[D]ede Cummings can tell you a story about a Middlebury College literature major who wrote poetry while waiting tables, only to become a senior book designer at the prestigious Little, Brown and Company before returning to Vermont to freelance her skills for such acclaimed authors as Mary Oliver and Thomas Pynchon.
“I was working for other publishers,” recalls the 60-year-old Brattleboro resident, “and then I realized I know how to do a lot of this — why not do it myself?”
That’s when Cummings, a climate activist in addition to everything else, decided to start Green Writers Press, an imprint aiming to spread the state’s environmental ethos globally.
“In today’s world of social media and online transactions,” she writes on greenwriterspress.com, “we remember that your head and your heart need nourishment from the natural world. With that as our credo, we embark on a journey to bring the beauty of the published book as a tactile object into the homes and hands of our readers, and we also embrace the technology of tablet and ebook publishing.”
Seeking to preserve and protect resources, Green Writers Press is using only recycled paper and soy-based inks, all while giving a percentage of its proceeds to such causes as the grass-roots climate-crisis group 350.org.
“We could just be another publishing company,” Cummings says, “but we have to walk the walk.”
For the poet-turned-publisher, that has meant forging through some formidable peaks and valleys.
Seven months ago, Green Writers Press could boast legendary Vermont writer Howard Frank Mosher as an advisor and Northeast Kingdom peers David Budbill and Leland Kinsey as authors in its catalog. Then Kinsey died of lymphoma in September, Budbill died of progressive supranuclear palsy 11 days later, and Mosher died of cancer just a week after announcing his diagnosis in January.
Cummings has since established the Howard Frank Mosher Book Prize to recognize emerging novelists and is working to publish several Budbill and Kinsey books posthumously.
“I had the honor to work with them,” she says, “and I miss them so much.”
But spring brings new life. Green Writers Press is set to release a dozen new titles, including the short fiction collection “A Field Guide to Murder and Fly Fishing” by Tim Weed, the commune remembrance “Horse Drawn Yogurt: Stories from Total Loss Farm” by Peter Gould and the anthology “Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry,” edited by present and past state poet laureates Chard deNiord and Sydney Lea.
Cummings is in talks to print former Gov. Madeleine Kunin’s “coming of age” memoir “The Year I Turned Eighty,” which a representative for the 83-year-old retired U.S. ambassador to Switzerland describes as “an honest and positive look at aging and how it has affected her life.”
And Cummings is promoting her own first poetry book, “To Look Out From.” It’s the one volume she hasn’t published herself — in this case, because Connecticut-based Homebound Publications is releasing it as winner of its annual poetry prize.
“My daughter asked, ‘Why not do it yourself?’ but it has always been my dream to have my own collection accepted at an independent publishing house.”
That said, Cummings didn’t envision how she’d learn her work had bested 500 other entries.
“I was folding laundry in the basement and my iPhone binged,” she recalls. “I saw an email with the words, ‘We are pleased …’ and I started screaming.”
The book starts with a 1978 poem, “Written at Home on My Mother’s Typewriter,” that caught the attention of former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, who notes her work is “driven by curiosity and enlivened by quick maneuvers and spritely turns.”
The 94-page paperback also includes recent and rawer words, such as a poem Cummings wrote after her daughter, Jezebel.com editor-in-chief Emma Carmichael, was seriously injured in a fiery 2015 car crash that required months of recuperation.
“There is something about morning./The optimism peels through sun-/streamed windows, even though/a wheelchair is parked by your bed./A gift from the Seelys — a white/orchid — bows its head in grace,/ripe with possibility.”
Cummings is set to read at public programs Friday at 7 p.m. at Putney’s Next Stage Arts, April 11 at 7 p.m. at Montpelier’s Bear Pond Books, April 20 at 6:30 p.m. at Rutland’s Phoenix Books, and May 16 at 7 p.m. at Middlebury’s Vermont Book Shop.
“This is my life’s work,” she says. “Sometimes your path doesn’t go where you expect it to, but if you put your heart and soul in … All I care is that it reaches people.”
