The Power of Publishing

Having made time to deeply reflect upon my work, ground myself in this new now and open my heart to new intentions, I have been working on my website for Parlour Press Publishing. 

I set up Parlour Press Publishing 17 years ago when I was approached by Caerphilly Youth Service to tour Youth Clubs facilitating Creative Writing Workshops. I drafted a plan to extend the project from workshops so that it had a celebratory outcome, a platform from which the young people could have a voice as writers in their own right and to inspire each other. I was taken aback at the power of publishing in terms of its ability to raise self esteem and touch the hearts of many.

Tales from Two Valleys was a retelling of all the local folk tales of the area and won a National Youth Excellence Award from the Welsh Assembly. What I had intended as one project that I essentially ran from my front parlour (and still do to a certain extent) has now facilitated 49 Community Groups to write collections short stories and anthologies of poems, supported in my workshops and then to publish their work into soft back books or more recently, ebooks. 

In addition, Parlour Press has recorded and edited more films and digital stories than I care to remember. This year alone I have been contracted to edit 21 inter-generational digital stories and 2 major website based storytelling projects, one for

Storytelling for Health International Conference and the other for West Wales Sound Healing Centre

Parlour Press has won Best Practice at the International Mental Health Conference held at Cambridge University, a Gold National Care Award, a further Youth Excellence award ... 

I am really very proud of such a huge body of work that has literally changed lives and fed into national policy regarding education and care in Wales.

But I am so busy out there doing the work that I never get time to reflect or design materials to tell anyone about it! It's all grown via word of mouth. So, it gave me great joy to spend time on the website. 

Feel Free to on come over and have a look ... see what you think. I've kept it as simple as possible. I think sometimes less is more when storytelling through a website. 

Oh and if you you'd like to know more about me, you can visit my Cheryl Beer website ... it's also having a major overhaul at the moment so some pages are not quite ready ...