The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
From Bookshop to Publishing House: Jean-Paul L. Garnier's Literary Journey
In this episode, I speak with sci-fi writer, editor, and publisher Jean-Paul L. Garnier, who shares his journey from avid reader to the owner of Space Cowboy Books, a thriving indie bookstore and publishing house in Joshua Tree, California. He reveals how science fiction offers writers complete creative freedom to explore human psychology through fantastical settings.
More than just a desert bookstore, Space Cowboy Books represents a multifaceted literary ecosystem. Starting in 2016 as a modest shed, it quickly expanded into a proper storefront near Joshua Tree National Park – where the stunning landscape and dark skies provide constant inspiration. The store's "free books for kids" program showcases Garnier's commitment to childhood literacy, eventually growing into partnerships with local nonprofits to build school libraries.
Whether you're a science fiction enthusiast, aspiring writer, independent bookshop lover, or simply curious about literary entrepreneurship, this episode offers a fascinating glimpse into how one passionate reader created a thriving literary hub in the California desert.
To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast.
Michael Moorcock Interview With Mandy Jackson-Beverly
Gloriana, Or The Unfulfill’d Queen, Michael Moorcock
New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, Kingsley Amis
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 285.
Speaker 1:John Paul L Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house and the producer of Simultaneous Times. He is the editor of the SFPA Starline magazine and deputy in chief of Worlds of If and Galaxy magazines. In 2024, Jean-Paul's Simultaneous Times, Volume 3 won the Laureate Award for Best Editor and for Best Anthology, which also won the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Critter's Reader Poll. In 2023, he also won the Laureate Award for Best Fanzine. Jean-paul is the host of many author events, as well as the acclaimed Flash Science Fiction Nights reading series. He is the author of many books of poetry and science fiction and has been the recipient of the Arts Connection Arts Innovator Grant and the James Patterson Holiday Bonus. His work has also been nominated for the Elgin, Riesling and Dwarf Star Awards. Jean-paul has also served as a juror for the Speculative Literature Foundation and the Omega Sci-Fi Awards. Hi, Jean-Paul, and welcome to the show. It's lovely to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:My pleasure. Now let's begin by learning about you what led you to becoming a writer and your interest in science fiction.
Speaker 2:So writing is something I've done since I was nine years old. I got an early start writing with poetry, but it wasn't always science fiction for me. In my youth I read mostly classic literature. My parents had been poets, so that was sort of a push in that direction, and my father had been a French literature professor. So we had this incredible library in my home and anytime I had a question my father would point to the library. The answers are in there. So that got me started. And then in my early 20s or I think I was around 19 or 20, a friend of mine gave me a Kurt Vonnegut book and that sort of changed everything. And then I found Frank Herbert, unaware that he had written Dune. I just found a book at a thrift store and that began me reading science fiction voraciously as a writer.
Speaker 2:I found it particularly attractive because I mean, writing is just utter freedom. You can do absolutely anything in writing. It's a place of complete freedom. So that was a big appeal to me. And in science fiction in particular, it's the only field that you can actually break the laws of physics and get away with it. You can break the laws of nature, as William Burroughs would call it. The natural outlaw those who break the laws of nature, and so that just has an incredible compelling freedom to get away with anything you want, and that's very attractive as a writer because it gives us an amazing toolkit of devices for telling the types of stories we want to tell. Of course, all stories are about people, but to use fantastical settings and to put people into bizarre forms of durace brings up wonderful questions about the human psyche that we can speculate upon, and so that's been a great attractor towards science fiction, and for the last 25 years it's made up the bulk of my reading. It's not all I read, of course. All readers read widely, I feel.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it's also important for writers to read a wide variation of nonfiction and fiction.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and you know, nonfiction makes up a healthy part of my diet. I also have a rule for myself that if I ever catch myself saying, oh, I'd never read that, then I have to. I have to read it then, and a couple of times a year I'm inclined to go pick up something that is of little interest to me, just to dig beneath the surface there, and you know, either that validates an unwarranted opinion. You know that we have our biases and we can either have them confirmed or, even better, broken, and so I love reading outside of my scope for that reason. And you know, I'm definitely the type of person that if I'm not liking a book, I will still see it through. I'll finish, you know, and my reading taste can be masochistic at times with the types of books that I pick up. But you know, my profession, my livelihood and my life is all about literature and books, and one of the wonderful things about having a bookshop is the recommendations that customers give to me.
Speaker 2:So while science fiction is a huge part of my reading diet, nonfiction is as well. A lot of poetry and, working as an editor for various magazines, I read a lot of slush. That's a huge part of my reading, and that's often work that's not in its finished stages.
Speaker 1:For listeners who aren't familiar with the slush pile, could you explain please?
Speaker 2:Sure. So when you're working for a magazine or publishing house, slush is the submissions that come in, and you know those can be anything from established writers to writers that are attempting to get their first publication. Sometimes the work is ready to print, sometimes it is not and needs work, or it's just not a good fit for the venue or the author isn't quite there yet. So it's work in a lot of different stages of completion, and getting to know writers through that sort of behind the scenes process is also extremely, extremely valuable for me as a writer. I've learned so much in that way.
Speaker 1:I want to go back to something you said, and that is how much your parents encouraged you to read. I had the same kind of parents. I saw them reading, my siblings reading, and it made me want to read. I've partnered with a nonprofit called Books in Homes USA and through them I have learned that it has been proven if a child has I think it's between like 20 and 40 books or something in their home library, then their adult numeracy and literacy rates will be higher than if they didn't have a home library. And I'll add the importance of reading to your children from birth, all the way through. It's so important.
Speaker 2:It's extremely important and for many reasons. I mean not only for childhood development, but reading and sharing stories is also how we learn to empathize with one another and learn the differences in each other, and that's just incredibly important on an emotional level. So engaging with childhood literacy is super important. It had come out a while ago I had talked to this was in the early days of the bookstore, so about eight years ago and I talked to an elementary school teacher who told me that their school didn't have books and I said well, that's criminal. How many books do you want? I'll build the school a library, and that ended up. I ended up losing touch with that person, but that caused me, so now I had all these children's books, so I started a free books for kids section in the bookstore so all kids under 14 can pick out a book on me, and there's a really wonderful effect to this.
Speaker 2:The children are not used to being treated like adults. They're not used to being given something by a stranger. That's positive and there's great enthusiasm for it, and I find that also with children that are too young to be reading on their own, they'll ask their parents to read to them that night, since they've gotten a book as a gift and that's just a double win. And through that it also came out. I ended up meeting some local nonprofits that did reading programs in local schools, and I teamed up with a local nonprofit called Spark Growth to actually build libraries in elementary schools. Some of these schools had wonderful libraries in them, but it was coming out that the children didn't have books at home and that's problematic. So we built these libraries where they could take books and keep them if they wanted to. So we built these libraries where they could take books and keep them if they wanted to, and that was a wonderful success.
Speaker 2:But unfortunately more recently and I think this is just part of the attack on literacy in general in this country without our consent or notifying the nonprofit, those were removed and destroyed and replaced with book vending machines. Now, while on the surface the book vending machines would seem like a good idea, apparently how these programs work is that the kids earn these fake dollars for good behavior and they're able to use those in the vending machines. But the problem with that is it excludes the students that need the books the most. We weren't giving books to children and I don't give books to children based on their behavior. It's based on the need for reading and that has de-incentivized reading for children and that's just criminal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's heartbreaking. I'm with you. Every child needs to be reading. Let's talk about Space Cowboy Books. You opened in 2016, and it's an indie bookshop in Joshua Tree, California. So why an indie bookshop and why in Joshua Tree?
Speaker 2:Well, to answer the first part of that question first, I have worked in so many varieties of fields. I've been in hospitality, I've been in construction, I've been in food. None of these things were terribly satisfying to me when I was a house painter all day. I would just think I wish I could work with my mind instead of my meat, and literature had obviously been a huge part of my life already, and so I'd always fantasized about having a bookstore, without knowing the practicalities of it. I'd even started collecting books to open up a bookshop, but it seemed out of reach, and it was appealing for multiple things. One, to do what one loves is imperative in life, and two, not everyone's a reader. You know everybody eats, so you know you work at a grocery store and you deal with absolutely everyone, which is fine. But I figured, owning a bookstore, my clientele would be my people, people I want to talk to, and that's been the case, which is absolutely lovely. Why Joshua Tree? It just happens to be where I live, and at the time that I opened.
Speaker 2:This has changed pretty dramatically over the last 10 years, but at the time that I opened it's a much more affordable place to be, and so I could actually take the risk of opening the bookshop the first year, and you know my partner had found this place. Oh, you should rent it. And I went gosh, I have. I could do this for three months as a as a test and see, and I was. I was working as a handyman at the time, fixing properties around the area, and the beginning was extremely modest. I mean, it was a shed out in the desert and people would come in and go. What is this place? You're out of your mind. Within a year, a better and bigger location opened up, so I was able to open up a proper storefront and around that time I quit my day job and went into being a bookseller full time, and it's the best choice I've ever made in my life.
Speaker 1:I love hearing that, and you know what? I have never heard an indie bookshop owner or bookseller say oh, I hate my job. So there's a lot to be said for being an indie bookshop owner. Now I would love to know a little bit more about the demographics of Joshua Tree and maybe the geography for our listeners.
Speaker 2:It's an unusual place. It's in the high desert, so it's definitely a desert environment. You know, temperatures are often up to 120 degrees, which is not for everyone, but we're also up in the mountains so it can get very cold and it snows. The store is about five miles away from the National Park, which is one of the most majestic places in the United States Just truly gorgeous and it has a very unique ecology, because we're right where the Colorado Desert and the Mojave Desert meet and whenever you have two different ecologies budding up into each other, you develop a unique ecology that may only exist in that area. So sheer natural beauty. It's incredible. As a community, it's an interesting place.
Speaker 2:I think there's a misconception for people that visit here that it's sort of this arts community and that there is that, although it's sort of a veneer, we're also next door to 29 Palms, which houses one of the largest military bases in the United States, and so there's a great deal of military family here, which is a transient population because you know they'll be restationed and move on, but there's a big military community, a lot of retirees you know there's the ATV, you know rip through the desert in their trucks type. You know, there's the atv, you know, ripped through the desert in their trucks, type um it's, it's a, it's a a wide variety of people that are all sort of butt up next to each other and coexist and and I appreciate that, you know we're, we're a few hours away from la, two, three hours away from la, so we we do get a? Um, a very large tourist population coming through which is ever changing. The types of folks that come. It used to be only Germans came in the summer because they don't have a desert in Germany. I guess they want to see one. So all different types of people come.
Speaker 2:It's been much more heavily visited over the last couple of years. It's increased in popularity, I think Americans and people from all over the world's desire to see the great national parks. So it's truly beautiful and it's hard not to be inspired because I mean, at night we have this, we're dark skies, communities, we have this wonderful view of the stars which is always inspiring for me as a science fiction writer, and then our gorgeous and bizarre landscape. You know, looking out my window for years I'm like I have to write a Western one of these days. You know, it's right there, and last year I actually had my first Western published, which takes place on San Jacinto Mountain, which is not far from here and is an algoryth for the changes that have happened in this town in the decade that I've been here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there are certainly changes everywhere. Now let's talk about your podcast, Simultaneous Times. I enjoyed the arrangement of the show where you have readers and they could be authors of their own story reading their own story, or they could be reading someone else's short story. It is really fun. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about Simultaneous Times and what's the handle for the show? So yeah, Space, little bit more about Simultaneous Times and what's the handle for the show.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, space Cowboy Books presents Simultaneous Times. You can find it on Spotify, itunes, youtube, basically anywhere you listen to podcasts, it's always free. There's no ads, because I don't want to interrupt the wonderful stories. The podcast comes out on the 15th of every month. There's always two science fiction stories occasionally fantasy or horror, but mostly science fiction, and the writers are from all over the globe. It's very much an international project, which is incredibly satisfying, especially as America attempts to isolate.
Speaker 2:Literature is a global conversation and that's important. As I was saying earlier, these are how we learn about each other. Fiction is how we emotionally respond to the world, and that's important. As I was saying earlier, these are how we learn about each other. Fiction is how we emotionally respond to the world, and that's so important, and the concerns are various depending on where you're coming from and the culture you're writing from. The idea for the podcast it was always something I wanted to do. We launched it in 2018, so a few years after the store began because I had to figure out how to run a bookstore first, but it was born out of my love for radio dramas from the 30s, 40s and 50s and I was very fortunate. When I was a child I inherited my sister when she moved out, passed on a little radio, a little battery-powered radio, to me, and at my bedtime there was an AM station that would play old radio dramas and I fell in love with the Westerns and the horror and the detective and the science fiction and all these wonderful stories.
Speaker 2:And you know, writing is birthed from an oral tradition, so it's a wonderful way to experience stories and to hear them in different voices. So that I'd always wanted to do something like a radio drama. And um, there was a program in the in the late 70s called mind webs, which you can find on archiveorg. Highly recommend it to all fans of science fiction. And um, they were these dramatic readings set to wonderful music of all varieties, and I thought, you know, we can do this, we can model something of this.
Speaker 2:And initially I thought, oh, I have some unpublished stories and I have friends that make music, we'll just cram them together. And almost immediately it was like no, we're going to bring in writers from everywhere, we're going to pay the writers, let's make this happen. And that's just grown and grown and I think we're producing our 83rd episode. So we've done hundreds of stories at this point and it's just been a fabulous experience. And it has also taught me a great deal about how reading is, an act of interpretation, when I'm reading someone else's story and trying to make sure that I get the intent right of what the story really means. So. Much of that has to do with the delivery, and it's been a wonderful learning experience as a writer and a reader to see how deeply reading is an act of interpretation.
Speaker 1:As is listening. Now why did you open your own publishing company under Space Cowboy Books?
Speaker 2:So that started pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:In the beginning, we did a series of chat books, so we did I think I don't know 14 or 15 chat books, primarily from local writers, and that was just to sort of get to know the writing community, to see if there was a potential for sale.
Speaker 2:And then also, I mean, I knew nothing about publishing at the time, so this was something I could go to the local copy shop and execute, but it was always in the plan that you know, we'll sell used books with the idea of raising money to publish new books and keep literature alive and proliferate these wonderful stories and hopefully get writers paid, because it's a notoriously difficult profession to make it in, so always try and make sure that the writers are taken care of. And we did our first book in 2018, our first paperback, which was a collection of stories that had appeared from the podcast, but also some that hadn't, so that were appearing for the first time, and that's become a regular thing. We've done three paperbacks on the Simultaneous Times brand, as well as a bunch of others. Now it's burst into single author collections some of my books, other anthologies and that's a dream that I had my entire life and I just wasn't really sure how to navigate it. But I met a book designer, started learning that process and it's an ongoing learning process.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is, and it's one of those professions where you truly do learn by making mistakes, especially when you're paying for those mistakes.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's incredibly expensive, it's a difficult and long-term process.
Speaker 2:Things often take forever and then they move so quickly it's impossible to keep up with. But it's been an incredible learning process because, you know, as a writer, it really has allowed me to understand what publishers are going through, what publishers are looking for, their needs, the complications, and, I think, no matter what profession one is in, to know a little bit about the back end is incredibly important, and one thing that's been neat about it is as I've learned how all of these things work. I've been able to pass that on and help presses that are just getting started, authors that are having difficulty navigating how to do these things, whether they're publishing their own books or dealing with publishers, and so that's something I've been able to branch out and help a lot of other presses with, because it's a steep learning curve and there isn't exactly a great manual for what to do or how to do it. There's a lot of mystery in the business and it's a business like all others that's constantly changing and publishing houses have to adapt to those changes.
Speaker 1:Well, I definitely agree with you. Publishing is constantly changing. I've recently gotten into reading zines. Are zines still popular in the sci-fi world?
Speaker 2:no-transcript, much a thing, and Space Cowboy does publish a few chat books a year, which is really fun. I've got a laser printer. I can do them right in my office. It's a great and cheap way to spread the work around and do zine exchanges and things like that.
Speaker 1:And I think the quality of the publishing of zines has become really good. I've been reading some collections of essays through zines and I really enjoy the smaller book. I just love everything about them. I think they're really great.
Speaker 2:And there's a great history of it too. And you know, with the recent wave of attacks on books and censorship, you know we may, who knows? I hope not, but we may have to move back towards sort of the pamphleteering attitude of publishing. You know it's a way to do things without censorship, to have something tangible immediately, and certainly the readers that come into the store love them. You know, all the windows have strings with clothespins with zines hanging on them and they're quite popular.
Speaker 2:There are bookstores I know, in California and around the rest of the country that specialize in zines, and I think it's very important to have outlets of independent media in that way, whether it's small press or zine makers, where it's not big business that's behind it, places that can move faster than the big houses and take chances that the big houses wouldn't.
Speaker 2:And zines are an absolutely wonderful way to do that and imperative for keeping independent media alive. Now, where zines are incredibly important in the science fiction world is in the fan community and there are what are called APA's Associated Press Amateur Groups, which are basically zine exchange groups, and these will happen through the mail, they happen through email, depending on whether they're physical or digital zines, and that has always been incredibly important in science fiction. In fact, the first zines as we know them were born out of the science fiction community, fanzines starting as far back as the 30s, and those traditions are very much alive. I'm part of an organization called the National Fantasy Fan Federation, or N3F for short, and that is a zine exchange bureau that has been running since the 30s.
Speaker 1:I was lucky enough to interview the great writer Michael Moorcock, and he is one of my favorite writers. I love his book Gloria on All the Unfulfilled Queen, and creating fanzines for fan clubs in London is actually how he started. So yeah, zines have a great history. Okay, now I would love to hear about some of your local sci-fi authors living in the Joshua Tree area. Absolutely, but real quick now. I would love to hear about some of your local sci-fi authors living in the Joshua Tree area.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, but real quick. I'd like to comment on Michael Moorcock. Many editors in the science fiction world cut their teeth first in fanzines. Michael Moorcock changed what science fiction means in the late 60s, along with JG Ball and and a lot of writers from the new wave and um. Quality of editing is imperative, but it's also a place to learn to be an editor. Um. This is not exactly something you can go to school for. Um. It's a tricky profession. A lot of us fall into being editors accidentally or or just through circumstance, but it is is. I encourage anyone that wants to do it to absolutely do it. You know, michael Moorcock is a wonderful example, because you can come from the fanzine world and end up being one of the most important fantasists of the 20th century.
Speaker 1:I think Michael Moorcock is brilliant.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And for our listeners, all the books and websites and everything that we've talked about in the show, I'll make sure to put in the show notes. I'll also make sure to put in the interview. I didn't know any other science fiction writers at the time.
Speaker 2:This was quite a while ago but I was sort of alone in my fandom. I didn't know the fan communities. I just read these books on my own and didn't really have anyone to discuss them with or the writing with. I didn't really have a community yet and when I moved out here I met some great friends that were science fiction writers. When I moved out here I met some great friends that were science fiction writers. Brent A Harris, who's a science fiction and alternate history writer, was one of the first people I met out here. I'm still publishing his work. He's doing excellent novels.
Speaker 2:Some of my favorites and often some of the stories will take place here, which is fun. The other writer I met right away was Mary Collier, who sadly passed away recently. It was a great loss because she was a wonderful lady. She was in her 80s, her mid-80s, and she was still writing these fantastic science fiction Western books that were just outrageously fun. So she was one of the first people I met and very much lament the loss of her.
Speaker 2:But for a very small community there's more science fiction writers than one might anticipate and one very cool thing that's happened is obviously I've met writers through the store, of all variety and all genres. But I've managed to sort of throw an elbow in and convince literary fiction writers to try their hand at science fiction as well and that has produced some incredible results from, you know, radical feminist science fiction to absurdist science fiction, to all different kinds of flavors of science fiction, and that's been exciting. And there is a wealth of writers here in a small town and I think part of the attraction of writers ending up here is it's a fairly quiet place. You're not that far from civilization but you're also in the middle of nowhere and that breathing room is really conducive to the ability to write.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree. Okay, what are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:So today I'm reading a book of science fiction criticism from 1960 called New Maps of Hell by Kingsley Amos and I can't say I'm enjoying it that much. But I read it because JG Ballard had sort of had a feud with this guy and in a recently published book of Ballard's nonfiction he was highly critical of this critic and I thought, well, let me see, let me see what he's talking about, and it's from 1960. So obviously it doesn't include a lot of the history of science fiction. It's about the early days. That's okay.
Speaker 2:But my pleasure reading these days is I'm trying to read my way through the entire works of Thomas M Dish, who is one of my favorite writers. I believe he got his start in New World's Magazine, which was edited by Michael Moorcock. He is a fabulous writer and the breadth of his work is just incredible. There's a lot of straight science fiction novels. He's probably best known for the Brave Little Toaster, the children's book. He wrote the first interactive fiction, what today we'd call a video game, which is an interactive text-based novel, really all over the place. I just finished his memoir, which was one of the most pompastic and outrageous things I've read in the funniest way. So I'm often inspired by writers who seemingly can take on any subject and just excel at it, and he's one of those a fabulous poet as well. So I've been trying to locate and read all of his books. I've also been reading, trying to read through all the novels of Charles Platt, who was the art director and designer of New World's Magazine. Again back to Moorcock, who's become a friend recently, and so I'm trying to read through all of his works, and I like to.
Speaker 2:When I fall in love with a writer, I like to try and read everything that they've written, because with some writers there's a greater overarching mythos that you can. I don't think you can fully understand them until you've read everything. And obviously I can be a little bit obsessive in my reading, where I will attempt to read all of the output of a writer, which is not always easy, especially with books that are long out of print. But it's been on my reading stack lately. And a lot of slush. The podcast just opened up to submissions, so I've been reading a dozen short stories a day, the bulk of my reading. While I read every day for pleasure, I also read every day for work.
Speaker 1:I know the feeling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, For most people it's insane to have read several books worth of material a day, but that's my profession and it's what I love to do. So a lot of slushing right now, and I'm also editing a few nonfiction books one for my partner, a book about art, and one that's a biography of an early science fiction writer, which is something I'll be publishing later in the year.
Speaker 1:You're a busy man, John Paul. Thank you so much for being on the show. I've really enjoyed getting to know you and your local science fiction writers. Thank you so much and keep up the good work.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Mandy, and thank you for what you're doing to support booksellers and bookstores. As most people, I think, understand, it's a perilous profession and what you're doing to support that is absolutely wonderful. Thank you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Jean-Paul L Garnier, owner of Space Cowboy Books Bookstore and Publishing House and the producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson-Beverly, Theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, Adrian Otterhan, and graphic design by Frances Barala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.