What Basalt Sea Press Publishes, and Why It Matters That It's Native-Owned

Starting from the land

Basalt Sea Press takes its name from a place. The Klamath Basin in southern Oregon and northern California is a landscape of lava beds, basalt desert, shallow lakes, and river canyons carved by water that has been moving through this country since before anyone was counting. It is the homeland of the Klamath Confederated Tribes. It is where I grew up, where my family comes from, and where the stories I have spent years writing are rooted.

The press grew out of a simple problem: the stories I wanted to publish did not fit neatly inside any existing category. They are mythic but not fantasy. They draw from Modoc oral tradition but are not folklore collections. They are literary fiction but not realist. What they are is what the land itself is: layered, old, not easily reduced to a single frame.

What we actually publish

The press has three areas it keeps returning to, not because they are market categories but because they are the kinds of work the house genuinely cares about.

The first is mythology and oral tradition brought into print with care. The flagship project, the Kemush Cycle, is twelve myths drawn from the mythic imagination of the American West: origin stories, creation cycles, accounts of the forces that shape a world. These are not transcriptions of ceremony or sacred knowledge. They are literary works written in conversation with that tradition, shaped by someone who carries it.

The second is stories of resistance. The Modoc War of 1872 and 1873 is one of the most documented military campaigns in the history of the American West and one of the least honestly told. The official record buries what actually happened. The work the press is building toward that history, including the Captain Jack material and the documented record at kintpuash.com, is an attempt to tell it from the ground up, with primary sources rather than received mythology.

The third is what might be called land-rooted literary fiction: writing from the West that treats the landscape as a character rather than a backdrop, that takes the region's ecology and history seriously as both subject and structure.

Why Native ownership is the point, not the marketing

I am an enrolled member of the Klamath Confederated Tribes with Modoc ancestry. That is a specific thing, not a general one. It means something concrete about which communities I belong to, which histories I carry, and what obligations come with telling certain stories.

Most publishing about Native people is not owned or controlled by Native people. The decisions about what gets published, how it gets framed, which voices get amplified and which get corrected or softened, have historically been made by people at a remove from the cultures and communities the books are about. That is not a complaint about individual editors. It is a structural fact about how the industry works.

A Native-owned press means the editorial judgment stays inside the culture. It means I can publish a book that treats Kemush as a witness and mediator in the cycle, not a deity, because that is the accurate and respectful framing, without having to explain it to someone who learned about Indigenous religion from an anthropology textbook. It means the decisions about what to include and what not to include are made by someone who understands what is at stake.

That matters especially for the mythology work. There is a difference between publishing about a tradition and publishing from inside one. The press exists because that distinction is real and because it is not preserved by accident. It requires ownership.

Where the catalog stands

The anchor title is The Spirals of Kemush, available in paperback and as an illustrated iOS app. The twelve-spiral cycle forms the cosmological foundation of the house: creation, change, death, kinship, memory, and the other forces that run through the myths. A companion guide is included in the complete edition.

Forthcoming work includes the Kintpuash material on the Modoc War and The Confession of John Rollin Ridge, a novel about the Cherokee writer and poet, due in the fall. The press is also open to inquiries from Native writers working in mythology, oral tradition, and stories of resistance. Write to editorial@basaltseapress.com.