Banana Slug Books gathers around the campfire to share Spokane authors’ mythologies, ghost stories and urban legends

This Friday, campers will gather at the Lawrence Rist Memorial Fireplace in Manito Park to hear mythologies, ghost stories, and urban legends of Spokane, as the new local book press, Banana Slug Books, celebrates the release of its first book, “Spokane Campfire Stories,” which features work from 23 writers.

But the book came before the press. After graduating from Eastern Washington University with her master’s of fine arts in creative writing, Editor-in-Chief Aimee Brooks was searching for her next project, ideally something that integrated her background in outdoor education into her creative practice. She admired Scablands Books, and sought out Spokane author Sharma Shields, who founded the press, for advice.

“I was thinking about applying for a SAGA grant, and she walked me through that process,” Brooks said. “She talked to me about the indie publishing world. She did so much mentorship that really meant the world to me.”

Spokane Arts awarded Brooks a $5,000 grant for Spokane Campfire Stories, a collection based around campfire stories through a Spokane lens. Before moving to Spokane to attend the creative writing program, Brooks had never seen a banana slug, and wanted the press to have a Spokane-centric name. When choosing her editorial team, Brooks chose fellow students from grad school: Katy Shedlock, Dylan Cooper and Morganne Elkins.

“Morganne Elkins is our design lead, and so she works in the interiors of the books, putting together files and InDesign, making the aesthetics of the project consistent across the board,” Brooks said. “She’s an incredible visual artist as well, and has a visual arts background. Katy Shedlock is a phenomenal editor. Morganne is also a phenomenal editor. Everyone’s editing all the time.

“Katy brings just such a sense of peace and grounding to the project. She’s got a ton of incredible Spokane connections, and I’ve also seen her event planning skills, off the charts. I know that in our planning phase, nearing the party, I’m going to be relying on her so much, and then Dylan Cooper, I don’t want to shout anybody out too much, but I would say Dylan is our most phenomenal editor on the team, has the skills to comb through these manuscripts, so meticulous, so thorough in their practice, they are just also just such an incredible presence to have on the team.”

Shedlock said the editorial process for Banana Slug Books differed from her experience working for Willow Springs Books, the literary press housed within EWU’s MFA program.

“The stuff for Willow Springs, it was like, you read a submission and you have to decide yes or no,” Shedlock said. “But in this situation, for this project, we were able to say, ‘Well, we could work with this author to develop their story in these ways.’ And so that was a fun new angle on the process that I didn’t really get to do previously.”

The book features a mixture of established and upcoming writers. “Home” will be the first story Eva Murphy has published.

“This opportunity has really sparked something within me and fueled what I believed to be something that lived within me,” Murphy said.

The acceptance gave her the confidence to submit more work, and she’s already had another story accepted for publication. She told her longtime family friend, Joseph Edwin Haeger, who has published several books, about the project. His response? Hey, I’m in that, too.

Haeger said he doesn’t normally write stories for specific prompts, but he realized he had an unfinished project about a man seeking to be adopted by wolves that could fit the bill.

“It’s really cool to be part of something where everybody’s taking it seriously and giving it their all,” Haeger said. “I don’t know what the finished product is going to look like or anything, but they have my complete trust at this point that it’s just gonna come out and be stellar.”

In turn, Haeger is friends with another one of the writers in the collection, Emily Gwinn. Gwinn wrote a series of four poems titled “Natatorium Park.” Originally, the poems were paired with work from Chris Bovey as part of “Landmarks,” a 2015 collaborative exhibition put on by Spokane Arts and Get Lit.

“Both Chris Bovey and I had a real big interest in the history of Natatorium Park, and so he created some original signage from it, and then I created some poems from the perspective of people on the ride,” Gwinn said.

For “Spokane Campfire Stories,” Gwinn was one of the writers who read her piece for Spokane Public Radio.

Brooks said the idea to collaborate with radio came to her because she loved “Miller Cane,” the serialized novel by author Sam Ligon that came out in the Inlander. Ligon is also a professor for EWU’s creative writing program.

“We do have some incredible poets, some incredible lyricists on our contributors team. And so I was able to contact just a handful,” Brooks said. “… We were able to work with Verne (Windham) at Spokane Public Radio to produce this super fun show.”

This wasn’t Banana Slug Books’ only promotional event; they hosted a workshop about oral storytelling through Pivot and a unique merch experience. Brooks also does printing, so she and her staff created a block print, and invited people to Hive, where Brooks had an artist residency, to have their own bags, T-shirts and more printed for free.

“I get excited about merch,” Brooks said, “but I also feel pretty concerned about the environmental impact of purchasing 300 shirts and sending them out into the world and or my house being full of leftover merch.”

Cooper said this idea came out of Brooks’ brain, “as a lot of wonderful things do.”

“I think that reflected the community-centric focus that we have wanted from the start, as well,” Cooper said. “This is a community project. It’s made possible by the writers and artists and thinkers and funders like Spokane Arts.”

Shedlock, who was born and raised in Spokane, said the writing within the anthology made her look at Spokane in a fresh way.

“There’s a story by another one of my MFA classmates in the book that sort of centers on People’s Park, which is a place that I don’t personally have a whole lot of relationship with,” Shedlock said. “I drive by it occasionally, but I’m gonna think about that place differently now, I do think about that place differently now, because of their story and how it gave me a new perspective on that one little piece of the bigger story of Spokane.”

Liina Koivula wrote that story, which came from a piece of research she was doing when she was working on a piece for The Spokesman-Review’s Summer Stories series.

“I came across a lot of articles about a conflict over nude sunbathing at People’s Park,” Koivula said about their story in the anthology, “While You’re Twisting, I’m Still Bathing.” “So, that’s kind of my enduring interest in Spokane is the history of People’s Park, as it was a spot for transient youth to camp during Expo and then continued on as an unofficial nude beach through the at least through the ‘90s, possibly through the 2000s, and that was a story I was really interested in telling in a fictional lens.”

Shraya Singh, also an EWU MFA grad, took on another piece of Spokane history, Jimmy Marks. In “How to Make a Fire,” Singh reimagined Marks with her culture, making him a reincarnation of Agni, the god of fire.

Singh is also a co-founder, alongside EWU grads Kurtis Ebeling and Rook Rainsdowne, of the literary magazine, Croak. (The frog-themed journal is accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and art for its fourth edition.)

When Singh first heard about the campfire project, she thought it was aligned with the community.

“I just feel like campfire stories inherently just give up a Spokane vibe in my head,” Signh said. “I don’t know how to explain that, but I feel like Spokane is meant to be a campfire story in itself.”

The event itself will have many campfire elements. Writers will read their work, as expected at literary events, of course, but there will also be an actual campfire, summer camp games, a camp guide lookalike contest, as well as snacks provided by Lunarium.

The event is free and open to the public. Auntie’s Bookstore will be selling the book for $29.36. If you don’t make it to the event, the book will be available at local retailers, but you won’t be able to purchase it outside of the region, and it won’t be made available on Amazon.

“As I’m thinking about becoming a business owner and stepping into this leadership role after I’ve had years to learn as a student to study under people that I really respect and admire …” Brooks said. “Getting a graduate education is such a gift, and I want to return my skills to the world in a really ethical way. And I think that the world makes it so easy to not do that, even just thinking about publishing through Amazon and using them as a distributor.

“I mean, I think give me two weeks, and my whole house is going to be full of 300 books. And that’s not the most convenient thing in the world, but I do think that I feel good about that.”