A New Website Is Born

Hi and welcome to the brand new website for Fire Ecology Press! I’m feeling pretty excited about it, and I think it’s a good time to take just a minute to reflect on how far I’ve come so far, as a letterpress printmaker and a small business owner. 

I started Fire Ecology Press in mid-2022, after the successful kickstarter campaign I ran for my first big letterpress project, the Tarot of Sorts. I started doing artist markets around then too, and you need to be legally a “business” to sell at those sorts of events, so I got the DBA for Fire Ecology Press and registered it as a sole proprietorship. (In a way, the name actually predates the business, and even me becoming a printmaker — Fire Ecology Publishing was already the name I’d been releasing my zines under for many years.)

Since then, I’ve had a lot of cool opportunities and done a lot of things. I’ve honed my talents. I’ve learned from incredibly talented printmakers, and I’ve taught a lot of people myself. (I even went back to school for art education, which I’m studying now.) I’ve made prints for festivals and musicians and comedians and politicians and drag queens. I moved briefly to Nashville to work for a season at the historical printshop Hatch Show Print (probably the coolest experience of my life). I’ve been in group shows, I’ve won a few honorable mentions, and I had my first solo site-specific installation last summer. I’ve made friends. I’ve lost friends. (The spiritual hands of Mickey Harmon will be all over my art for the rest of my life.) And then I’ve made even more friends. 

Letterpress really changed my life, and Fire Ecology Press has been with me all along the way.

This is the second website I’ve made; the first launched in Fall 2024, and while it served me well enough for a couple of years, I’m not sad to see it retire. This new version, while simpler in design, speaks more about me and what I do. It reflects the fact that I’ve been experimenting with a number of other non-printmaking mediums, including getting back into collage art (which was my primary medium before I discovered letterpress). And it gives my art the space to speak for itself, I think. 

I wasn’t sure that I was going to add a blog to the new website, but as you can see, I decided to go for it. I post most of my updates about what I’m up to on Instagram, but I’m not a big social media fan, and I like the idea of having my own place that I control where I can share some of my longer-form thoughts. (I’m thinking about doing a newsletter, would you sign up for it? What if it was a physical mail club newsletter?? A friend of mine has been doing that and I think it’s totally inspiring. Let’s all be a little less reliant on technology.)

What's next for my artistic career? I'm not sure. Let's find out together!