STRANGE NATURES is a small press founded in the summer of 2019 by Natalie Mattox and Nadine Vassallo. Having spent several years working in the publishing and bookselling industries, Natalie and Nadine met while working at a local independent bookstore together and bonded over an undeniably similar taste in books and writing, a vision of a more collaborative, empathetic, and personal publishing experience, and a desire to bring unique stories into the world. This led to a dream of a publishing project that is now STRANGE NATURES.
Our first love is print books and publishing, and STRANGE NATURES’ primary purpose will always be to produce physical books worth holding, owning, and sharing. We also appreciate digital publishing for its immediacy, accessibility, and reach, and will publish shorter-than-book-length works electronically via our STRANGE NATURES DIARY.
STRANGE NATURES is at once a publishing project and an endeavor in human connection, dedicated to making space for contemporary voices to share their stories and identities. Collaboration lies at the core of our mission, as together we can un-bind traditional notions of the publisher/author dynamic, creating end results that reflect a collective, communally-oriented vision. We seek to publish writing with an uneasy relationship to genre, a restlessness of form, books that may not be readily shelved and categorized, and that challenge our understanding of what a book is or is for.
In calling ourselves STRANGE NATURES, we honor the weird, the queer, the wild, the human and the non-human, the margins and the in-between. We dig ourselves into fruit-bearing soil, into the messiness of process. Our work is driven by empathy and community, and the works we publish will be deeply, weirdly, wildly alive.
How you can support STRANGE NATURES:
Purchase STRANGE NATURES items from our shop! All proceeds from items sold will go towards building a sustainable foundation for this project and compensating our authors and writers as fully as we are able.
Purchase our (forthcoming) books! We’d love for you to purchase our books directly from our site or from an independent bookstore. Our books will not be available from Amazon.
Spread the word. We’d love to welcome as many people as possible into the STRANGE NATURES community, so sharing our project with your friends would be appreciated.
If you would like to get involved or support us in any other way, please get in touch with us.
