Who is celium?
celium began as a way for me, Cal Angus, to collect my teaching under one umbrella organization that is separate from my identity as an independent writer. I am a trans writer, publisher, and teacher. I have a deep connection to the mycelial threads through which celium travels. I write with and about them, most especially lichen. I spend time with them outside. I make space for them in my life, my home, my books and stories.
In short, I make habitats where celium and people can coexist. And I’m still figuring out what that means.
celium is a learning organization. This means I’m still learning how, and how not, to be an organization, and I always will be. celium remains open to failing, to being curious about failure, to corrections and feedback from the community. Starting a new endeavor is rife with failure and hazards, and this is what makes it interesting.
You can learn more about my books and writing on my personal website.
Why celium?
I’ve spent over a decade working in academia, publishing, and retail, and there’s one thing all these fields have in common: they are all broken. It turns out that prioritizing profit and growth at all costs is no way to teach, learn, support resilient communities and usher interesting work into the world that will shape the culture in present and future. And yet, most “small publishers” still play by the rules of the big ones.
But celium isn’t about trying to get back to a mythical smoothly functioning version of capitalism. It’s about seeing if by linking these areas together we can do them all a little bit better. It’s about connecting the writers to the editors to the readers, and connecting “idea to value.” It’s about trying to do as much as we can with what we’ve got, and about dreaming beyond those limits. It’s about rejecting the status quo and believing that we can come up with something that’s at least As Good As, if not a fair bit better.
Like its namesake, celium expands the inventory of possible stories and communicates across vast distances. Celium sends imagination deeper, farther, wider. celium does this through low-cost classes and workshops, and by (eventually) publishing books missing from the broader literary landscape in the US, writers whose work engages questions of form, legibility, and accessibility from a myriad of different directions. celium books are in between, contradictory, adrift, alert, but they’re not quite “experimental,” at least not how the term has come to be understood in the American literary sphere. celium books are too genuine, too earnest, too interested in connecting with the world and uninterested in categories to test and reject something.
Above all, celium’s books are endemic. They cannot be found elsewhere. celium will act as a refuge for the work that would otherwise be lost.
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Tin House Workshop
Independent Publishing Resource Center
Corporeal Writing
The Seventh Wave
Clark College
Smith College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Odyssey Bookshop
Powell’s Books
Catapult Book Group
Pacific University MFA in Writing
Juniper Summer Writing Institute