the distinctiveness of my perspective as a veteran.
InterVarsity Press let me use an ambush as the opening lines of my book but refused to print the “bad word” my NCO used in real life.
The Marketing Director at Hachette Nashville (whose work produced exactly zero publicity hits) told me to calm down after initially refusing to put any of his budget for God is a Grunt toward its primary (military) audience.
After a Senior Editor invited me to write an essay for The Christian Century, they red-flagged every occurrence of the word “civilian bias,” saying my “tone” was “accusatory” and “judgmental.” The essay was never published.
It is in circumstances like these that I came to realize “confession” can be a weapon of abuse when it is a requirement for access. A “speech act” that is expected demanded of a marginalized community is not Confession, and certainly not when it is clipped and curated to accommodate an oppressive status quo. My dream is a community where nobody feels they have to justify or abridge their experiences existence just to accommodate the masses.
My favorite part of my Waffle’n Press idea is helping other veterans write their stories within a community that looks, sounds, and acts like them. No more civilian gatekeepers, no code-switching or self-censoring. Military folk are the best editors of military experience; Soldier Stories will never become soldiers’ stories until civilians get out of their way.
Or military families could just do shit themourselves. 🤷
Let’s try that!
Next up: TBA
I’m opening up the comments for this Post because I’d like to hear what people think. Love it or hate it, I’d like to hear constructive feedback about the next phase, for what I plan to put my energy toward from 2025 to 2028. Next time you get an email from the Post, it will be about the most ambitious part of my vocation, the fourth (and probably final) phase.