Stick Around and Read
Our vision at Belle Point
Our origin story as a publisher is not exactly smooth or simple to explain. Although I went into some history in the introduction to our first book last year, there is a lot more to say.
I’ve never been very good at sticking with things. True to my generation, I have fumbled my way into adulthood with a variety of college majors and thwarted career paths that ultimately were driven by two encompassing values: creativity and community. Being from Oklahoma and coming from a Mid-Southern family/place/culture has formed my grasp of those things in ways I still don’t know how to articulate fully, but it’s knitted into my bones: the geographical in-betweenness, the open plains mixed with urban pockets, the twang that sounds a little mixed with generic TV drone. The sense that something is pulling you there, leaving a trail of echoes, like the actual Center of the Universe landmark in downtown Tulsa (which you can read more about in our latest Prose Series chap, by the way).
My husband and I met in Tulsa after somewhat different upbringings in our respective parts of eastern Oklahoma. We fell in love through books in grad school and got married at Circle Cinema, a local institution that’s been important to our history. Sometime in there, my first published poem appeared in a Tulsa magazine about another local landmark, Cain’s Ballroom.
Then we left.
After hovering in the Third Coast Capital of Chicago for several years, during pandemic lockdown we came back—sort of. Deciding to settle in Fort Smith, Arkansas (a border town two hours southeast of Tulsa) made sense for a lot of reasons and tethered us, and our children, back to earlier generations of both our families. My grandmother’s parents built the Baptist church a couple miles down the road from my current house; my husband’s family has been rooted about forty minutes down I-40 in Sallisaw for decades. Still, becoming an Arkansan with an Okie-shaped heart has not been without its own confusion. I’ve had to learn to reckon with a new subregional culture alongside new versions of community that are different from anything I knew in Tulsa yet still feel familiar in an intuitive way. I’m not from here, but I’ve been around here—and we’re staying.
That’s the sort of vision that inspired us to start publishing books. Not only did we see, in practical terms, a general gap in literary resources beyond the various colleges around the state and the cultural hubs of Northwest Arkansas and Little Rock, but we saw commonalities among many writers around the surrounding region—that loyalty to home and commitment to staying rooted, even if the details have shifted over time. Although writers from states like Louisiana or Tennessee have distinct cultures and contexts that have shaped their identities, I see a similar sense of place that makes their stories feel like home; we share borders, overlap experiences, in ways that are often too intimately connected to know how to describe them fully.
But for our purposes as a literary small press, here’s the closest we’ve come so far:
As a reader, writer, and publisher, I am increasingly more interested in supporting the folks and institutions who find ways to stick where they are or otherwise remain loyal to where they came from. In a time where it’s easy to leave—and often appears necessary in order to foster creativity and community—we stand by the people and places that got us where we are. And we think everyone should do the same as much as they’re able. There can be many factors that influence the decision about where to live, work, grow—but we all know what it means to remember the stories that get us home.
What does this mean, practically speaking? You’ll see us talk less narrowly about our identity as “Mid-Southern” or “regional” because we think our books should be valued everywhere. As we see stories from around this region achieving greater recognition—from novels like Calling for a Blanket Dance and Demon Copperhead to shows like True Detective and Reservation Dogs—we believe this central part of America that contains regional multitudes has something to say to anyone. While we will continue to focus on publishing authors from the same states we always have (Arkansas and its surrounding environs, in general terms), we will be finding ways to connect with a broader range of readers.
For us, starting the press has never been just about supporting writers (though it’s critical, of course). It’s been about growing the community we try to build within our own homes. We hope you’ll join us—and stay awhile.
