Momoko Yamaneko, Editor-in-Chief of Prionailurus Press

Momoko Yamaneko stifled a nervous laugh as she responded to a reporter’s question at a press conference held at her office this morning.[pullquote]The time has come for us to live up to our responsibility.—Momoko Yamaneko, Editor-in-Chief, Prionailurus Press[/pullquote]

The question was a simple one: “Why now?”

“You’d have thought by our name that this would have been our mandate all along…our raison d’être, so to speak,” said the Editor-in-Chief of Prionailurus Press, which today became the first publishing house in The Park to respond to the plight of striped and spotted Animals.

But Yamaneko stopped short of apologizing for the company’s seeming neglect of its own community.

“A constellation of factors influence publishing decisions,” she explained, “and often we are forced, by the markets and by our readers, to put our survival ahead of even our most heartfelt desires. But we called you here today to announce that the time has come for us to live up to our responsibility in this regard. We will be putting striped and spotted writers at the forefront. That part of our agenda is set for the next three years, at least.”

The  publishing house, she said, has committed a sizeable amount of currency and all its other resources to finding and publishing emerging writers from the striped and spotted community.

“We want to welcome them to the Prionailurus family,” she said. “We want hear and read their stories of the challenges they’ve faced in the past and those they face now. We want to strengthen our own community at the same time as we work to foster understanding among all species.”

The publishing house’s new mandate begins “now,” the Editor-in-Chief said emphatically, as the press conference drew to a close.

“We have a host of new and exciting initiatives in development. You will be hearing from us very soon in this regard,” she said.