BRATTLEBORO — “We’re small, but we’re mighty,” Dede Cummings said, describing her Brattleboro-based publishing company.
A poet, book designer and environmental activist, Cummings, 60, founded Green Writers Press almost five years ago as a way to practice what she preaches.
The press’ mission is to publish books, e-books and audio books that “spread a message of hope and renewal,” while fostering environmental and social justice through sustainable printing and shipping practices.
Green Writers Press prints fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s books for a global readership interested in environmental activism.
As the press’ founder, Cummings spends time on every stage a book goes through before it makes its way into a reader’s hands.
She reads, edits and chooses submissions, and collaborates with authors to decide all aspects of the book’s design before it is sent to the printer. Once the books are printed and distributed to bookstores, she works with the authors to promote them.
“We’re really into the whole ‘localvore’ movement,” Cummings, of West Brattleboro, said. This means using local printers and encouraging readers to buy from area bookstores, rather than from Amazon. “We’re talking economics, social justice, jobs, a respect for the environment, but for workers as well.”
Amazon is a dominant force in the market, but Green Writers Press is trying to fill a different niche, Cummings explained. “We have no problem with Amazon existing, but they don’t support the local economy.”
She was invited to speak about sustainable publishing at the Women’s Convention in Detroit in October and was excited to find her talk packed.
“I think people are looking for community and looking for that solidarity and friendship. It’s even more so given today’s political climate.”
Although sustainable publishing is not unique to Green Writers Press, Cummings said the company is one of the first in the country to use it as a mission.
“We encourage and embrace all people to be readers and writers. We’re trying to encompass as wide a range of voices as possible,” Cummings said.
This sets the press apart from some of its bigger, more traditional counterparts.
Cummings worked as a designer at Little, Brown and Company in Boston for five years before moving to Brattleboro in 1987. She says she found her niche working there designing books, including front and back covers, font, page layouts and page numbers.
Although she loved working there, Cummings wanted her press to be different.
“I had a really great experience there, but the big publishers are limited by what we call the author’s platform and sales,” she said. “They’re a really big corporation, and they can’t afford to take risks.”
Unlike the larger publishers that need to see an author’s marketing plan and an established following before printing a book, Green Writers Press accepts online submissions from “regular writers,” Cummings says. In fact, she encourages them.
She doesn’t care whether an author has an agent, but rather that the books she prints are well written and edited. She wants to give voice to “writers and artists who will make the world a better place.”
“It’s rewarding because it’s a collaborative effort with authors,” she said.
And even after 30 years in the industry, she stills finds it interesting to make books.
“I love to be part of that process. It’s a joyful experience bringing a book into the world.”
This year, she’s finally feeling what it’s like to be on the author’s side of the table.
“My goal in life was to have a first book of poetry.” And although it took nearly 40 years to write and finally publish, her first poetry collection, “To Look Out From,” was published this year after winning the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize.
Now that her second poetry collection, “The Meeting Place,” is due out in May from Salmon Poetry, an Irish press she’s long admired, she says she feels like a real poet.
She hadn’t planned on a second book so soon, but couldn’t turn down the offer down when it arrived. So she spent many months sifting through decades’ worth of material and writing new poems.
One section she’s particularly fond of is a series about her mother.
“It’s sort of historical. I ask my mother questions, and I take down her answers literally verbatim and turn them into poems.”
Her mother describes being 21, living in New York City after World War II and being courted by Cummings’ father when he was on leave from the Navy. “She just said things, like he took her to the Stork Club, and she ‘drank Coke out of a straw’ — that was a novelty then. When I heard that, I was like, that’s poetry. ”
Cummings describes her poetry as personal, narrative and introspective, but adds that she has found “it seems to be resonating with readers, which is a wonder.”
Although Cummings works “all the time,” she says her work brings her great joy.
Every day, she spends nearly two hours outside. She, like the poet Robert Frost, considers this to be part of her work.
“I hike in the woods or I climb a mountain or walk the back roads of Vermont. ... Living in a rural area is vital to my work,” Cummings said. “It feeds my soul.”
Having grown up on the ocean in Rhode Island and having lived in Vienna, Seattle and Boston at different points in her career, she knew she wanted to raise her family in a rural area.
Cummings moved to Brattleboro with her husband, Steve Carmichael, when their eldest son, Sam, was 1.
“That was my goal, and my husband shared that goal,” Cummings said. “We wanted to build a house and raise our children.”
And with the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s, she found she didn’t need to be in a city, but could work as a freelance book designer from anywhere.
She was drawn to Brattleboro because the area had a strong connection to the publishing industry, which at the time employed a lot of people in town.
She worked as a book designer for seven years before deciding to go out on her own as a book designer and consultant in 1996. Making the leap was scary at the time, but she now describes her work as a freelance book designer as her “day job.”
“I still have a day job, but I’m building something that is a regional and national, and now international, global publishing company right in Brattleboro.”
The press is publishing authors from Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Washington and Canada.
“We’re still in startup-mode, but we’re starting to make some money, which is really exciting.”
In June, the company moved out of Cummings’ home office and into an office on Main Street in Brattleboro.
Cummings now has a part-time employee working on publicity and several freelancers and interns working for Green Writers Press every year. She has come a long way since once being an intern herself.
Shortly after graduating from Middlebury College in Vermont, Cummings moved to Seattle to work as an intern for a press. “I wasn’t paid, but I did it because I was dying to get into publishing.”
When she moved to Boston, she became an intern for a small press called David R. Godine. “I just walked in off the street and said, ‘Can I be an intern?’ And they said yes.”
Although Cummings says internships are great because of the experience they provide, it’s nothing like it was when she was fresh out of college. Now, she says, the competition is fierce.
But at Green Writers Press, Cummings tries to make interns part of the community.
Chaya Holch, a Brattleboro resident working as an editorial intern for Green Writers Press before attending Princeton University in the fall, describes the community the press has created as particularly important to her.
“When I come to work every day, I know that I’m helping sustain this community, which in turn sustains communities around the country and world with its commitment to environmental and social goodness.”
And Cummings, Holch says, is the vital force behind this community.
“Evident in all of her work is her vivacious spirit, her commitment to every detail, her belief that the world can and will be better. She pursues environmental and social justice in every part of her life, and Green Writers Press is just another tangible way that she has touched the lives of others.”
(0) comments
Welcome to the discussion.
Log In
Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person.
Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.