We were lucky to catch up with Rachael M Rollson recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Rachael thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Our business models our life in many ways. In January 2020, my life partner and baker, Joshua quit his career with a local solar company and started baking sourdough bread with local and responsible ingredients from our homestead kitchen. As a result of sharing meals and breaking said bread with friends and family, he was encouraged to start baking for others. In less than a month, he was selling and delivering bread on a weekly basis. AND THEN the pandemic hit, and everything was shut down, but he was up and running getting real food to families.
I was part-time teaching and in the middle of my doctorate dissertation in Aesthetic Philosophy (specifically in anarchic practices of ecology and the history of New England philosophical practice). My program had a travel component, which I was thankfully finished with by then, only the writing to be done. Our life was small on the homestead during the pandemic; we already homeschooled our child and were able to get what we needed from nearby community-supported programs, and were determined to help other folks. I struggle with long-term Lyme disease co-infections and work a lot with my health, but I developed complications depleting my immune system and damaging my eyesight, hearing, and lymph function. An intense recovery process left me feeling better than I had in years, and we discovered we wanted to continue working together as a family and in and for our community.
Our little downtown has been struggling for years as the industry in this area has moved on. However, it has such lovely natural features and a great history. Many new folks came here to get away during the pandemic, and both the population and attitude have shifted—people want places to get together again, places to connect and share their stories. We thought our interests might open this kind of space for others and found a space for Stone Broke Bread & Books right in the heart of town.
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?
Everything we do is in partnership. We were inspired by community-building ideas when we thought of what we could do together and the kind of place we wanted to be and hoped others would want to be. Our ethos stems ‘from the ground up’ and ‘feed the mind and the body’, both things we’ve learned from our attention to DIY homesteading and Bread & Puppet Theater. We’re old-school punks and always worked with a sort of social justice mindset, having careers in holistic health, renewable energy, and progressive education. We’re both creatives- writing, art, music- and we love talking about the philosophy and culture of these things.
We’ve moved around a lot and found ourselves in the middle of beautiful Maine, where we love the nature but miss the dynamic culture we know could exist if there was a place for other like-minds (we know we’re out there!). When we thought of connecting to folks, we thought of creating a space where ideas could thrive and grow. For us, the best place to start is with the body, with food, and providing people with the kind of food that nurtures the land, the farms, the farmers, the community, and health (grain culture is the basis of civilization and the history of Maine). We found ourselves in an area that did not have access to much of this kind of food culture or places to share ideas. We try and be intentional in how and what we offer. We made the decision to add books to the bakery as a way to enter into so many of these conversations. We are attentive to sourcing everything responsibly and offering it in responsible ways.
We offer naturally-leavened, fully-fermented bread made with local minimally processed grains and sweeteners. This goes for our books, too. We offer books from only small publishers or self-published works highlighting diverse and underrepresented voices. This collaboration of bakery and books allows us to bring our best selves together and invites so many to join in in so many ways. Along with this we partner up with other local goods (cheese, butter, coffee, crafts) and event sponsorships with LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC support systems, youth empowerment writing groups, natural healing practices, and food ecology organizations. In a rural but growing area, we see and feel the potential of creating these spaces where people can connect, share experiences and knowledge, and give each other support.
We joined our efforts to ‘feed the mind and the body’ and create a space to generate new ideas. We’ve been open for two years this Fall and are so grateful that people are finding us and feeling heard, seen, and connected. We’re excited to offer our own community-supported program and idea-positive books.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
I mentioned Bread & Puppet Theater before but I cannot stress enough how it impacts our thinking and being. It is a political puppet theater up in the wilds of Vermont that fosters critical thinking amidst our impact in the world; where everything is made from the earth itself and bread is served at every event (because they believe that the act of chewing on bread and chewing on ideas is most effective together). It stems from a long line of New England thinkers who stress simplicity and sustainability, harmony with nature, and social justice (think Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Dewey, the Nearings, Bookchin, and the Schumanns of B&P). This line has inspired such entities as the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (and their 50 years running Common Ground Fair, a farm and homesteading fair of amazing proportions and natural gifts of knowledge) and the Maine Grain Alliance and their partner Maine Grains (the former, an entrepreneurial ecosystem for grain culture and the latter a dedicated Maine miller and granary working towards the resurgence of grain growing and use in Maine), which are highly influential toward our attitude and attention.
We’re also really jazzed by community-supported programs. They center economy in a very real and local way; they encourage commitment to small businesses and, in many ways strengthen the ecology of relations of production (community-supported structures tend to generate less waste, more stability, and therefore have a positive environmental and social impact). Particularly in places where food culture has been degraded by subsidized farming, big box stores, and ultra-processing a community-supported model creates consistent security for options beyond these convenient but ultimately damaging sources.
Another big influence was a visit to the Free Thinking Zone, a bookshop and activist hub in Athens, Greece. There we found a community of folks working towards social justice concerns, not just in their own community, but as part of a world community. They host activist and educational meetings and press positive writing groups, philosophy and artist talks, and are supported as a center for like-minded folks to meet (having a gallery, a coffeeshop, free wifi as a working space). We knew we wanted to build up to be a similar kind of space where we worked for more than just retail/selling stuff.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We’ve been lucky in so many ways, but being resilient at times has certainly been key to our trajectory. Both of us had significant struggles in our youth so our plans for the future were tenuous, at best. We bounced around trying to figure out where we fit, all the while amassing a lot of varied experience and education. At heart, we’re both writers and artists, but we decline to advance in the marketing aspect of our practices, instead choosing careers that work towards something larger.
This worked out great for a while, but when we had a child together, we decided to take a step back and focus on a smaller way, getting a homestead and considering our own human/family footprint. We were ecstatic to start this new endeavor and jumped in with both feet. Not long after, I got really sick, unable to work, and struggled with seemingly something new every day. We went to many doctors, but the diagnoses were contradictory, and treatment was ineffective. My goals of travel lecturing and full-time teaching were no longer an option. Homesteading was harder than ever (homesteading IS hard, but now it was impossible), and my thinking was not clear enough for any of my practices. The baker was taking care of everything — me, the child, homeschooling, homesteading, and working full-time still but had planned to leave his position soon. We were a mess. I was in and out of medical treatments with small successes, and then symptoms would return in new and terrible ways. Then the baker injured himself and needed surgery — he was fine, but the stress and recovery of it set us back further financially and emotionally.
During one of my remissions, I started another educational program (why not?! I wasn’t able to do much else), but the stresses of that also hampered my health. We were at a particularly hard low point. We felt like failures at everything (parenting, homesteading, life) and weren’t sure what steps to take next. He had the baking program by then, and I found a Lyme-literate doctor in the area who started me on a chemical therapy treatment catered to my growing list of co-infections and impacts. The treatment felt more horrible than the sickness most weeks. Many folks do a 3-6 month treatment cycle, but mine took 9 full months, during which I lost my job, my artist working group, many friends, and any self-confidence I might have had — sickness and treatment fatigue is its own illness.
But when I was finally finished, things that had been working against my immune system even before the Lyme was cleared up, the co-infections were solidly in remission, and I felt like a human being again. After a few months of accepting that I could be a healthy person and that we could be a functioning family again, we decided to embark on this bakery and bookstore project together. I know that my own personal resilience rests on our resilience as a team and as a partnership.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.stonebrokebreadandbooks.com
- Instagram: stone_broke_bread_and_books
