La Sirène Press · Subscription Publishing
A Vodou Cosmology of the Natal Chart
Book One of Savala-Ginen · by Fabiola Jean-Louis
First Light
Published the old way
Before a book existed it had subscribers. They paid for its making, and their names were printed in the front of the first edition, permanently part of the object.
Constellation of First Magnitude is being written, painted, and illuminated by hand, and it is published this way. Once a month, subscribers receive First Light, a letter from the workroom showing the book come into being. No one else sees what subscribers see, and no one sees it sooner. The list of names closes at one hundred.
The work
Savala-Ginen takes the natal chart, the West's own map of a life written in the stars, and turns it to a purpose it was never built for: the archiving of Black life, our lives, with precision, through the cosmology that is ours. A love letter to Haiti, and to her people, wherever the water has carried us.
Choose your place at the gate. Every subscription shows you the book being made. When the list of names closes, it closes.
The monthly First Light letter. What was painted, what was written, an image from the book in progress, and one teaching from the tradition in plain language. The making of the book, as it happens.
Subscribe →Everything in Reader, plus your name printed in the first edition, a copy of the first edition when it publishes, and one small print or illuminated folio from La Sirène Press each year.
Everything in Subscriber, with the first-edition copy signed, plus one archival print from the Constellation paintings each year, private first access to new paintings seven days before public release, and your name in the acknowledgments.
Your name in the first edition, a copy of the book when it publishes, a small archival print from La Sirène Press, and the First Light letters through publication day. The pure historical model: pay once for the making, receive the book with your name inside.