the BOOKSHOP
Yes, I know…it’s a small bookshop. But when you buy one of my books directly from me, it helps me keep making art. Thank you!
From the Eye of the Elephant
Discounted from $25.00 to $20.00
Dedicated to Richard Lair (1943-2024) for his many years of helping us understand our relationship to elephants and his work on creating significant ways to protect the elephant, From the Eye of the Elephant is a rare book of twenty-five collaborative paintings between elephant and human. The book also includes an introduction, two poems, and the short story “The First Elephants” by the American artist, writer, and filmmaker Galen Garwood. This work celebrates his twenty-fifth year since he set sail for Thailand to make PANOM, a film about the plight of the Asian Elephant. In the movie, he writes, “We are, all of us, connected to each other and to all living and non-living things. In the luminosity of this understanding, we would teach our children to blossom in this light; we would teach them to unfold with compassion and tolerance. We would teach them of things good and things bad in the ways of the world, to believe in themselves, to believe in hope. And then we must trust them with everything.”
A percentage of book profits is dedicated to Cultural Crossroads Asia, a non-profit entity founded to help preserve and nourish indigenous cultures.
THE ONE-WINGED BODY
poems by Peter Weltner / photographs by Galen Garwood
Discounted from $40.00 to $25.00
GALEN GARWOOD and PETER WELTNER have made a Valentine to Beauty and Arousal with photographs and poetry that are beautiful and aroused. Words italicized by arousal. Nakedness articulated by folds of cloth, a dialogue of flesh and flow that signals classical antiquity, but also the mystical inwardness of Mary’s mantel. If the body is a language, here it speaks, in itself, of happiness, fulfillment, lush utopia. Arousal is the wing that carries it upward. Not wisdom through suffering but awe. But desire ignited by beauty, desire that submits to beauty that’s another story, a story that may involve destruction, obsession and loss. And memory: our culture’s visual memory, like the pictorialist photographs of Imogen Cunningham or the ethnographic studies of young natives by Baron von Gloeden, who also carried his camera to Sicily, and personal memory, like the Ronnie’s and Bob’s of Weltner’s past. John Keats called beauty truth. Is it? Weltner and Garwood are not suspicious of beauty, belittled by it, made ironic by it. What do we do with beauty? submit to it, aspire to it, be ennobled by it, be destroyed by it? All of these. Robert Glück
Peter Weltner was raised in suburban New Jersey and piedmont North Carolina. He received his AB from Hamilton College where he majored in English with a minor in Philosophy, and his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University, where his inside major was Renaissance Poetry and Drama, his outside one in the School of Letters. His dissertation, Translated Mortality, was a close reading of the court plays of John Lyly. He taught for thirty-seven years in the English Department of San Francisco State, retiring in 2006. His first published work, beginning in the seventies, appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Parnassus, Ironwood, The Ohio Review, Harper Studies in Language and Literature, and elsewhere. His first book of stories was published in 1989. His two novels, one collection of three short novels, four collections of short stories, and twenty or so books or chapbooks of poetry have been variously published by Five Fingers, The Crossing Press, Graywolf Press, Standing Stone Books, 2Rivers, BrickHouse Books, Agenda Editions (UK), and Marrowstone. He’s been awarded, among other literary honors, two O.Henry’s.
NOSTOS, Voices for the Journey Home
Discounted from $40.00 to $30.00
NOSTOS, Voices for the Journey Home is a collaborative book of art and poetry and essays dedicated to environmental awareness through creative imagination…The VOICES are Alex BoyesenHjalmar Boyesen, James Broughton, Ed Cain, Ford Crull, Tim Davies, Niels Devisscher, Kathleen Garrett, Galen Garwood, Larry Gray, Christine Hemp, Mary Ida Henrikson, Anne Hirondelle, Hart James, John Franklin Koenig, Kim Kopp, Chang Lek, William O’Daly, Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma, Jami Sieber, Joel Singer, Garrett Smithberg, Jeffree Stewart, Liz Tran, Peter Weltner, Nathan Wirth, and Stephen Yates.
“…a chorus: a multitude of voices conveyed in visuals and words forming an originative magnitude, fluent passages leading us to the still point of home-home in a place, in a person, in the self, in a memory, a wish, a hope, a loss, a discovery, a revelation.” -Kathleen Garrett
MAENAM, of Water, Of Light
Discounted from $40.00 to $30.00
MAENAM, Of Water, of Light is a collaborative book of art: photographs by American artist Galen Garwood with poems by seven remarkable poets: William O’Daly, Sam Hamill, Peter Weltner, Lindqa Gregg, Jeane Morel, James Broughton, and Emily Warn. “The power and grace of these poems and photographs also come from their specificity to their own makers, which, while we readers and viewers can never precisely share, can still be profoundly moved by them nonetheless. We haven’t been to Galen Garwood’s home on the edge of the Maerim River, but his images still carry an expansive quality that encompasses so much: the repetition of a ripple, the roll of a wave, the water that becomes a landscape, a world, a painting, a sculpture. Many of the poems are intensely personal, yet the truths they convey in their universality lead us to have our own personal experiences, our own deep and lasting reactions to these written words.” Kathleen Garrett
APEIRON
Discounted from $40.00 to $30.00
“The imagination is boundless. That fact is both its promise and its despair, contradictions that make great art possible, art like Galen Garwood’s whose vision invariably expands beyond its frame, its rectilinear borders, into the realm of things unseen. His is a formal and contemplative art, yet always surprising as if reality were best measured by dreams. It is an art of wonder and ever-changing evocations in which “something inside his images” is always “begging to be let out.”
~ Peter Weltner, author of Crow-Black Stones and a Flock of Crows / Agenda Editions, UK
In Apeiron, Galen Garwood’s astonishing galenographs give physical and spiritual dimension to boundless mysteries, to questions which cannot be expressed in words. Remarkably, the poems accompanying the images convey a similar sense of being. This consummate artist’s contemplative, kinetic symmetries engage gradients of shade and hue, unparalleled light, calm seas and impelling darkness, all of which accentuate that calling we recognize as our humanity. With this beautiful book, Garwood invites us to see far beyond and within ourselves, to intuit that of which we are an integral part.
~ William O’Daly, author of The New Gods and translator of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Twilight
The GATHERING
Discounted from $15.00 to $12.00
“A conscientious working artist may encounter real genius a dozen times in a lifetime. What distinguishes such work is a unique mixture of technical mastery combined with a compassionate engagement of a grand vision. In the words of Camus, this may be as simple as recapturing two or three metaphors of our lives or as complex as intercultural mythopoetics or even both at once. Neither greater vision nor technical mastery alone is sufficient. In some way, the gift must be earned to be realized, which requires discipline and generosity.
On the one hand, the task is Sisyphean; there is no success without failure. On the other hand, it is like the Zen monk raking the garden. Success and failure become almost meaningless in one’s act of selfless devotion. Galen Garwood has the richest palette of any artist I have ever known. Whether working in oils, acrylics, on canvas or paper, as a painter or printmaker, or behind the lens, his work invariably embodies the true qualities of genius.”
~Sam Hamill, poet, translator, essayist / from the introduction to PASSPORT,
a collaborative book of paintings on plexi by Galen Garwood and poems by Sam Hamill.
The DREAM SEA
Discounted from $20.00 to $12.00
The Dream Sea Photographs by Galen Garwood is a series of twenty photographs that reveal the power and mythic nature of the sea, out of which the fires of our supra-consciousness rise in the winds of our dreaming, a symbolic transformation from the self to the universe of unknowns. As poet William O’Daly writes: “Galen Garwood’s works are meditations and explorations that attain harmonic balance and truth in motion, infused with an astonishing awareness of color and the perpetual energy generated by dark and light. Life within these evocative works emanates from a fleeting, ceaseless center, and their vulnerability and compassion, their fearlessness and wisdom, reside within us.”
BENCH, A Story of Wonder
$15.00
“With lyrical language and magical storytelling, Galen Garwood weaves a tale that is both modern and timeless yet has the feel of an ancient myth. Ambrus, the venerable, charismatic main character of the story, tells the history of Bench, in some ways the history of the world, to his young friend, Döm, in this enchanting story. This is destined to become a favorite of readers young and old.”
~Rosi Hollinbeck, Seattle Book Review
“Children and adults everywhere will enjoy the seedlings of magic planted throughout the pages of the enchanting tale Bench: A Story of Wonder by Galen Garwood. The story is told by a homeless man and seen through the eyes of a wandering young boy who learns more than he ever thought he would about a bench on the river’s edge. Combining mystery in good storytelling and the effervescence of childhood belief in the incredible comes a beautiful tale of two kindred spirits and the journey that weaves them together.”
~Jenna Swartz, San Francisco Book Review
“A timeless tale about the magic of Mother Nature and how long after humans pass, the trees, rivers, and other bodies of water remain and carry on with their business. Reminiscent of Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree,” Bench is a tree that becomes a log that becomes a bench that speaks to those who touch it and keeps on giving generation after generation. A wonderful book for all ages with vivid imagery and a mixed cast of interesting characters.”
~Kristi Elizabeth, Manhattan Book Review
SELL THE MONKEY
Discounted from $ 22.00 to $15.00
“An incredible journey. One cannot be too prepared to be swept away. Deeply stilling and resonant, Galen’s writing, like his brushstrokes, is a work of extraordinary meditation. Remarkably restrained and sublime, it is writing that emboldens the enormity of story with a cast of characters, each one bigger than life itself.” ~Nirupa Umapathy
“Sell The Monkey is a captivating story of family, love, abandonment, and man’s search for his identity. The story is told in clear and powerful prose, and the reader is pulled in from the very beginning by the ruthless honesty with which the narrator looks at his life. It’s a story that answers the question: What does it take to feel at home with one’s self? I enjoyed the way the protagonist was developed throughout the narrative and how he grows from a victim to someone who can live life on his own terms, embracing art and determining how his work can be appreciated. There is grittiness and a powerful sense of pathos that makes this memoir a gripping story. I found it to be as riveting as it is psychologically deep. ~Romuald Dzemo, Seattle Book Review
“In the initial pages of Sell the Monkey, Galen Garwood is being urged to take a chance in life. This is just a microcosm of his life story… Sell The Monkey is not your average autobiography. The title alone proves that, but don’t let that fool you. The narrative is strong, and the retelling of a tough past done beautifully. The reader will be glad to be a passenger on a voyage of self-discovery and growth. An excellent autobiography and all-around great read!”
~Philip Zozzaro, San Francisco Book Review