The Wild Lot Ethos
A wild lot is a vacant space in a city. In a place built to accommodate a human civilization, it is a space abandoned to the whims of the natural. It is the overlooked, absent from the economy. Yet, a presence, often lush and rampantly green, sometimes noisy with insect music, full of the motions of microbes and flora and fauna, living free in spite of the economic context that implies it should not be there.
That’s kind of how we see our work here: performing oppositional defiance to an economic system that considers the breathing planet as something to be disregarded until it has been confiscated for money. There is beauty in the abandoned spaces and in the places of the world where the nonhuman impulse is allowed to assume or resume dominance.
We publish work that helps people think, feel, and operate in the Anthropocene. We want to be the vivid link to the past, to the wild, to the offbeat, that helps people make sense of the world as it is and to better prepare for our hot, turbulent future—in order to make it greener, humanistic, and utopic.
Who We Are
Jeremy E. Hauck grew up exploring the fields and woods of the pin-oak flats of southwest Ohio, where his family settled in the 19th century. After a mini-career in journalism, he thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, earned his MFA in fiction from Temple University, and met Sonja while editing the graduate-student-run literary journal, TINGE. He works as a book compositor in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he resides with his family, running the publishing-side of Wild Lot, and writing creative nonfiction and fiction in his free moments.
Email: jeremy@wildlotpress.com
Sonja Crafts runs the Wild Lot House, a rural residency program for emerging writers that is set to launch in 2022. She has an MFA in fiction and is one class shy of her certificate in sustainable agriculture from University of Massachusetts: Amherst. She is presently working on her second novel, set in the underground music scene that thrived in the suburban landscape of central Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. Her short stories often dwell on the places shared by character and nature, and have most recently appeared in Best New Writing and Fourth River. Former editor of TINGE Magazine, she is a freelance writer and college writing instructor, and currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with Jeremy Hauck and their two small children, Edel and August.
Email: sonja@wildlotpress.com
As an independent benefit company, our mission is to advance the arts and support the conservation of green space. Wild Lot Press is based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Midland, Ohio.
Wild Lot Press is a proud member of the IBPA and CLMP.
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