Driving Our Economy Forward: Walnut Street Publishing
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) — It’s a local publishing company focusing on local authors. The want to reimagine what publishing is as a community, as well as tell stories through all mediums of art. We look at how Walnut Street Publishing continues to Drive Our Economy Forward.
“Being a writer, I’m a novelist and poet myself, I’ve been published, and I hated the publishing experience. So, what we decided to do to make that experience easier is we attached it community. Right? Like when you have genuine community, meaning people who want to invest in your work, invest in your life, then all of a sudden, those hard moments where you might feel alone, you might feel like you’re not valued. You might feel like you’re just a commodity that a business is trying to exploit. Those go away, and all of a sudden, we try our best to create these spaces where when you walk in, you’re not alone. And it’s by not being alone. That’s how you build your platform, because it’s everybody building each other up because there’s enough, room at the table for everybody to eat. So, we don’t believe in competition. We just believe in homies kicking it and doing really cool art and lifting each other up,” said Aaron Quinn, the Executive Director of Walnut Street Publishing.
“You know, growing up on the spectrum and being bullied a lot when I was growing up, I had this huge heart of, I want people to be seen. I want their stories to be told, and I want them to have space where they feel like they can be fully themselves. So as a publishing company, we want to reimagine what publishing is as a community, and we also want to tell stories through all means of art. So now, every single day I get to have an opportunity where I say, you matter, your story matters, and this is space where you can tell your story the way that you want to without being judged. And I think that’s just wild that I get to do that,” said Quinn.
“One of the first people that I got connected to, Walnut Street, they were in this transition between jobs, and they were trying to figure out what they wanted to do as an artist. And that was about five years ago. And since then, we’ve been able to refer, people to them to make covers. And they continually talked to us about how that encouragement, because they face fiscal, disability. And since we give them accessible space, they no longer have to be limited by their physical disability. And then we were able to publish an eighth grader who wrote a novel. And so, by eighth grade, she was able to get her first roll royalty check and say, I am an official author on official writer. And people valued my words enough to pay for them. And we were able to give her a physical check for that. And then even this weekend, we launched our first market, and we had people who, had not had access to markets because of the pay structure or the over exposure of having to set up and stuff like that,” said Quinn.
“Being able to say no, this is going to be an artist forward market and see first time, people set up and we had one photographer come to us and say they made their first sell ever at the market because the opportunity was accessible to them, and they didn’t have to face that over exposure of financial overexposure when they first set up,” said Quinn.
“I saw a bunch of this kind of stuff. Walnut Street publishing on social media, and I thought it was really cool. And I attended one of their poetry open mic events, which was really awesome. So, I decided to reach out to them, and then they offered me an internship. I would say a lot of my daily life is antsy and when I come here, I don’t feel that it’s more calming. It’s a relaxing environment, but it’s also more of a controlled chaos where I feel like I can reach out and do crazy things if I wanted to. But at the same time, there’s like an organized method to the madness. I would say,” said Page Jenkins, an intern at Walnut Street Publishing.
