By H.L. Delaney · September 15, 2026

How We Decide What Basalt Sea Press Publishes

People ask us what a small press like this is looking for, and the honest answer is that we work from a short list of questions. Basalt Sea Press is a Native-owned imprint in the Klamath Basin, and most of what we publish comes out of Klamath and Modoc country. The list is small on purpose. When you can only take on a few things at a time, every yes has to carry weight for years. What follows is the set of questions we actually ask before we commit to a project. They come out of the books we have already made, and we treat them as working questions rather than fixed rules.

Does it recover a story the record was built to manage?

The first thing we look for is whether a project brings back something the written record was designed to bury or soften. A great deal of the history of this region reached print through the people who did the taking. Their accounts turned decisions into weather, killings into incidents, and named people into a nameless crowd. We are drawn to work that reaches under that surface and puts the buried account back where it belongs. That can be an origin cycle that survived in oral tradition and has never been given the room a book provides. It can be a documented event that the official version keeps vague. The test is whether the work returns something that was taken out, and whether it returns it accurately.

Is it told from the inside, and answerable to the record?

We publish from inside the tradition, so we care a great deal about where a story is standing when it speaks. Told from the inside means the account belongs to the community it describes and carries the shape of the culture and the land it comes from. That is one half of the standard. The other half is accountability to the documentary record. A story told from the inside still has to hold up against the sources, the dates, the names, and the physical facts of the place. We trace claims back to the primary record, and we mark the seam where the record ends and invention begins. We have written about that method at length in how we edit Indigenous historical fiction for accuracy. We need both halves to be true. Community standing does not excuse getting the facts wrong, and careful research on its own does not give a writer the standing to tell a story that belongs to a community they are outside of.

Can it be told whole?

Some stories can only be told honestly at full length, with the violence left in. We look closely at whether a project is prepared to do that. Colonial history in this country is often handed to readers with the worst of it removed, so the story goes down easily and asks nothing of anyone. We have no interest in that version. If a book is going to name what removal did here, it has to name it plainly and keep the real names on the real events. This also means we ask whether a project has the room it needs. An origin cycle chopped into fragments, or a history that stops just short of the hard part, loses the thing that made it worth publishing. We would rather take on fewer projects and give each one the length and the honesty it requires.

Does it earn its place beyond the page?

Not every reader we care about reads novels, and we hold that in mind when we decide what to make. Some of our projects pair a book with an app, a game, or a plain usable tool, so the story can reach a classroom, a family, or a kid who would never pick up the paperback. We ask whether a project has a life beyond the page, and whether that life would carry the material faithfully. A game that teaches the ecology of a watershed, or an app that carries an origin cycle with its art intact, can do real work. We wrote about why we build these alongside the books in why we publish books and apps together. This question does not apply to everything, and we do not force it. When it fits, it moves a project up our list.

Can we stand behind it for years?

The last question is the simplest and the hardest. Once a book carries our name, we are responsible for it. So we ask whether we can defend every claim in it a decade from now, whether the community it comes from would recognize itself in it, and whether we would still be proud to hand it to someone. A small press does not have the volume to absorb a project it cannot stand behind. That constraint turns out to be useful. It keeps us from chasing work that looks good in a season and reads badly later, and it keeps the list honest.

What this adds up to

None of these questions is a scoring system. A real project rarely answers all of them at full strength, and we spend most of our time weighing how a particular work sits across the whole set. Sovereignty over the story is the thread that runs through all of it. We are looking for the community's own account of its own history, given the room to be told in full, held honestly to the record, and carried in whatever form reaches the most people. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard we invite writers to meet. If you are working on something that fits this description, our door is open, and you can reach us through the publishing and inquiries page. We read what comes in with care, because the whole point of a press this small is that every book on the list had to earn its way onto it.