For this series 12 writers were asked to engage with a call that explored our relationship to Animals. Over the course of 12 months (beginning in June 2017) A new handmade, limited-run, stitch bound book will be released each month. Each chapbook will be $10.  Proceeds after costs are covered will be split with the writers involved because writers deserve to get paid for their writing.

The writers involved in this series include: Nicelle Davis, Kim Young, Chris Campanioni, Vi Khi Nao, Sesshu Foster,  Anthony Seidman, Cooper Wilhelm, Teka-Lark Flemming,Steve Dunn, and Johannes Göransson and Roberto Castillo Udiarte.

The call that each writer is engaging with is as follows:

“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth”. – Henry Beston

Throughout one’s existence we encounter many animals whose lives, while so vastly different from our own, parallel ours in so many different ways. Though we can never truly understand them, we find kinship in animals for characteristic traits that we see in ourselves; or look to animals to provide us with something we are missing – be it in the form of a spirit animal, totem, companion, or friend. We all have an affinity to an animal that takes root from something wholly personal and profoundly intimate. This connection is not always something that one gets to choose, and sometimes it is all consuming. From this will result in new and original work of varying genres and approaches that explores the writer’s relationship to a single animal.