About Callender Press
Callender Press is a family founded and owned press
Callender Press Description
The Callender Press is run by Ruth Finnegan, helped by her brothers and sister, the fourth generation of the Callender family. She writes fiction and poems in the name of Catherine Farrar and any profits all go to support the family-run Catherine Farrar trust, founded in memory of little Catherine who died just over a century ago in that well-remembered house in Templemore Park at the top of Derry city, with its sweet rowan tree for babies to lie under and be few with its wisdom – not remembered in later life perhaps but never never forgotten.
Catherine Farrar was the little girl, daughter of David and Lucy (once Farrar) Campbell. She was born, long awaited, in the December of 1899 and died in 1906 just short of her seventh birthday to the despair of her adoring family, especially of her lovinigest jealous sister Helen and her ever grieving mother .
She did not live to dream her dreams for herself or to write them as stories. So now Ruth must write and publish them for her. She sends her stories and songs to Ruth who receives them, hearing the music between sleeping and waking. And then, calling hard on all her long-honed skills as writer and reader and hearer, Ruth turns them in the daylight into Catherine’s poems and tales. Then with lightning swiftness they become the beautiful books of the Callender Press, not Ruth’s but ever Catherine’s.