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Who we are

We began life in 2003 as The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, since shortened to Rainy Nights Press. We had a single purpose at the time: to publish Raising Our Voices, and Anthology of Oregon Poets Against the War. The war being the one in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a success and inspired us to publish other books by area poets and authors we met through that initial effort.

Rainy Nights Press published a number of works by authors and poets in the Willamette Valley, including Red Dust Rising by Marilyn Johnston, The Eye of the Moon by Shelley Davidow, Marginal Notes by Jay Theimeyer, Navigation by Brittney Corrigan, and in 2014 we published Ralph Salisbury’s Like the Sun in Storm.

In 2012 we started Readings at Milepost 5, a monthly literary event that continued until 2016, and in those same years we published Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World, an online literary magazine that attracted national attention.

Other writers and poets whose works we have published include Ursula K LeGuin and Judith Barrington, who wrote the introduction to Raising Our Voices, Marge Piercy, Ingrid Wendt, Toni Ann Johnson, among many other fine writers and poets featured in Raising Our Voices and Elohi Gadugi Journal.

In 2016, we decided to focus our time on finishing our own books, which we’d long neglected. We published a trade paperback edition of our mystery, Bartlett House in 2018, and Ghosts of Saint-Pierre in 2022. The first two books of The Sweetland Quartet came out in 2022 and 2025. You can find purchase links on our website above.

In 2023, now retired, we moved from Portland, back to Central Oregon where we grew up. Due to our very limited resources, Rainy Nights Press can no longer publish book-length works by other authors. We still have limited copies of the books we have published, which are available for a small fee and mailing costs.

We aren’t finished yet. Wehave been considering a Central Oregon journal of place and have also been publishing songs as Studio A Productions/Rainy Nights Music. Possible other projects in the future.

—Duane Poncy & Patricia J McLean, Founders and Editors