The name
For the first six months of its existence, this press was called Crossroads. As of October 2026, it changed to Narrows Press. Same people, same books, same promises to our authors. Only the name changed.
We picked Crossroads on instinct. It felt right for a press that publishes books written at the turning points of a life. I didn't look much further than that. What I hadn't considered was how many others were already out there under the same name or very close to it, some of them even publishing related books. Sooner or later that would have confused readers and authors, and probably a few lawyers. Better to fix it now.
We found a name that belonged to us about fifteen miles down the river.
Below Chattanooga, past Moccasin Bend, the Tennessee River cuts a canyon through the Cumberland Plateau. People have been naming this water since long before the steamboats. The rivermen who worked it in the 1800s had a name for this challenging section of twenty-odd miles. They called it the Narrows. We now identify the area as between Raccoon Mountain and the south end of Walden Ridge.
It was the most feared stretch of the river. The water had names: the Suck (from a very early map), the Pot, the Skillet, the Pan. Flatboats went to pieces there, and so did steamboats. Going upstream through it was close to impossible, which meant that for a long time the Narrows decided what this whole part of Tennessee could become.
It was also the way through. If you were going west by water, there was no other road. You didn't go around the Narrows. You went down into it, held on, and came out the other side into open water.
In 1913 Hales Bar Dam backed the river up over the rapids, and the Narrows went still. The gorge is still there. You can paddle it now, and on a gray morning you can still feel what it must have been.
The books we publish are mostly about a stretch like that. A marriage that goes sideways. Work that stops meaning what it used to. A grief nobody prepared you for. The middle of a life that no longer makes sense the way it did. Nobody chooses to be in the narrows. In my experience it's also, usually, the only way through.
I've said on the podcast for a while now that “the difficulty in life is the choice.” The Narrows are the dangerous waters that come after the commitment: the current, the cost, and, if you hold on, the open water.
The river carries an older name. Tennessee comes from Tanasi, a Cherokee town upriver on the Little Tennessee. The meaning of the word has been lost. The way it has long been understood is “the place where the river bends.”
Our legal name is Narrows Press, LLC. We also go by The Narrows.
Our lanes keep their names. Bearings, Soundings, and Passages were river words to begin with. They fit even better now.
Thanks for coming down the river with us.
