April Gloaming Publishing is a Nashville-based independent press that aims to capture and better understand the Southern soul, Southern writing, and the Southern holler. In the words of William Faulkner, to be Southern is to, “Tell about the South…what do they do there? Why do they?” April Gloaming seeks to arrive at the conclusions to these questions through amplifying the voices of the unbridle
d holler. What is a Southern author? Southern authors are steeped in the grotesque, nourished and entranced by the land, are constantly cultivating and questioning their way to a truth, in hopes to better understand themselves and the land that bore them. Southern authors are not necessarily from the South, or live in the South, but are people fed by isolation, bursting at the seams to get their story out, though most of the time their screams go unheard. They find a connection to the land, are scarred, sometimes ashamed, of their past, they divulge too much information to complete strangers amid the slovenly wilderness surrounding the convenience store, in which they stand under a tattered Confederate flag, languidly held up by old fishing wire, bound to return to the dust from which it was borne, and ask, “Why?”
What is the Southern landscape? There is a thickness to the air of the South, a certain character to it that ravages your body and crawls inside of you. It is oppressive and paralyzing, causing your whole body to swell up in its presence. It clings like breath, the story of the air, of the rivers and trees, flowing from the land and back into our mouths where it is again expelled in the form of another story. When you drive down our highways, you see rain-drenched billboards for strip clubs and adult video stores, and then a mile down the road see a sign that condemns you to Hell for your lust, but no matter the amount of rains, they cannot wash away the perversions our own hearts and mouths lust for, and these moments are where knowledge is bitten, chewed, and spat back out again. What is Southern writing? Southern writing is pitted against the stigma that the twang resonating from our tongues insinuates our ignorance. It is bred from us clawing through the rubble of our past’s downfall to build a story. It is borne from the blood of all of our past’s sins, which are carried with us, day in and day out, and spit out onto our bourbon-stained notebooks in our search for our own personal revival. What is Southern art? The art is pregnant with a heat experienced through a thick presence like a permeating fever as the artist experiments with mysticism, known or unknown. They see the Eden, they know the Eden, they culture and breed the Eden but have blood on their hands. Southern art grabs you by the waist, courts you for months, sends flowers to your parents, and leads you to a truth. What is April Gloaming? April Gloaming is a refuge for the small and the weird. Our impetus is our authors and artists and ensuring that they have a voice at every step of the publishing process. We seek the formless and sublime, the chaotic and the devastating. April Gloaming celebrates the genre-benders, those rare works that bring the old and the new together into something entirely transcendent. Being small lets us follow our dreams, however dark and twisted they may be, and allows us to show them to the world.
