ABOUT GARN PRESSThe Quest for Knowledge that Can be Acted Upon.

Garn Press publishes digital chapbooks and experimental books. Some books are available in limited edition paper copies and a few are available in rare handmade form as book arts originals. Books are changing and so are the opportunities for writers and readers to engage with each other in new and original ways.

The last time such a transformational shift took place in human communication was in the 1500’s when chapbooks and pamphlets were first mass produced. “Chap” originates in Middle English from the old English “capman” meaning a tradesman. Some accounts of the origin of the word propose that “cheap” was added to capman, which became a peddler called a “chapman”. Shakespeare referred to chapmen in Love’s Labour Lost, and in Troilus and Cressida chapmen are mentioned along with vendors, pedlars, and unruly people. In 1611, Cotgrave described a chapman as “A paultrie

Pedler, who in a long packe or maund (which he carries for the most part open and hanging from his necke before him) hath Almanacks, Bookes of News, or other trifling ware to sell”.

Chapbooks sold for a penny. They were sixteen (later 24) pages long, and they were the first books available to the common people. Chapbooks were for all people, with woodcuts providing illustrations for the many who could not read. They were religious and legendary, provided medical advice, recipes to cook, as well as stories, nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

Chapbooks were often subversive, with coded messages and dangerous ideas at a time when criticism of the crown could bring imprisonment or death. In England, the first organized protest of “the masses” is ascribed to the common reading.

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“The Mission of Garn Press is the Quest for Knowledge that can be Acted Upon”

People and the Planet

Language and Social Policy

Imagination and the

Human Spirit

of a chapbook, and there was concern amongst the ruling classes that the dangerous ideas contained in some of these small books could topple the crown.

In a society that is so off kilter it is no longer the task of writers, as the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz once wrote, to keep “the world off balance”, but the task is still, as Geertz wrote, to pull out the rugs and to upset the tea tables. The challenge for writers of the chapbooks is, as Geertz states, to unsettle, embarrass the categories, and uncover the odd actualities in a re-Visioning of U.S. society, which is the most unequal in the developed world.

Garn Press invites scholars across paradigms, disciplines, and professions to engage in new and dynamic ways with a general readership in reimagining life on Earth. The Press has three divisions:

1.People and the Planet

The chapbooks in this series bridge the humanities and sciences as they address the enduring question, “What are the relationships between people and the planet?” The re-Visioning challenge for Garn Press is to uncover the shifts in thinking about modes of existence that are taking place, and to publish chapbooks and experimental books by scientists and philosophers who are engaged in ground breaking work that, quite literally, requires transformative rethinking of the possible future connections between people and the planet.

2. Language and Social Policy

The challenge for authors of chapbooks and experimental books in the Language and Social Policy Series is to heed the warning of Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt.

“Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends upon them,” Murdoch reminds us in The Sovereignty of Good. “The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

“The work we do around language is central to human experience”, Arendt similarly reminds us in Life of the Mind. “Analogies, metaphors and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds onto the work,” Arendt writes, “even when absentmindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience.”

Garn seeks scholars who, as Toni Morrison wrote in her Nobel speech, “think of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences.”

Garn Press publishes digital chapbooks and experimental books. Some books are available in limited edition paper copies and a few are available in rare handmade form as book arts originals.

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3. Imagination and the Human Spirit

“It is imagination,” Maxine Greene writes, “with its capacity to both make order out of chaos and open experience to the mysterious and the strange—that moves us to go in quest, to journey where we have never been.” The challenge for authors of the chapbooks and experimental books in the Imagination and Human Spirit Series is to incite the imagination by creating intense intellectual and emotional spaces that evoke the human spirit, and encourage us to re-imagine the possibilities, not just for our own lives, but for all people on the planet.

The quest of Garn Press is for knowledge about our natural and social world that can be acted upon. What Garn seeks is to view in situ how people have complicated the inherently complex relationships between people and the planet. Garn is convinced that when renowned scientists from the physical and social sciences are joined by philosophers, novelists, poets, and playwrights, the prism through which we “see” people

and the planet shifts dramatically, becoming multifaceted, engaging us in consideration of the affectual and relational dynamics of our earthly life – the local and the global, the familiar and the strange. And so Garn presents the writings of world renowned scientists and scholars, metaphorically unclothed, without the esoteric language of their disciplines, in chapbooks written for all to read.

To receive updates on the launch of Garn Press and more information about Garn authors and eChapbooks please send an email to: dennytaylor@garnpress.com.

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3“Books are changing and so are the opportunities for writers and readers to engage with each other in new and original ways.”- Denny Taylor

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“We rose at 6:05 and went to bed at 9:05.We slept on straw.We ate bad food.We ate in silence listening to one of our kind read bloody stories about torture.I took my turn to read.Sometimes we secretly waited for the delivery man and begged for bread”

Jim Gee, "Vampires", in Blowing Out The Candles, Book I, Souls

Denny Taylor spent every summer of her childhood living with her Grandparents “on the Garn”. The Garn is short for Garn-yr-erw, a coal mining village in South Wales. The coal miners and their families lived in segregated villages, not in the beautiful green valleys, but in four roomed row-houses built on heaps of grey-black slag, the detritus from the mines when the shiny black coal was dug up. Nevertheless it was a beautiful place, filled not only with deep hardship and sorrow, but also with the music of brass bands and the voices of people singing and telling great stories. Big Pit is now a coal mine museum, and Blaenavon, the nearest town, is a World Heritage Site.

“Garn Press is named for the Garn,” Taylor says. “We used to go into the hills and drop stones down a 19th century shaft. We would lie around the edge of the shafts, with our heads and shoulders over the edge staring down into the emptiness, terrified and exhilarated, foolish and brave, seeing nothing but the void, dropping stones, watching them momentarily as they hit the side where a few ferns grew, and then disappearing, counting, reaching

ten, and hearing the sound of the stone hit the water at the bottom of the shaft with a deep dead plunk. I’ve written about this in a novel called Rosie’s Umbrella that Garn will publish this Fall.”

“In a way, dropping stones down a mine shaft defines Garn,” Taylor says, “for as the stone falls we can see beyond the moment, focus on the particular and the infinite, the known and the unknown, the sublime, and the painfully exquisite. We can also see beyond ourselves and glimpse the world’s terrible nightmares. All of this is Garn.”

“The Garn is short for Garn-yr-erw, a coal

mining village in South Wales.”

The Origins of “Garn”GAR

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“In a way, dropping stones down a mine shaft defines Garn, for as the stone falls we can see beyond the moment, focus on the particular and the infinite, the known and the unknown, the sublime, and the painfully exquisite. We can also see beyond ourselves and glimpse the world’s terrible nightmares. All of this is Garn.”

Blowing Out The CandlesBook I SoulsBy Jim Gee

Sometimes, when a person has spent his life pursuing a life of scholarly work and deep contemplation, if a moment comes when he hears music or poetry, however strident or dissonant or melodic, whatever the text, and however raw and revealing it may be, he writes it down and does not fear it.

This is my understanding of how Jim Gee wrote his poems. He says he doesn’t know where the poems came from. They arrived it would seem, like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, only for Gee the “rite” comes in the winter, in the midst of his aging discontent.

“All of us humans think, feel, and speak in poetry when we hurt,” Gee says. “Prick us, do we not all bleed in pulses and rhythms, in metaphors and pleas? When we drop pretense, we are incensed as humans at unfairness. We are incensed at anyone being left out, put down, or left to drown in sorrow.”

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In an act of courage, Gee takes off his armor, and brutally honest, Gee peels back the layers, until all contrivance has left him and he appears before us vulnerable on the page.

Blowing Out The CandlesBook II Dad By Jim Gee

“People get old at different ages, some quite young,” Jim Gee says. “This stage-to-nowhere phase of life we call old age makes you think.”

Sometimes cynical, sometimes searing, at times gut wrenching, Gee’s poems are of heart and mind, filled with pathos and humor. They have the power to turn us inside out and make us think about our own lives, about our relationships with each other, about our covenants with religion, and about our passivity in dealing with government and bureaucracies. Sometimes he is strident and in our face, but Gee cares for us enough to take us into his life space. In an act of courage, he takes off his armor, and brutally honest, he peels back the layers, until all contrivance has left him and he appears before us vulnerable on the page. These are poems not only for quiet contemplation, but also poems to be shared.

The issues raised in Gee’s poems about the politics and ethics of representation, the demands of official ideology, and the inexplicable human capacity for good and evil, are more than enough to keep us all conscious of the increasing dehumanization of the age we live in.

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Blowing Out The CandlesBook III Love and Puds By Jim Gee

“I have spent my career as an academic,” Jim Gee tells us. “When I was young, to me being an academic meant being a secular priest. But my church is a fallen church. We no longer honor little things like truth, but only big things like money.”

There is enough about Gee’s poems to keep a conversation going in a class in the Humanities or Sciences for an entire semester, and the issues raised about the politics and ethics of representation, the demands of official ideology, and the inexplicable human capacity for good and evil, are more than enough to keep us all conscious of the increasing dehumanization of the age we live in.

If all this sounds too heavy, it is important to add – at the risk of Gee’s wrath – that his poems will also make you laugh. They are paradoxical as well as quixotic, filled with the absurdities of life that make good stories to share with friends over coffee or dinner. For sometimes in our lives

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Gee’s poems are paradoxical as well as quixotic. They are filled with the absurdities of life, for sometimes in our lives when our unconscious and conscious meet, the cry out loud comes in the form of a laugh.

Can the American People Avoid Disaster and (Possibly) Save the World?By Denny Taylor

In the Preface to Can the American People… Brian Cambourne writes that “the way Taylor links global sustainability, income, and educational and gender inequality highlights and illustrates the complexity and the 'connectedness' of the issues confronting us”.

“She uses her expertise as an ethnographer,” Cambourne states, “to move us across a range of different disciplines and domains of inquiry, subtly showing how they're linked by identifying the 'clues' she identifies to help us understand the complexities of staving off the catastrophe which will overtake us if we do nothing.”

“It will take the active engagement of people,” Taylor says, “the participation of diverse social groups working together, a focus on human well being, and the development of political will to make the planet a child safe zone.”

“When a system rides roughshod over its own basic assumptions, supersedes its own ends, so

“It will take the active engagement of people, the participation of diverse social groups working together, a focus on human well being, and the development of political will to make the planet a child safe zone.”

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when our unconscious and conscious meet, the cry out loud comes in the form of a laugh.

The issues raised in Gee’s poems about the politics and ethics of representation, the demands of official ideology, and the inexplicable human capacity for good and evil, are more than enough to keep us all conscious of the increasing dehumanization of the age we live in.

that no remedy can be found,” she writes, quoting Jean Baudrillard, “then we are contemplating not crisis but catastrophe”.

“It’s time to act,” Taylor says, “a good place to begin is by taking a critical stance and asking “Can the American People Save the World?”

About Denny TaylorThe first in her family to attend college, Denny

Taylor graduated from Whitelands College, London (now Roehampton University), one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in the United Kingdom. Championed by John Ruskin, the political economist, and William Morris of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the intellectual and artistic life of the college was an extraordinary environment for a young woman who arrived with no idea of what universities were all about.

“It was a place with a passion for scholarship,” Taylor says, “with a deep commitment to issues of social justice. My deep love of literature and the arts were imaginatively shaped and strengthened there.”

After a Masters degree in the Psychology of Reading at Rutgers University, Taylor studied for a second Masters and a Doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University. Taylor’s doctoral research focused on language and literacy, and her dissertation was subsequently published by Heinemann in 1983. Family Literacy is still in print and is regarded a classic within the field. Nine books followed, including Growing Up Literate

1.People and the Planet2.Language and Social Policy3.Imagination and the Human Spirit

which received the Mina Shaughnessy award from The Modern Language Association of America, and Toxic Literacies, which was nominated by the publisher for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2004, Taylor was inducted into the International Reading Association’s Reading Hall of Fame – which presently has approximately 100 researchers and scholars world-wide who are recognized for their contribution to the study of language, literacy and learning.

At Hofstra University, while Chair and Doctoral Director of Literacy Studies, Taylor founded and directed the International Center for Everybody’s Child (ICEC). The Center focused on the impact of catastrophic events – including armed conflict, natural disasters, extreme poverty, and public health emergencies – on the lives of children and their families. Taylor’s research has taken her to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, focusing on families and the impact of armed conflict on children. She was part of a first response initiative in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and she has written and spoken extensively about teachers as first responders when catastrophic events occur, and also on the impact of mass trauma on children, families, and communities.

Most recently, her transdisciplinary research has incorporated both the physical and social

sciences. She participated in the June, 2010 International Science Council (ICSU) forum at UNESCO in Paris, which focused on developing a vision of new institutional frameworks for Global Sustainability Research (Earth System Visioning). She subsequently authored four peer reviewed research papers which combined data from the social and physical sciences that were presented at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London in March, 2012.

Taylor brings all of these experiences to Garn. Caring deeply about people and the planet, about language and social policy, and about imagination and the human spirit, Taylor has made these the three pillars of the Garn Press. Contact Denny Taylor at dennytaylor@garnpress.com.

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Taylor cares deeply about people and the planet, about language and social policy, and about imagination and the human spirit, Taylor has made these the three pillars of the Garn Press.

Upcoming Launch and Supporting Garn Press

The people at Garn are working around-the-clock and are eagerly awaiting the launch of Garn Press which will take place early in the Fall. Garn is planning to launch at least one book a month, perhaps two. This may sound a bit ambitious for a small start-up publishing company, but it is definitely a viable option for Garn.

Garn will be very deliberately stretching the interactive capability of the Press. The Press is already meeting to talk about creating opportunities for people to discuss the issues raised by Garn books at a series of “global cafés” which people can attend or participate in virtually through a free live stream of each of the events. The purpose of the global cafés is to inspire social action in each of the divisions of Garn Press - People and the Planet, Language and Social Policy, Imagination and the Human Spirit. In the coming year Garn will also be establishing electronic community “take action” boards and on social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, with a global reach, to encourage participation in the discussion of critical issues by people around the world.

These global initiatives will be constantly evolving, as the quest for actionable knowledge takes us into deep discussion of some of the most profound issues facing people and the planet. Of critical importance is the question of how knowledge can be actionable if it means that people of widely differing—and—disconnected values, ethics, emotions, spiritual beliefs, levels of trust, and interests must work together? It’s a question that Garn can’t answer, but what Garn can do is bring people together to address a different version of the question, which is: If we include consideration for the health and well-being of all our children in our response to the global crises that are taking place, how will that affect our present and future actions?

There is no doubt that if humanity is to survive we must take better care of people and especially our children. As Garn invites you to participate in

this venture we could say that “What’s good for the planet is good for people”, and “What’s good for people is good for the planet.” The ultimate goal is a shift in thinking about the issues that both Garn and the global café participants identify, and through the global community interactive initiatives, create actionable knowledge. For this to work, Garn will need your participation. Stay tuned for Garn books and global cafés, you never know, between us we might make a difference.

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“What’s good for the planet is good for people”, and “What’s good for people is good for the planet.”

Where to Purchase Garn Press BooksAmazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, More

Books are changing and so are the opportunities for writers and readers to engage with each other in new and original ways. An electronic book (eBook, Digital Book) is a book-length publication in digital form, readable on tablets, eBook readers, computers or other electronic devices that feature controllable viewing screens.

Garn Press eBooks will be available for purchase through Amazon (for the Kindle Reader), Barnes & Noble (for the Nook reader), and the Apple store (for the iPad). Garn Press books will also be available as eBooks directly from the Garn Press web site. Select Garn Press books will be made available in limited edition paper copies, and a few will be available in rare handmade form as book arts originals. Visit garnpress.com for more information.

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The best about Garn is its people, including Garn’s 16th century digital chapwoman logo! Garn brings together people who work in social media with documentarians, artists and illustrators, and with renowned scholars, some of whom are octogenarians, to create remarkable books that are inexpensive and widely available as eBooks. Garn’s mission is the quest for knowledge that can be acted on, but it is also to seek out works of the great 20th century researchers in the physical and social sciences whose research has been discredited, discounted, and in some instances outright banned by the ideological extremists who are presently dominating the thinking of society in the 21st century.

And yet, Garn is more than a push-back press. Garn is also interested in simply brilliant texts that might not be published by traditional publishers, because the works are considered esoteric and low sales anticipated. At Garn the focus is on the quality of the literary work. While some of the upcoming books by young scholars might not gain wide readership, they do combine great scholarship with great stories, and that for Garn is the best. If you have an idea for a highly readable, well researched book please contact us at dennytaylor@garnpress.com.

The Best AboutGARN PRESS

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“The Mission of Garn Press is the Quest for Knowledge that can be

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GARN PRESS

New York, NY 10023 212-724-2081

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