In 1985, when I started Earthen Vessel Productions, it was a tiny recording studio that my husband hired someone to build for me amid the apple trees near our house on Cache Creek in Lake County, California. Its sole purpose was to record the Scripture choruses that in 1979 the Lord had called me to write. For many reasons, the first recording was not made until 1990. Released on cassette, The Battle Belongs To The Lord went into the hands of Believers to encourage them to keep marching in the hard times of life. My friend Dale Enstrom, who had put color on my basic piano and guitar tracks with his synthesizer, told me he thought we needed to send some to the soldiers in the Gulf War, so 350 copies went out “To Any Soldier.” Many heartwarming letters of thanks came back. I was so surprised.
After my husband Dennis retired, we moved to a higher, wilder area with deer and rabbits and skunks, wild turkeys, and an occasional mountain lion. There I built another studio amid the pine trees overlooking Clearlake. By then I had a real recording engineer named Dan Worley.
As a Third Generation Chinese American, I felt a responsibility to collect the stories of my clan because there were not many books from the inside of a Chinese immigrant family. I wanted to establish my family's presence in the historical record, and I didn't want the books to go out of print. That’s why I started writing and publishing books. I had seven months of living with my parents gathering their history as my dad recovered from a surgery gone awry and the amputation of some toes which resulted from the carnage. My father was bedfast, but his restless, creative brain was driving him nuts, so I put a little tape recorder on his chest and said, “Tell me the story of when you were fishing on the train trestle and the train came.” It was my favorite of his childhood tales. How would he escape on the narrow tracks fifty feet above the water? I wanted all the details and I wanted them in his unique voice. That started a flood of stories I had never heard.
My mother was reluctant to tell more than the stories I had heard all my life--about the eight-pound sadiron she used when she was only eight years old, about the red rooster who attacked her mother every time she went in to get one of his harem, about the customers who were named for their laundry (Two Towels and Stinky Socks). She said I was wasting my time. Who would care about life in a Chinese laundry? It wasn't interesting. She told me I should write a best seller and make a lot of money and be famous. But as I transcribed and edited her voice into vignettes that I read back to her, she began to see how serious I was, and she began to remember. At first it was the bitter things—the hairy mold that grew on the inside of the walls, the sweltering heat in Merced summers inside a brick building with a coal-burning stove and only one small fan. But then she began telling me about the clock weeds that would wind into corkscrews when you stuck them into your sweater and the geese that flew in Vees honking across the autumn sky. She remembered funny things, tender things, and beauty. It healed her. Inside the Oy Quong Laundry came out in 1994, Earthen Vessel’s first publication. It is still my favorite book. My dad’s childhood stories came out a little later—Son of South Mountain & Dust, the names of his parents.
Since then we've published more than thirty titles. One is a book on microcurrent that I wrote with my dad, Dr. Thomas W. Wing, the inventor of modern microcurrent, and my husband, Dr. Dennis Greenlee, who helped pioneer many of the procedures and protocols back in the 1970s and '80s. Four are collections of the artwork of master painter Milford Zornes, N.A., who was one of my father’s patients and a family friend for over fifty years. Three are volumes of poetry from the first three Poets Laureate of Lake County—Jim Lyle, James BlueWolf, and me, Carolyn Wing Greenlee. And of course there are all the books on my family. We have art courses and devotionals and an animal cartooning book I drew in 1976.
I didn't intend to publish anything but my own work, but I kept running into great stories from other people. We have original memoirs from a man who drove his own wagon and herd of cattle from South Carolina to California when he was fifteen and a man whose wagon was one of the last to come across into California at the end of the great migration West. I wondered how they were able to face such hardship with humor and energy. Why was that? I wanted to know, and I wanted readers to know. It seems that especially young people give up so easily these days. I wanted to publish books about real people overcoming extreme adversity. We need to know others have done it, and done it well.
In December of 2008 I graduated from Guide Dogs for the Blind with my black Lab Hedy, adding both a new love in my life and a new direction to my writing. A Gift of Dogs, twelve stories from my time at GDB, offers an inside look into the experience of blindness, as well as the life changing that comes with a gift of a guide dog. I’m working on two more books on guide dogs—A Gift of Puppies, which is stories of puppy raisers who invest fifteen to eighteen months preparing a puppy for guide dog work, and Steady Hedy, my own hard walk into freedom with the help of many other people and my little hard-headed Hedy.
Meanwhile, the music has continued, though the albums have been from other artists. Time of Light, Dan’s original songs, was released in 2008. Tied to the Stone is the name of the band. And most recently, blues singer Bettie Mae Fikes recorded How Blue Can You Get? live in a barn in Ancient Lake Gardens. I will be recording my second album of Scripture choruses sometime this year. Finally!
Why are we called “Earthen Vessel Productions”? Because we have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us (2 Corinthians 4:7). I never expected to have an independent publishing company or produce music that would be heard around the world. I just wanted to have a place to record the music God had given me, and to keep my family’s history in print so their stories would not be forgotten.
Earthen Vessel Productions
Book & Music Publishing
Secure Processing