Hi there. I’m Hugh Hollowell, the proprietor of Canebrake Studio.
Canebrake Studio is the legal entity that “holds” all my creative pursuits. It’s a legal business, and acts as my publishing company, and as the store through which I sell the things I make.
I did it this way for a number of reasons.
One is that it makes taxes simpler. Not cheaper, mind, but simpler. Don’t ask me much about this, as I have no tax advice at all – I can’t even balance my checkbook. Which is why simple works for me.
It also gives me space to talk about the creative projects I’m working on, and the behind the scenes stuff, and all the things that people who follow my writing for other reasons do not care about.
So why the name Canebrake?
Canebrakes are wetland ecosystems in the Southeast US that are made up mostly of river cane, a sort of native bamboo. They are dense and nearly impenetrable, and have historically been the place where the dispossessed have hidden to recuperate and survive. In the aftermath of the Trail of Tears, indigenous Americans hid there; during slavery, escaped enslaved people hid there. Canebrakes seem scary to the privileged, but are places of safety and renewal to the people and ecosystems they seek to harm. Canebrakes are sources of a completely renewable building material we as a society in the US have virtually ignored. Instead, our response to canebrakes is to destroy them.
Safety to the dispossessed. Scary to the powerful. Extremely useful, but largely ignored and even targeted for destruction.
Seems reasonable to me.