The Small Walker Press addresses the research and creative interests of faculty members at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University, and engages with authors, artists and academics alike to produce small, innovative publications.

Small Walker Press publications can be purchased at the following locations:

Campus Store (select publications available as course texts)
Brock University, St. Catharines

Someday Books
St. Catharines, Ontario

The Salon für Kunstbuch
Vienna, Austria

Art Metropole
Toronto, Ontario

Bruno
Venice, Italy

Midnight Deer Abstractions

Geoff Farnsworth and Erin Knight

Midnight Deer Abstractions
Geoff Farnsworth and Erin Knight
Edited by Catherine Parayre and Nicholas Hauck
St. Catharines, ON / Vienna, Austria: Small Walker Press / Salon für Kunstbuch, 2024.
Graphic design by Bernhard Cella
ISBN 978-1-990208-34-8

Midnight Deer Abstractions is about limitless in-betweens, vast spaces where slight variations contain all the precisions of colour and diction, rendered immediately nebulous. Poetry and painting provide sanctuary where layers of selves are layered with memory and dream, which are in turn layered with creative process. As poet and painter, Knight and Farnsworth are attuned to each other’s practice and the spectral selves their processes create. They invite us to think, read, and look “between foreground and background” for the traces and sketches of identities, whose edits are vague, always disappearing to be retraced, resketched. Just as Knight’s poetry occupies a space between certainty and uncertainty, Farnsworth’s images play with presence and undecidability. Here is “an alphabet a kaleidoscope of brushstrokes / and blurs” that leaves us comfortably, colourfully, wrapped in a riddle: what is the difference between tangerine and clementine?

A Glossary of Illegibility

Linda Carreiro and Lan “Florence” Yee

A Glossary of Illegibility
Linda Carreiro and Lan “Florence” Yee
Edited by Catherine Parayre and Nicholas Hauck
St. Catharines, ON / Vienna, Austria: Small Walker Press / Salon für Kunstbuch, 2024.
Graphic design by Bernhard Cella
ISBN 978-1-990208-36-2

Glossaries are reservoirs of knowledge, abridged dictionaries, linguistic panoramas, fields of study. Their function is to be useful, as clear as glass, as transparent as light. Illegibility is, too often, what disqualifies a text – therefore, erasing it from existence and sending it back to inchoation or chaos, an obscure void. Linda Carreiro and Lan “Florence” Yee refute the premise of usefulness and invite us to reinterpret illegibility by giving it value, by rejecting the notion that what cannot be apprehended is worthless. They give momentum to their claim by selecting a format – the glossary – intended to facilitate understanding and present knowledge – what is legible – in neat classifications. Their glossary encourages us to pay more attention to the blurs and vagueness of our environments and thoughts, and to our societies’ invisibilities. Using the very tool that glorifies cartesian accuracy, A Glossary of Illegibility celebrates quintessential inconclusiveness, barthesian pleasures, as well as margins out of our sight.

Latitudes

Derek Knight and Shawn Serfas
Edited by Catherine Parayre
St. Catharines, ON / Vienna, Austria: Small Walker Press / Salon für Kunstbuch, 2024.
Graphic design by Bernhard Cella
ISBN 978-1-990208-32-4

This book is a collage whose only constraint is to use fragments of existing texts and images and whose objective is to briefly suggest the outline of an imaginary novel. Derek Knight’s words precede the book project and give it a sense of direction, a traceability. Artist Shawn Serfas experiments with abstract gestures and sculptural forms on large canvases. For this book, he photographed details in some of his works. Their editor’s role was to bring the editorial process to the fore without any claim of seriousness. In part, Latitudes exemplifies the playful extent to which an editor may exercise their freedom – choosing excerpts from unrelated texts, arranging them in no order other than one fictive thread identified by chance, picking details from large paintings without contextualizing their genesis or significance in the artist’s work. In Knight’s words, this book is made of “words and images in search of coherence.”

Small Walker Press Book Launch

Blurs and Vagueness series 
Geoff Farnsworth, Erin Knight, Linda Carreiro, and Lan “Florence” Yee
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024 from 4-6 p.m.
Someday Books, 21 King St Suite B, St. Catharines

Presented by the Centre for Studies in Arts & Culture and the Walker Cultural Leader Series.

The Small Walker Press is homed in the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts and receives the support of the Walker Cultural Leader series.

It publishes collaborative work that brings together authors and artists from the Niagara Region, as well as the Canadian or international contexts, covering all disciplines and creative practices taught and researched at the MIWSFPA