Anamchara Books' Dancing Network
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It’s been a minute (ahem!) since we posted here.
As a tiny publishing house with limited resources, it’s hard to keep up with everything. We need to get new product out, so we can sell more books and hopefully stay afloat—and that means I need to wear my editorial hat.
We want those books to have well-crafted words, but we also want them to be beautiful, inside and out, so I wear a managerial hat and sometimes an artist’s hat. And, of course, we also need to market our books (so we can sell more books and hopefully stay afloat); I pass that hat around among us.
While doing all this, we also need to do our best to keep our authors happy, communicating with them, cherishing their creative offspring, and being as gentle as we can when that offspring needs to go on a diet, have surgery, or maybe just have its toenails cut. And that’s a hat that sits on my head most of the time. That’s not all, either; there’s the bills-paying hat and the errand-running hat and the ongoing maintenance of accounts hat—and yeah, well, all those hats are usually on my head too.
I think maybe it seems worse when I break it down like that, though. Several of our authors have written about the Western mindset that loves to categorize and make hierarchies, rather than seeing reality as an interwoven and living thing. I know—we’ve all been taught we need to make to-do lists, prioritize, organize (hierarchies and categories), and a part of me really loves creating and then checking off items on a list. But that metaphor in the previous paragraph, the one about authors’ offsprings and their needs, got me thinking—what if I looked at my work at Anamchara Books the way I looked at mothering when I had young children?
As a mother, I never thought, Oh, now I’m wearing my laundress hat and now I’m wearing my nurse hat and then I have to wear my chauffeur hat and now I’m wearing my counselor hat and I can’t forget to wear the cook hat and now . . . well, you see what I mean. From the perspective of hiearachies and categories, motherhood is chaos. A hot mess. I remember feeling so frustrated at times because I never could do it all.
But really, motherhood was one of those interwoven and living things, and I participated in it the best I could. Sometimes, my actions were instinctive and joyous; other times, I strained and fumbled—and either way, I was still in that web of motherhood, supported by countless strands of laughter, tears, frustration, anger, and always love, all woven together.
Another metaphor that occurs to me is that it’s a dance. As a mother, I stumbled and tripped and lost my balance so many times—but when I felt I was failing as a mother, maybe they were just steps in the dance. If nothing else, I always leapt back to my feet and found my place in the dance as quickly as I could.
Switching my attention back to Anamchara Books, I’m thinking of it now not as a jumble of distinct things, all clammering for my attention, but as a network of authors and graphic designers and editors and freelancers and readers. And now—forgive me for bouncing back and forth between metaphors, but I just really like them both—so, yeah, you could say we’re all in this dance together. We make misteps. We step on each other’s toes. We twirl a little too fast or a little too slow. But looking at it as a whole (not as a bunch of separate pieces), this is a beautiful and joyous dance. I’m so glad to be a part of it.
Glad you are too.
