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Rain Mountain Press has evolved from the magazine Skidrow Penthouse and takes its name from "When The Cicadas Return" a poem by Bill Featherman, an obscure and homeless Minnesota poet and musician:

"This is the night Andromeda crawled/down from your ceilings flatland/of shining crickets,//a night to check the leaves/and bring the scarecrows to bed //This is the night cicadas landed on Earth/and set out toward the half-fires//and rain mountains that the people left behind."

We favor writers who speak the language of storms, the smell of fire after the smoke is gone, styles that are idiosyncratic and grounded, while at the same time suggesting realities far beyond themselves, whether those realities be political, cultural, or of some undefined nature. We want to spread the voice scrawled on the walls of an overpass during a cold Rocky Mountain night, the way Bill Featherman did on the night of his death in 1993.

Rain Mountain Press will operate as a publishing collective in which authors will actively participate.