We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Anthony Martin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David Anthony below.

Alright, David Anthony thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Middle Creek believes that the disconnect between nature and humanity is a crucial contributor to the discontents and dis-ease we see in the world. Our mission is to connect people to each other and the world they inhabit in a deeper, more meaningful way in order to inspire unity and oneness, to heal humanity, and thus the world, by reigniting the passion between people and nature through the arts. By providing a platform for artists working within this passion, we intend to share the rich complexity and profound depth of life . . . in all its beauty, challenge and potential.

I grew up in a very rural, seaside woodland area on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. The land my family owned lay between the Hood Canal and the Salish Sea and was the traditional homeland of the indigenous Squaxin peoples. This childhood in a very lush and wild setting sparked my love for the natural world. My father’s instruction in hiking, camping, foraging berries and mushrooms and edible plants, was elemental to my sense of humanity’s place within the natural world. This was back when Earth’s human population was around 3 billion people, it is now nearly 8 billion 40 years later. Most people on Earth live in the artificial built-environments of cities, with very little connection to the natural world, and who may never have really seen the night sky, stars, Milky Way, et, due to light pollution. I concluded that this profound loss of connection to the natural world, or what I would call the real world, was a root cause of humanity’s lack of a sense of place within the natural realm of life on planet Earth, and it’s subsequent lack of rational, well-informed, teleological direction as far as societal decision making went.

I wanted to pair my love of literature, poetry, and art with a purpose-driven business to do good work in the world.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have always been an artist and a writer as well as a lifelong outdoorsman. I was fortunate enough to have a small collection of poems published by a small press, but the small press quickly went out of business. Determined to have a book to sell at poetry readings, I took it upon myself to learn desktop publishing and managed to self publish my book once again. Inspired by HUgh Howey who wrote the WOOL series (now a major series on Apple TV+ as “Silo”) I moved forward in self-publishing my second collection of poetry. At the time I wa also in a life coaching training course and a maxim of that discipline is to put out into the world that which you wish to see. I realized that I wanted to be published, I wanted someone to say yes to my writing, and so, with my self-publishing skills, I decided to offer that out into the world. I would become the person saying yes to under-represented voices writing literature that I felt was important and connective and healing to humanity’s discontents.

I landed on defining what Middle Creek Publishing was looking for as the The Quality Literature of HUman Ecology, a cross-disciplinary practice that aims to illuminate the relationships between humans and their natural or built environments. Middle Creek is dedicated to the illumination of Human Ecology in any genre. We seek to produce and promote works of ecological literature which reveal and illuminate the deep connection we have with nature in our language, our personal mythologies, our private spiritualities, our dreamings, our stories, our communities and our solitudes. We want to read and share your ah-ha moments, the things that hit you like a meditation bell, made you smile, made you cry . . . made you feel. The moments in which you understood, or increased your sense of wonder. We are interested in place-based narratives. We love the rural life, the outdoors, the deserts, forests, mountains, prairies and waterways. We love the open seas. We understand small mountain communities, solitary cabin dwellers and the urban dwellers who recognize nature in its many disguises and tuck-away’s. We like that you forage mushrooms, dye your own yarn, split your own wood . . . but what does it mean . . . to you . . . to our world?

MIddle Creek believes that engaging in the world and responding to it is the primary job of any artist.

Being a small business based in Colorado, Middle Creek Publishing’s reach and readership began to grow and spread throughout Colorado. Although not exclusively publishing writers from Colorado, we did find that Colorado writers were the first to find Middle Creek Publishing and word of mouth slowly, organically spread from person to person as the larger community of writers, readers and fans began to materialize. As well, MCP is not exclusively a poetry press, but the bulk of its over 45 titles have been ecopoetry, a niche that well represents the mission of the company.

I am most proud of the relationship I have with the authors I have published. We have been able to easily collaborate and bring our separate understandings and vision of a book into unison, and put out into the world a book that both publisher and author are proud of. Because so many MCP authors reside in Colorado MCp has been able to create an annual Poetry Fest where many of them come together to read and offer workshops. This has allowed us all to meet in person and form new friendships and project partners, we both inspire and mentor each other. And so Middle Creek Publishing is not only a small, independent publisher, it is also becoming a resonant and living community of writers and readers . . . and if I were to offer any idea of what the answer to our health and well-being as a species would be, I would say that it looks a lot less like a pill, and more like a community.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

For a decade an da half, I have mostly been an Environmental Educator, HIke Guide, Camp and Camp Counselor with the Nature & Wildlife Discovery Center (NWDC), as well as being the Care Taker of the Pueblo Mountain Park. My small, independent publishing company, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio (MCP) run from my home office was more of a side thing that I worked on in the morning, the evening, and the weekend. Since 2015, MCP published between a few books each year sometimes 2 titles, sometimes 4, but it has always been somewhat a small side-venture that I was intent on growing.

With the advent of Covid, the work I do as an Environmental Educator, Hike Guide, and Camp Counselor for the NWDC came to a stand-still. No longer were schools or other organizations able to cram a bunch of people into a bus of van and transport them to our two campuses. Without environmental education work, most of my income was lost, and in the early times of the pandemic, it wasn’t possible to find new work or employment. I decided that my best bet was to take Middle Creek Publishing, which was more of a side business (as far as an income stream went), and invest all my time and energy into it, as my schedule and focus were now freed up due to work cancellations with my dayjob. In essence, it was my only hope of an income in that time. My role as Care Taker of the Pueblo Mountain Park garnered me a small cabin to live in where utilities were also covered, and so that greatly helped my overhead. This loss of day-job work, and increased investment into MCP coincided with more people having time, stuck at home, and some of them chose to invest their time in reading books that they normally wouldn’t really have the time for in life. So the publishing business, at least mine, did alright during the pandemic shut-down due to the nature of its product. I began to publish an average of 6 books per year, and as of 2023, my goal was to double that to 12 titles, a goal I have nearly completed as of August, 2023.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Middle Creek Publishing started without a budget, and one of the founding tenets I subscribed to at the time, was that I was going to operate the company entirely “in the black.” I aimed to work entirely without debt, and within the ability and opportunity that any profit afforded me. Of course, I put in an extraordinary amount of “sweat equity” — and still do. This time and energy is a sacrifice and an investment which I knew would most likely never be monetized or manifest as financial wealth. I looked at it in two ways: one, was that it was the necessary investment of myself and my energy into a venture I wanted to create with my own skill and agency; and two, that regardless of any financial reward for the work I was doing, I was engaging in community with other writers and artists, I was supporting art in my community and abroad, I was championing new and emerging voices with something I felt was important to communicate, and I was midwifing new books out into the world. All in all, I felt I was doing good work in the world, and that would be reward enough for me as long as I was enjoying myself and finding that it continued to give me a sense of satisfaction. To me, that was success.

Publishing, especially small press desk-top publishing, is one enterprise that can be performed without any over head (other than the aforementioned investment of one’s time and energy, of course), but it isn’t the only one. Many businesses are started by those with money or loans to finance the startup equipment, supples, materials, and labor force they need to produce the products they want to sell. But I would encourage anyone with a desire to start a business or to become successful in any venture they may desire, to start today, to just begin doing what you can, reap any rewards, and rill that back into your needs and keep that going. It’s like taking a single tomato seed, growing a tomato plant, harvesting a tomato and replanting the many seeds a single tomato gives you. Now you have more tomato plants and exponentially more tomatoes, I am not saying that money grows on trees, and I am still in the deep and early work of growing my reach and readership 8 years after beginning the work of Middle Creek Publishing. I still only manage to make a part-time income from the work, but the business is most definitely healthy, growing, and slowly finding its niche in the world of literary publishing and Human Ecology.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.middlecreekpublishing.com
• Instagram: @middle_creek_publishing.com
• Facebook: UsernameEdit https://www.facebook.com/MCPublishing
• Other: Medium: https://medium.com/@davidanthonymartin Swell: https://swellcast.com/MiddleCreekPod

Image Credits
David Anthony Martin