Homegrown Story

At Flowerbox Books, you’ll find stories you won’t find anywhere else. Why? It’s true that all Flowerbox Books are informed by a Queer perspective, but what really makes them different is how we “grow” them.

Whether it’s a Hollywood blockbuster, a show on a streaming service, or a novel from a big publishing company, so many of the stories we encounter in our lives are created with the money in mind. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does limit the kind of stories that are made widely available. If a story doesn’t stand to attract an audience of a certain size, whatever its other merits, it will not be produced.

In practical terms, this means that we rarely see stories that are radically different – stories that challenge us instead of just comforting us, stories that ask us to engage with our most fundamental assumptions. Even now, when there are more LGBT stories on bookshelves and movie screens than ever before, too many of them feel like just more of the same. The same love story, just with two same-sex partners. Plots that ultimately resolve to a familiar status quo.

At Flowerbox Books, we believe that stories are places where dreams are born and visions are shaped, and that by sharing our dreams and visions, we can come to better see what sort of world we want to live in. In creating our stories, we start by asking, What about our way of looking at the world do we want to share? What is necessary to make our world better, but seems impossible? The money, always, is secondary.

In that way, our books are like the flower boxes you see in the windows of apartment buildings. They are attempts – however small – by an individual in a community to improve the environment for everyone. Flowerbox Books are homegrown stories.