Sawaga River Press’ Year-End Update
Friends and Fam,
We hope you are well.
So many things in the world, especially the war in Gaza, weigh on us. It all feels so… big. Sometimes our efforts to publish feel so puny and useless against the backdrop of war and genocide. But we choose to continue to believe in the power of stories. We know in our hearts that what we strive to cultivate and grow through stories and books—the spirit of kapwa (our shared being)—is key to a society that cares for each other and the world. So we keep at this. And we pray that we all find moments of joy, continue to love our human and more-than-human kapwa, and do what we can in our own spheres of influence to practice and advocate for caring relationships.
EVENT UPDATES
Independent Book Publishers Association’s Innovative Voices Program
In September, we announced we were one of the twenty semi-finalists of the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Innovative Voices Program. We are proud to announce that we are one of the five finalists. Check here for the other four finalists and the benefits of being a finalist, including mentorship, financial resources, and complimentary attendance to the 2024 Publishing University in Colorado on April 24-25! Super exciting! We have several projects slated for 2024 (see below) and this boost from IBPA will really help us. Thank you, IBPA!
Great Place to Work Panel on Celebrating Indigenous People’s Day
In October, representatives from Great Place to Work (GPTW) (i.e., Juntos, GPTW’s Hispanic + Latinx/@/eRG; BERG, GPTW’s Black Employee Resource Group; and APIary GPTW’s Asian Pacific Islander) invited us, along with Ixquick Poz Salanic and Chili Yazie, for a lunch-time session to talk about the importance of our indigenous heritage, how it grounds us in our work, and how it relates to their work at Great Place To Work. For our part, ammong other things, we talked about our responsibility as immigrants and settlers to the land where we now reside, and how we build caring relationships with kapwa. Much gratitude to Lizelle Festejo, GPTW ‘s APIary lead, who invited me. Here is the youtube video of the event.
PROJECT UPDATES
We are wrapping up some projects and starting new ones. If things go according to plan, we will have several more books on our list by next year, 2024.
Mungan and Lola is now in its final phase. Ray finished all the illustrations. Adrienne is working on designing the rest of the book. We aim to send the final file to the printer by the end of this year, if not by January 2024. This means we will have the book in May 2024! Hopefully in time for some of the May events we have planned to celebrate Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. This project is taking longer than planned…but we believe this is what the book needs to arrive when it does. Because of its new timeline, we are able to accommodate a late inspiration to honor our lolas in one of the pages. For those who are not aware, in October, we solicited names of our lola elders and ancestors from our Fil-Am community to include in the book. We solicited approximately 50 names. Thank you for participating!
We are down to our last 20 copie of Jack & Agyu. We will be ordering a reprint when we order the Mungan and Lola book.
We are also out of Mama, Mama and will be ordering reprints at the same time.
We are now working on the first book of the Know History, Know Self series. Thank you to those who responded to our survey and shared their stories! We received 28 submissions from the community, just the right number and mix of stories to put together a collage that reflects a part of our Fil-Am community’s immigration stories. We are really excited to be working collaboratively with the community, especially with the kids!, on a book. We strongly believe in having our stories told from our first-person perspectives, with as little filtering by other perspectives, as possible. We’re also excited to be working with Albert Balbutin as our illustrator! He is a prolific artist whose art ranges from illustrating playful food puns to rapping about the Fil-Am dream. Check him out here. Right now, we are conducting virtual interviews with the participants and putting together the narratives and illustration plans. We hope to finish the draft of the book by April 2024 and crowdfund its publication in April-May 2024. Again, if things according to our plan, we will have the book published by October, in time to celebrate Filipino American History Month. We will keep you posted.
We’re also working on two other books with the same timeline as KHKS. We will share more info about this in January 2024 as we firm up some of the details this December. And keep an eye out for another survey from us.
We feel inspired and appreciate your support and responses to our outreach. With you, we will create more books next year!
May the holidays bring you moments of joy.
