Last Chair Press

There are two great things about skiing: first chair and last chair.

My friends and I never say “last run.” There’s an old joke that skiers get hurt on their last run, which is why it’s the last one, so we say “let’s go down and reassess.” But nothing beats the end of the day. The slopes have emptied out, your legs are shot, and you get one more chance to dance with the mountain before après, a good meal, and enough sleep to catch first chair in the morning.

This press could just as easily have been called First Chair. Last Chair won, and not because of the lift. It’s the last run that matters. It’s how you finish. More often than not, that run decides how you’ll remember the whole day.

I started the press to give my writing a home of its own. I run a travel business, organize pickleball tournaments, serve on a ski club board, teach scuba, and crew a sailboat on Wednesday nights. None of that belongs here. This is the one place that’s only about the books.

The idea came out of a plastic file box. In the summer of 2026 my wife and I cleared out the apartment of Ron, a relative of hers, who had died with no one to carry his things forward. In the box was a screenplay from 1989, which became the first book. Alongside it were folders of everything else he’d ever thought of: game shows, character names, questions he was still chasing. We didn’t keep those, and I’ve thought about them since. I wish I had catalogued my own ideas over the years. Finding his made me want to see what I would do with mine.

What gets published here is whatever interests me. Childhood stories. Athletic adventures. The nature of reality, the biblical stories, and the idea of God, which I find endlessly interesting even though I’m not religious. The possibility that human history runs deeper and stranger than the textbooks allow. An adoption story that’s still unfolding. And whatever else catches my attention along the way. There is no house genre, and there won’t be one.

I should say why I’m doing this at sixty.

I was adopted at ten weeks old and have known it for as long as I can remember. I was raised by a loving family and never once treated differently from my three younger sisters, who were my parents’ natural children. But I knew I was different, even before I was old enough to understand what that meant. Being loved and being certain you belong turn out to be two separate things, and I’ve long wondered whether that gap is where my self-doubt began. At fifty I was reunited with my birth mother, but that’s a whole other story.

My father loved me, and he was hard on me. He was a man of conviction, unwavering, and he wanted the best for me. His way of pushing was to tell me I’d never finish something and then say, “Prove me wrong.” I usually felt I wasn’t good enough, or that what I’d done wasn’t good enough, but that was the point. I proved him wrong on the black belt, the master’s degree, thirty years of marriage, and two kids raised. It never quite settled the question in my own head. I thought of myself as mentally tough, but underneath I wasn’t sure, and I was afraid of finding out. So I signed up for a 24-hour GORUCK Heavy. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I finished it.

I’ve always felt I had a creative mind and never gave it a chance. These books are me giving it one. They’re also, if I’m honest, one more way of finding out what I’m made of.

Last Chair Press is not open to submissions. Everything else is at hello@lastchairpress.com.

Michael R. Vollmer
Freehold, New Jersey