QI · L · ARA (kee-LAR-ah)
QILARA Press grew from a small international creative community of people reading, writing, making art, sharing ideas and responding to one another. We lived in different places and countries, spoke different languages, and connected through ordinary technologies that allowed a creative conversation to cross a room—or an ocean.
Over time, we noticed something: some of the most interesting things were happening between the usual categories.
QI — Vitality
Qi (also rendered chi) comes from the Chinese concept of vital energy or life force—the energy that animates.
That felt familiar to us.
An idea rarely remained exactly as it arrived. Someone shared a poem, an image, a question, a fragment. Someone else responded. Something came alive.
L — Link. Language.
We shared English, but many of us also brought other languages, dialects, cultures and ways of seeing into the conversation.
Fortunately, geography didn’t determine who could enter the conversation. We connected through screens and texts, telephone calls and video chats, and sometimes through something as old-fashioned as a letter or package arriving in the mail.
Language connected us. Modern technology linked us across distance. Sometimes creative work quite literally circled the globe.
ARA — Author. Reader. Artist.
We discovered that these identities weren’t particularly useful as mutually exclusive boxes.
The author was also a reader. Readers and authors talked about what they had read, and those exchanges sometimes inspired entirely new writing. Responses to writing inspired new creative work. Likewise, visual art inspired writing.
Reading was not separate from the creative process. It could change what happened next.
Often, one small creation shared with other people became the seed of an entire body of work. New work blossomed, the creative community around it grew, and our understanding and appreciation of one another deepened alongside it.
During one of those conversations, a few members of the collective were talking with a poet who summed up something we had been experiencing:
“The forest is already in the seed.”
That statement captures much of what became QILARA Press.
So it is fitting that the poet who said those words, Monique Susanna Simón, became QILARA Press’s first published author—even before we formally opened our doors.
Her collection, To My Wild ~ poems from an untamed heart, uniquely embodies this way of creating. Her writing and visual art grew in new directions as she read and responded to the creative work, ideas and perspectives of other people within the QILARA Collective and beyond.
And yet, we knew from the beginning that publication would never mark the end of the creative conversation.
For us, each published work is another seed—tended first by the QILARA creative collective and then by the people who encounter it after publication:
You.
The reader who discovers it.
The artist who responds to it.
The writer in whom it plants another idea.
That continuing exchange is part of the life of the work. It is why Reader stands alongside Author and Artist in our name, and why QILARA Press is being built as more than a place to find books.
The forest may already exist in the seed. But words take root when we tend the garden together.
Welcome to QILARA.
