Whitworth University is getting into the publishing business.
The north Spokane college is creating Pines Press, in conjunction with Washington State University Press. The project was conceived by two women, one at each university.
The two protagonists are Amanda Clark, the dean of Whitworth’s library and special programs, and Linda Bathgate, the assistant director and editor-in-chief of WSU Press. Clark says they met just before the start of the COVID pandemic.
One day, after Bathgate came to Spokane to give a publishing workshop for Whitworth faculty, the two went to dinner and conceived of Pines Press.
“I kind of broached the question of would that be something that Whitworth might be interested in pursuing. And you jumped on it, yes!” Bathgate said in a recent interview with Clark.
The pandemic intervened and the idea was put on hold. The two corresponded via email for a couple of years. The Pines Press idea fell down the priority list. Then, as the COVID threat was waning, Amanda Clark got in her car and took a trip to Pullman.
“I was so enthusiastic about WSU Press. They do such beautiful jobs with the physical book, where many publishers have moved away from really enjoying that end product experience,” Clark said. “The pairing with WSU was perfect. It’s close regionally and then I felt that Linda and I had a shared meeting of minds around publishing. We just hit it off.”
Clark says Pines Press will initially focus on the Whitworth academic community.
“I served on our faculty research and development committee here at Whitworth and, during that three-year time, I came to realize that a lot of our faculty, for a variety of reasons, would do research or begin a manuscript, but it would never come to publication. They would never see the project all the way through, which is why Linda first came to do that seminar on campus,” she said.
“I thought I’ll bet there are faculty all over campus with dusty manuscripts in bottom drawers in their desk that never saw the light of day. I want to give them a platform, both here and at other schools, of course, a platform to seek out a real publication success,” she said.
“Their subject areas are going to be distinctly different from what we publish at WSU Press,” Bathgate said. “Whitworth having a religious affiliation, we’ll be watching out for anything that might be proselytizing. We want to keep it on the academic as much as we can, an academic footing.”
As for how WSU benefits, “There’s a couple of things. Part of it is it supports our mission, in terms of serving the community and providing another channel of publication for Whitworth scholars who might otherwise not want to publish elsewhere or not be able to publish elsewhere. It certainly benefits them. And for us, it gives us more content to produce and sell,” she said.
After all, if you don’t have books to sell, you don’t make any money.
“So it’s a way for us to expand our publishing program and then Whitworth will do a lot of promotion to its own alums and its own contacts and that’s a community that we don’t reach,” Bathgate said.
She says she doesn’t view the cooperation between the two presses as a competitive situation.
Bathgate says this is the first arrangement WSU Press has made with a peer institution.
“I came to the Press in 2019 and my plan at that point was to reach out to Western Washington, the other state universities, as well as the smaller universities that might want to have a publishing list that they could control, but didn’t have the facilities to actually start up a press,” she said.
Clark hopes Pines Press will provide enough incentive for Whitworth faculty to revive old projects or start new ones. She says her bosses in the administration have been very supportive.
“I was very fortunate that my current provost was very enthusiastic about this project and he’s taking a report to the board meeting this April to share with our board of directors,” she said.
If all goes well, Clark says it’s possible the first books with Pines Press on the spine could be released by early next year.
