Our New Book

Unlike any other book that we know of we are bringing to bear on the issue of workshopping or not workshopping the wisdom of two disciplinary fields — largely unrecognized in English departments — Neuroscience on upper-cortical re-entry and Social Work in its practice of plucking wounded young people from the herd so that they can learn to do internal work.

Our Third Book

Whoever heard of getting after the clergy for anything? Whoever expected them to put their shoulders to the wheel for the United States anyway?

Our Second Book

This is a first—a respectful book for educated conservatives who find themselves afraid

Our First Book

Funny, accessible, full of story, and full of dreadful truth--the stuff that most small literary presses avoid like A-type flu...

What's been happening with this book is: readers feel startled when they recognize in its stories and essays parts of themselves--not to mention relatives and neighbors! On the other hand, you can't help feeling cheered when you realize that 1990s and 2000s neuroscience and social work theory and American literature are joining hands to take on the rough stuff with hope.

“It is hard for us to trust that each brain, left in calmness, but guided in imagination, will tear along collecting itself to make a philosophy to present to the boss (its organism)... The bright neurologists and the bright therapists are already telling us: neurons like those in the heads of Socrates, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, John Rawls, I.F. Stone, Senator Robert Byrd, and Bill Moyers, are firing and firing in great bands inside our heads too.”

—Carol Bly & Cynthia Loveland from A Shout to American Clergy

“Perhaps our mind is presenting us with 19 different messages about that horror we just saw, only one of which keeps saying, ‘Look, you could have a go at turning this thing around—you could, yes, you.’ If we trust in this fascinating aspect of re-entry, chances are this minority voice of ours, the ‘one out of the nineteen,’ is more summoning than all the others put together.”

—Cynthia Loveland and Carol Bly, in Stopping the Gallop to Empire

“Hopelessness is a four-letter word to us. We’re not the ones who hang up the trendy posters that tell people to recognize what you can change and give up on the rest. We know people can change, systems can change, and whole societies can change. We don’t give up. We’re particularly stubborn on this point.”

—Cynthia Loveland, in “Afterword to Non-social Workers and Social Workers, Too”

“What makes someone act like a conservative? I finally—these four years later—have figured it out. For those forty-five days (of surgery and radiation oncology) I was like a little kid in a very good prep school. There is no emotional ease like the ease in American prep schools…in those forty-five days I lived in that sort of kindly ambiance. Anyone would want to stay in such an ambiance. Of course they would! They would want to stay in such an ambiance all their lives.”

—Carol Bly, in “How Radiation Oncology Nearly Made Me a Republican”