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Who we are

Originally called The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, we began life in 2003 with a single purpose, 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 authors.

Founded by writers Duane Poncy and Patricia McLean, 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 are Ursula K LeGuin, Marge Piercy, Judith Barrington, Ingrid Wendt, David Abel, Toni Ann Johnson, among many others.

In 2016, Patricia and Duane decided to focus their time on their own books, which they had been neglecting,

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.

In 2003, Patricia and Duane, both now retired, moved from Portland, back to Central Oregon. Due to limited resources, Rainy Nights Press can no longer publish book-length works by other authors. But we have been considering a Central Oregon journal of place and have also been publishing Duane’s songs as Rainy Nights Music.