Neverwert Press presents its first book, and the author explains how it all came about.

So first of all, about 1,200 years ago, a monk whose name we don’t know writes a poem in Old Irish about his cat. (See links to “The Real Pangur Ban” on this page.) Fast forward to four years ago. I come upon an English translation of that poem in a book about something else. A year goes by. I can’t get that unknown poet and that cat of his out of my mind. I find myself inventing personalities and situations for them. Without the training or the desire to write straight history, little by little I complete 11 tales—tales, because tales by definition aren’t documentaries, and 11, because the word “eleven” has such a nice flow to it. And because this is the age of the home computer, and because self-publishing is no longer the disgraceful thing that it used to be, and because I have a daughter who is both a gifted editor and conversant with the world of e-pub, The Adventures of Brother Arcadius and Pangur Ban is prowling around out there, looking for readers. And “Neverwert Press,” of course, is simply me. But it was the monk who started it all, the monk and his cat. And rather than bog down my blog with too many words, I’ll leave it at that.