About
About
I’m Gillian Paschkes-Bell. I started Bryn Glas Books to publish three novels I’d edited: The Seaborne and The Priest’s Wife by A G Rivett and VU by Kenneth Sinclair. These books had been with Wordcatcher, a Cardiff-based publisher that ceased trading in 2022. I started my own small independent business to make sure they stayed in print. I also write the Bryn Glas Blog.
Storytelling is something we all do. Even if we donʼt read stories, we tell them – at least to ourselves. And we hear them told. We all have stories of where we've come from, what's made us into who we are. Our view of the world from our own particular vantage point. The stories we tell interweave with those of other people, sometimes clashing, sometimes making a thing of beauty.
A question I learned to ask of my own stories is this: do they serve me well? Or hold me back, sending me off in some unhelpful direction?
This website is dedicated to stories that have served people well. Through the Bryn Glas Blog I offer thoughts that arise through reading, hearing and watching stories. The books published by Pantolwen Press offer tales to feed both heart and mind.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading them.
Gillian Paschkes-Bell
Gillian’s love of stories began young, listening to her mother, her father and her grandmother recounting their memories. She did a degree in English and Drama at Exeter University. Then she worked for RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) addressing societyʼs attitudes to people with disabilities: attitudes that arise from the hidden stories we carry inside....
Training as a counsellor, she learned to sit with people as they reflect on their inner stories, helping them move forward with fresh insight and renewed strength. Later at Heythrop , then Mansfield College Oxford, she studied theology, which she sees as the stories people tell to express lifeʼs biggest mysteries.
Gillian has worked as a tutor for One Spirit Interfaith Foundation She has lived for twelve years in the Findhorn community in northern Scotland. Now she lives on a hillside in West Wales with her husband, Andrew, the author A.G.Rivett.
Since working for RNIB’s publicity department Gillian has been an editor. Working with literary texts is the cream of such work, and the part of writing she loves best. “It’s a work of alchemy to take a text and bring out the gold that lies buried.”
Why Bryn Glas Books?
Bryn Glas translates from the Welsh as ‘Green Hill’. Glas is one of those magical words. Although in Welsh it usually means blue, poetically has a range of meanings from green to silver-grey. A farmer talking about a lush meadow might well describe it as glas.
Bryn Glas Books is housed across the valley from an eye-catching green hill. And so our logo shows the green hill above what could be folded fields, or perhaps an opened book. Thank you, Alex Nicholas Designs!
Why Pantolwen Press?
Below Bryn Glas, as in so many steep-sided valleys in this part of Wales, are the remains of a mill. Driven by water, perhaps the most distinctive feature of all these mills was the great dripping water-wheel. As ‘Wheel’ in Cornwall became synonymous with a mine, so ‘Olwen’ (Welsh for wheel) became the almost universal name for a mill. Pantolwen literally means the Hollow of the Wheel, or the Hollow of the Mill.
The logo Alex Nicholas has designed for us picks up on this imagery, but takes its quirky form from the summit of the hill opposite, where footpaths and field boundaries intersect the remains of an Iron Age fort. Thus the two ideas, of the mill wheel and the local hilltop, are brought together.
