Hard Soft Press
Founded from a desire to publish work that is profoundly and profanely human.
Why
Again and again I have encountered writing, art, movement that asks me to choose between intellect and sensation, theory and experience, rigor and tenderness. For two decades, I have watched real, alive human beings, people who have stories and experiences, only be considered credible if they used approved institutional language, or were formulaic enough to fit a mold. I’ve watched amazing people be dismissed when they either exceeded or fell short of approved structures of storytelling, speaking, and making.
I learned early that most spaces are more comfortable with ideas about women, rather than women themselves.
Hard Soft Press exists to make room for the writing that doesn’t resolve easily.
You are the author(ity).
What
I am interested in writing that stays awake as our living bodies stay awake, or move into torpor like states, or expand and contract in consciousness, energy, hunger, satiation. The books I publish are not instruction manuals, or narratives of arrival. They are places where bodies, ideas, histories, humor, darkness, and desire meet without guarantee of resolution… but they might have it, graze it, or digest it. I publish work that refuses to be anything other than complex, or an encounter with truth.
I am not aligned with fashionable certainty, and I don’t ask my authors to organize their writing into acceptable shapes.
I insist that what this imprint produces can be porous, move across disciplines, be messy, and reject convenient packaging.