Four Freedom Publishing
Write the Silence/Right the Wrong: The Four Freedom Publishing Story
​
(the following has appeared elsewhere including Writing.ie)
​
Write the Silence/Right the Wrong:
The Four Freedom Publishing Story
​
Hubert O'Hearn
November 2, 2015
​
Prologue:
​
It was just as the sun was setting on the second of three days with no electricity, no internet and no food when I realized that life was presenting me with two options: die or launch a publishing company. And here you thought a Harvard MBA was tough?
​
Journal Entry One:
​
October 19/2015
​
The business of writing is hard enough when you can see what you're doing, but this? The power is off because I have no money and Electric Ireland's system of taking payments by credit card is disabled. Of course I sent them an emergency email with the dying breaths of my laptop battery but ... no response. It's someone else's problem and not theirs; it is mine.
I had moved to Ireland from Canada at the end of 2012 in order to live two experiences. I wanted to live in the country I had fallen in love with when I was ten years old and I was going to do it as a writer. There had been just enough writing success in Canada to convince me that if I truly dedicated myself to just that, I could do it: twelve years as a newspaper columnist, six produced plays, several publications running my book reviews, and a decent CV of speech-writing and other This Gun for Hire work.
​
It's funny now when I look back at how I arrived nearly three years ago. My bank account was fat, the first house rented was huge, there was even a Jaguar parked in my driveway. Then, a whole lot of circumstances went wrong, more than need describing here. Suffice it to say that by the time my dog Stella and I had, to use the polite term, simplified our lifestyle by moving into a low rent yet comfy duplex cottage in County Mayo I had learned that one really can live without most of what you might think of as 'necessities.' Yes, I had become poor and yet, I was (and am) having the time of my life.
​
I'm no good at reciting poetry from memory – not even my own work – however I do have a deep fondness for T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, particularly this section:
​
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
​
That was where I lived, in the Shadow. I knew who I had been and I equally knew who I wanted to be, yet I was no longer there and was not yet there. I was where I was – taking any writing assignment I could get. There were web content articles, editing books and articles, reviews, interviews, ghostwriting, advertising, receiving a contract to publish a book of poetry (yay!) and watching its sales fail (boo!), coaching writers, teaching, even entering contests provided there was no entry fee. And my ego told me: You're a goddam great writer and your day will come!
​
Journal Entry Two:
​
This is one of those really special moments in a man's life when he sits back and thinks, “You know, maybe somewhere along the line I might have made a mistake or two.”
Yeah well, could be. On the other hand, if I'd had it to do all over again I'd probably just done it all again. Maybe take more pictures next time, and more detailed notes for when life brought me right here again.
​
A Brief Philosophical Statement
​
The single smartest piece of advice I have ever been told came from my beautiful friend Lydia Cornell (yes that Lydia Cornell). Lydia and I have been 'sore arm buddies' for years now, picking one another's spirits up during various crises. So Lydia one day either said to me or wrote to me the following:
​
There aren't good things or bad things that happen to us. There are just things. Whether they turn out to be good or bad depends on what we do with them, how we choose to see them.
Remember that one the next time you feel that ev'ryone's agin' me. When something happens that adversely affects your plans, consider that it occurred as an outcome of your life. Perhaps instead of viewing that seemingly nasty episode as some sort of punishment, view it instead as a message for change.
​
Amen and onwards.
​
The True Origin of Four Freedom Publishing
​
Four Freedom Publishing really began as an outcome of a ghostwriting project I was hired to create. Please forgive me for not supplying all the details, however revealing a client's name or the book title truly goes against the ghostwriter's creed.
In any event, I was hired by a client to write, format and publish a book on sports. Great fun! I have often said that in my heart of hearts I am a sportswriter; indeed one of my favourite assignments of all-time was when I was a regular columnist covering TNA wrestling for PWTorch.com.
​
I wrote the book and went to CreateSpace to put it together. While filling in all the various fields I came to the one labeled Publisher. Years of reviewing books had taught me that any book that listed CreateSpace as its publisher was, odds on, likely to be a piece of hastily and badly written crap. (There have been exceptions. Off the top of my head, out of some hundred or so that I have been assigned I can think of ... two.) Therefore, on the spur of the moment I decided to do my client a favour and invent a third party publisher.
​
Since moving to Ireland I had been working steadily on a collected series of essays titled For Freedom: A Human Rights Reader 1948-2015. I'm getting slightly ahead of myself, but you can find it on Amazon and I'd be frankly delighted if you did as it is a very, very good book. The publisher who had agreed to release For Freedom was in financial difficulty, so there were delays involved there which culminated in the manuscript returning to my hands. As such, it was in the back of my head to release it on my own. At a certain point, you just want to be free of the bloody thing. (If you are a writer yourself, you'll understand. If you're not a writer, imagine the manuscript as your child trapped in permanent, noisy adolescence leaving you longing for the day when the little arsehole moves out of the house.)
I decided to kill two birds with one stone and so typed in that the sports book was published by Four Freedom Publishing: Ireland – US – Canada. I drew up a logo, slapped it on the back cover, and so it was that Four Freedom was born, or at least achieved fetal status.
​
Journal Entry Three:
​
October 25/2015 9:30AM
​
Slept quite well actually and incredible dreams. A poem even, completely written:
I whispered all my secrets
Into lovers' ears before
Can they even be called secrets
Or chocolate mints for paramours?
As each one left my pillows
Crumpled wrappers on the floor
She then became a secret
To tell the next one I adored.
I never meant to be this way
Unless of course I did
But that's the real secret
The one I still keep hid.
​
Not bad. More importantly, I know what I want Four Freedom to be, what I want it to do. If I'm going to spend this much time staving off death with single sliced white bread sandwiches smeared with scrapings of jam, if I survive, I will make someone's dreams live.
Yes, I do get a bit vain-glorious at times, but then again so did all my heroes in the writing trade and not just the authors themselves. You think Maxwell Perkins didn't know he was damn good and knew what was best for his writers? Or Harold Ross when he assembled the Murderer's Row of brilliance that was the original The New Yorker? Or Richard Seaver, searching obscure little book shops and small printers in Paris over weeks and months, as he described in his posthumous memoir The Tender Hour of Twilight looking for this little-known expat Irishman named Samuel Beckett because – he! - Dick Seaver! - was the one who could bring Beckett to the world's attention. Do editors and publishers have big egos? Darling, they can't get big enough.
​
The Lights Come On, The House is Launched
​
As you can tell, given that I'm not quite dead, the lights did eventually come back on and all the ideas and notes I made of them over those days and nights of dark and furious journaling have been put into action. There were four key decisions I had made:
​
-
If Four Free Freedoms Publishing was truly to be worthwhile for me to focus the remaining half of my life on, it must make a positive impact on the world. Therefore, all its works in whatever category must touch on the advancement of Human Rights in brave, daring and entertaining forms. Our motto will be taken from a line written by Jacques Derrida:
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
-
We will publish in four categories: Non-Fiction, Fiction (both short and long), Poetry & Children's, and Drama or Screenplay
-
There will be 16 titles per calendar year, so that each can achieve proper attention.
-
Marketing will be achieved by setting out an investment opportunity with a 22% annualized return, and also by offering free books to anyone willing to share our releases on social media. The world is Four Freedom Publishing's marketing team.
And now ...
We have an email address:
fourfreedompublishing@gmail.com .
​
Most importantly we have writers and editors and proofreaders. The books we have in the works include two one act plays in one volume, a poetry collection by an exciting new Canadian writer, two children's books by an author from Northern Ireland, and just in its genesis a book about healing the soul from the traumas of everyday life as that too is a Human Rights issue.
​
As well, there is one series that I suppose is not actually Human Rights based. We are releasing a series of books with the prefix The Friendly World of ... Those are gently humorous, yet content-filled books about various dog breeds. I suspect they will pay for the rest.
As For You?
​
Come and join us. You'll find all the details on the Four Freedom Publishing website vis a vis submissions, or marketing, or even investing in us. This is all a glorious adventure and one I will do my damnedest to push forward in a quest to make this world just a little bit better than how I found it. So I shall end this with the closing lines of a poem I actually do remember, Tennyson's Ulysses. I say to you:
​
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
​
Be seeing you.