Dial Publishing is a project for next year, 2007, when it will become the print arm of Syntagma Media, currently an online publisher.

This site will keep those interested fully informed of progress on the project.

The reason for the delay is that our online Network Magazine, Syntagma, with its 45 websites, is taking up so much time. New partners in the business should open the way for our expansion into the print market in the new year.

Stay tuned for further information.

The Nirvaneans is my new book, due for publication by Humdrumming on June 21 next year. Here’s a little taster from the preface :

The basic premise of this book is that “Nirvanic experience” is more common than we might suppose, but often goes unrecognized. Moreover, it is not an abnormal event, but a sudden emergence of our subtle background consciousness: our Nirvanoception.

An American study showed that a majority of people claimed to have had spiritual experiences, but that a significant number did not want to repeat them. Even a glimpse of our real self-nature overturns every canon of the materialist world-view, and that can be deeply challenging to some.

Reality is clearly multi-layered, at least in texture. Quantum physics recognized the fact when it postulated an infinite number of dimensions in its mathematical equations. The danger of this particular approach, though, is that the further we stray from direct experience, the less our speculations are worth in any practical sense. Many of our religious woes are caused by the misconstrual of texts which sought to hide the secrets of our nature from the uninitiated. A simple adherence to phenomenology would make a difference to our understanding of many of the inscrutable mysteries of life.

Alan Watts once wrote : “It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus…are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their state of consciousness.”

I have set out here to describe the state of Nirvana—including detailed, attested descriptions of it—and the radical implications of its realization for the realizer. The process is mostly misunderstood in the West and is practically ignored in the East, where it originated in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. An extraordinary spin-off is that it delivers powerful confirmation of the survival of consciousness after death. It also gives us invaluable clues to the mystery of the Holy Grail and the wonders of the Philosophers’ Stone.

John M Evans

After all the publicity effort over the launch of Denys Val Baker’s: The Sea’s in the Kitchen, I hope to have news of the results soon.

The new Denys Val Baker is now on the streets, so lots to celebrate for Humdrumming after all their work.

Congratulations to the team and to Martin Val Baker in Penzance.

You can buy a copy of the book by clicking in the link in the sidebar.

We’re taking a few days off here at Dial Publishing. We’ll be back on Monday 10 July.

Have a great week.

As a final throw in our Denys Val Baker Week, here are a few more snippets from his irresistible first autobiographical volume, The Sea’s in the Kitchen. This is the opening to the book:

Author’s Note
“After working for many years in London as a professional author and
editor I responded to a call which many writers and artists have felt and
went to settle ‘away from it all ‘ in Cornwall. As this autobiographical
account of the ensuing ten years will show, life cannot be escaped from
in Cornwall any more than anywhere else. But in fact Cornwall offers
many precious things to the creative worker, quite apart from its inspiring
natural background - not least a more sympathetic and tolerant attitude
than is generally found in provincial England. For this reason I have tried
in this book to capture a portrait of Cornwall in our life as much as of our
life in Cornwall.”

Chapter One
“When Jess and I were married it seemed perfectly natural to me that we
should settle down in Cornwall. But then perhaps I was a little prejudiced,
for I had long ago deserted the literary world of London for the wilder
and much more exciting world of Cornish cliffs and carns and moors,
and everywhere the booming echoes of the restless sea.

“Like many other professional authors before me l had made the welcome discovery that one of the writer’s most precious gifts is that of freedom of movement. I could, of course, have travelled farther a field, wandered the world, but the fact was I had for a long time been conscious of feeling drawn westwards to this strange and rather primitive and mysterious land of Celtic mythology. This may have been partly due to Celtic sympathy, as I am Welsh. Whatever the reasons I felt happy and satisfied in Cornwall, whether living in a tiny castle on the cliffs at Portquin or working with a repertory theatre at Camborne or writing novels in an attic bedroom looking over the serene beauty of the Carrack Broads at Falmouth. I could not, in fact, imagine living anywhere else, or how anyone could wish to live anywhere else.

“It was true that Jess and I met far from this magic land. At the time I was spending Christmas up in London and one evening my friend Ross said: ‘Do you remember I told you about a little Sagittarian with two small daughters who has a flat off the Fulham Road? Well, it’s only round the corner — come on, I’ll introduce you.’ ”

The Cornish Review

In 1972 Val Baker began a productive association with the publisher William Kimber that ultimately produced six further novels, nine collections of his own short stories and twenty three edited anthologies of short stories by such writers as Edna O’Brien, Alan Sillitoe, Hammond Innes, Fay Weldon, Winston Graham, Margaret Drabble, Daphne Du Maurier et al. In fact, a definitive listing of major British writers. These apart, he also found space in such collections for new, young writers.

Then, midway through the prolific decade of the sixties, Denys Val Baker launched a second run of the Cornish Review. Those were hopeful times, as Val Baker himself suggested: “…There was a new climate abroad and people had come to recognize that artistic ventures such as a regional literary review deserved some sort of practical support from Government…”

How far we have regressed from such optimistic times, with the abandonment of regional literary assistance, now followed by a national neglect of literature, is patent, But the second Cornish Review ran for twenty-seven issues and was never anything less that fulsome. Among poems and stories there were works by such as DM Thomas, now Cornwall’s most prestigious literary son, as well as by Jack Clemo, Charles Causley, Donald Rawe together with such figures of the Penwith literary establishment as Arthur Caddick, Frank Ruhrmund and W.S Graham.

There was also substantial exposure of the visual arts with reproduction of work by Bryan Pearce, Jack Pender, Peter Lanyon, John Miller and many more. The rich fund of material contained in the Reviews has still to be assessed.

Inevitably, Caddick had much more to say about this ‘Second Launching’, using Denys Val Baker’s own nautical connections to good effect:

And it was those Celtic cheques that made the Cornish Review even more authentic, because Denys Val Baker recognized the importance of professionalism in the literary world as in all the creative arts.

From Des Hannigan’s obituary in Peninsula Voice, Penzance, August 1984.

In 1948, following the break-up of his first marriage, Denys Val Baker moved to Cornwall where he rented a cottage on Trencrom Hill and it was from here that the first Cornish Reviews were published between 1949 and 1952.

The magazine ran for ten issues and offered the very best of Cornish writing on all aspects of the arts, including articles by Bernard Leach, R. Morton Nance, Peter Lanyon and A.K. Hamilton Jenkin as well as poetry by the young Causley, Clemo, W.S. Graham and the irrepressible Arthur Caddick, who penned this first volume’s swan song: ‘Its friends, the artists had no cash to spare, And those who should have helped it did not care’ — thus appraising the fate of many a brave literary venture.

Short Stories
Over the years, Denys Val Baker sustained his trade as a writer by producing hundreds of short stories, many of which were broadcast by the BBC. He was an acknowledged master of the genre, reminiscent in his more literary creations of H.E. Bates and Lawrence — The Woman and the Engine Driver and The Clay Pool being particularly fine examples — and it was a matter of some regret to himself that he had not more time to dedicate to his short story form, his favourite. But life and limb, not to mention a large and flourishing family from his second marriage, demanded a steady output of bread and butter writing in the form of stories, articles and lesser novels.

During the fifties, Val Baker lived in Penzance, Sennen Cove and St Hilary before moving to St Ives, which later inspired the first of his idiosyncratic autobiographies, The Sea’s in the Kitchen and The Door is Always Open.

There was to follow an inevitable sequence of twenty-four more such books by which Val Baker captivated an entirely new public, to whom he brought great pleasure through escapist reading. The books were extrovert and delightfully eccentric and it is by these that many will remember him.

His later adventures at sea in his converted Motor Fishing Vessel Sanu were outrageously chronicled in such books as The Petrified Mariner which, in their turn, were guaranteed to harrow the blood of any professional seaman with those tales of Denys’ and Sanu’s incredible brushes with disaster.

Although one guessed that there was more than enough of Valentine Baker’s pioneering instinct in his son to keep Sanu afloat and on course in the long term. (”…You mean you had the wrong charts Denys, and you headed up channel regardless…?” A quiet chuckle and that self effacing smile, followed by …Well, Sanu knew exactly where she was going…”).

You couldn’t make it up.

The following is an extract from the newly republished The Sea’s in the Kitchen by Denys Val Baker:

Denys’s house in Penzance.

” Each of us could produce our favourite version of Dennis Pattison and his cars. I think I like best the story told by Donald Swan, of how one lovely sunny day he was driving back from Bodmin and gave a lift to a young New Zealand doctor and his wife. Wishing to impress them with the delights of Cornwall, it was such a lovely day, Donald said: ‘Look, I’ll tell you what, I’ll drive over to Porthleven. A friend of mine has a bungalow on the cliffs there. We’ll have a nice lazy time…’

” However, when Donald drove up the narrow lane leading to Dennis Pattison’s house he found the way blocked by an old ex-Post Office van, and Dennis Pattison hovering nervously around. Apparently the car had been there for days blocking the way and now there was unrest among the neighbours. How fortunate that Donald should arrive - as it happened Dennis knew of a shed at the end of a field, a woman had told him it would be all right to put his van there. Could Donald possibly…?

” Aided by the New Zealand doctor, Donald turned his car around and hitched up the van and proceeded to tow it by a difficult route up a narrow winding hill and out of Porthleven until they reached a large white gate opening onto a field with a shed nearby. After much complicated manoeuvring they got the old van close to the shed and then went and opened the doors…”

Be one of the first to buy Denys’s book. There’s a link in the sidebar.

Denys Val Baker’s literary output was quite prodigious. Most people knew that he was a well established author but few appreciated the extent of his achievement.

In his lifetime, he published 14 novels, 26 autobiographies, 23 short story collections, 18 books on general subjects, 41 edited collections of other writer’s work and several hundred short stories.

He was a writer from the very start. Born in 1917 of Welsh parentage, his father was Valentine Baker the noted flight pioneer who taught Amy Johnson to fly. (Valentine Baker was later killed in a flying accident while testing a Martin-Baker Fighter in 1942. His partner, James Martin, went on to design the first ejector seat for jet-engined aircraft.)

Denys Val Baker began work as a junior reporter on several regional newspapers and worked briefly in Fleet Street where he learned many of the basic skills of the writer’s trade. On the outbreak of war he became a conscientious objector (he had been vegetarian since the mid-thirties and was to remain so until his death) and worked with various pacifist groups in London doing voluntary work during the blitz.

In 1941 he began editing Opus, a quarterly literary magazine and it was to this particular literary form that he dedicated much of his energy and skill over the coming years. There followed other editorial stints with Voices, Writing Today, Modern Short Stories and International Short Stories, all of which featured work by such developing writers as Alex Comfort, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Taylor, Rayner Heppenstall, William Sampson, Anais Nin, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Krishnamurti and Henry Miller.

First Novels, 1945 saw the publication of Worlds Without End, a collection of Val Baker’s own short stories followed soon after by his first novel, The White Rock, while the end of the forties saw two more novels, The Widening Mirror, and The More We Are Together, a humorous account of community life.

From Des Hannigan’s Obituary of Denys in Peninsula Voice, Penzance August 1984.

In Cornwall where visual artists enjoy the relative security of a supportive tradition, through established galleries, studios and workshops, to be a full time professional writer is to be something of an unsung hero. Denys Val Baker was such a man.

There are one or two others of course but what made Val Baker unique was his dedication to the writer’s trade and his marvellous and unselfish belief that there should be a “community of writers” in the same sense that there is a community of artists; that the written word should be as much a part of Cornwall’s culture as the visual arts and that both should be extended.

Too often of course writers are their own worst enemies. Introverted and subjective, they lack the gregariousness of the painter and the visual evidence of their work while, for those writers who succeeded, total withdrawal seems to be inevitable.

Denys Val Baker never hit the bestseller lists but had he done so, it’s a fair bet he would have achieved even more for the Cornish literary world and for that community of writers he so believed in. As it was, he did everything he could until circumstances overcame even his spirited support for the written word.

It was ironic that, coincident with his death, opportunities for literature were being further eroded by a philistine National Arts Council.

Des Hannigan. Obituary in Peninsula Voice, Penzance August 1984