Pages,
Gathering Words
(article from the Scottish Book Collector, issue 7:11, spring 2005)
‘The
body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each
other.’
Meridel
LeSueur (from
Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980)
One
of the poems from the spring 2004 issue of island
that lingers in my mind is Elspeth Murray’s poem circle: 'water held by rock
shaped by...'
It
stays with me because of the quiet expression of inter-dependency within it. It
is a circularity that I also like to apply to books. I have always been drawn to
books not just for their content, but for their form: words held by pages shaped
by words. I knew from the beginning that the design of an issue of island
magazine would be integral: I would need to search for a means to express what I
felt could be an intimate relationship between the form and the content held
within. Just as a poem is more than the words the poet has chosen, but also
finds its meaning in the way those words are arranged on the page.
island is about landscape – the natural landscape upon
which its textual content is themed, but also the landscape of the page. Each
white page is an open space, and as I place each poem within a page, I seek to
retain that experience of space. I use greys and other pale colours to fix the
text lightly, with a sense of transparency, of impermanence. In the design I
seek a quietness, a gentleness, an accessibility. A lack of clutter. The reader
is encouraged to enter and explore, to wander, to pause awhile. island
can be appreciated, I hope, with many of the senses. The texture of text
meandered through the various textures of different types of paper is designed
to appeal to the reader’s sense of touch. A sheet of soft white rippled card
is used for the cover of every edition, and only the colour of the title graphic
varies from issue to issue – a colour that will be reprised throughout the
individual issue.
I
am seeking to create a wholeness. The parts are literally and figuratively
threaded together to create a whole. Physically by the natural string that
gathers the twenty or so sheets of folded A4 paper together. A couple of knots
and twists, secure but with the sense of unwrapping, unravelling. No staples, no
glue. Also, no trimming or cutting. Just the pure edges of each sheet of paper
layering on top of each other creating a means to fan through from front to
centre, from back to centre. A flow of pages through the reader’s hands. Each
issue has a specific theme that links the pages. Care is taken to place pieces
within the issue to create connections, echoes in the reader’s mind. Each
issue is sprinkled with a liberal use of quotations (another love of mine) that
blend and lead the theme through the issue.
Each
issue can be read in different ways. It will be read inevitably in a linear way,
and care is taken to create a linear flow through the pages, although I do not
encourage this way of reading the magazine exclusively as I omit traditional
elements such as contents pages and page numbers deliberately. I also encourage
reading from the back via the fanning quality of the untrimmed pages and from
the centre out. The beauty of working with such a simple A5 design of a
gathering of folded A4 sheets is that the centre pages lend themselves to
special usage. Pick up a copy of island
and you will find that it opens naturally at its centre, and it is here that I
encourage artists and poets to collaborate; offering them a unique space to
create what is in effect a book within a book. Using sheets of tracing paper and
images, a layering can be achieved, a sense of what is hidden being brought to
the surface. Text and images can be woven together in ways not possible in other
commercially printed magazine formats.
The
entire magazine is produced from beginning to completion in a small study using
relatively unsophisticated means to produce an object with as high a degree of
quality and beauty as possible. The content is formatted and the design is
created using the simplest of desktop publishing programmes (Microsoft
Publisher). Paper and tracing paper are purchased in bulk from local stationers
and art supply shops. The sheets of A4 paper are printed on by a colour ink jet
printer that cost no more than £90. Each sheet is then folded one at a time
using a bone folder (one of my favourite possessions) and then each set of
folded sheets is collated. The final stage, the binding with string, and the
stacks of paper become individual copies of island.
There is a deep sense of pleasure to be felt knowing that the entire magazine is
created by my hands, in witnessing the steady process of combination and
transformation of each of the ingredients that make up an issue of island:
the piles of submissions in their brown envelopes, the stacks of books all over
the floor, the ideas jotted down on slips of paper, the revealing biographies
given to me for the special section at the back of each issue, the reams of
white paper, the boxes of string. A time-consuming process perhaps, but there is
a ‘slow’ and meditative joy to be found in the repetitive tasks involved.
The
most recent issue was the spring 2004 issue. Stone was the theme. As always I
was interested in receiving pieces that used non-traditional forms. I have a
particular liking for concrete poetry, for prose poems, for fragments. For the
stone issue I encouraged poets to send circle poems, and enjoyed using many of
these to create simple, clear pages containing just a few words. Gunnie Moberg
provided images and Robert Alan Jamieson a text and they allowed me to weave
their work together to create a sense of geology and texture for the centre
section. It is always fascinating to watch the pieces come together for an
issue. To see the different preoccupations of writers and how they often share a
response to a theme. Stone inspired a sense of loss, of rawness, of bereavement.
Of flux, of impermanence set against geological time, of a wearing away.
Something I thought summed up visually in Gunnie Moberg’s image at the centre
of the issue. An image of rock seen through a glaze of water, with a curve
meandering through the image, like a river, a flaw, a path. And also like flesh.
As in Elspeth Murray’s poem, stone is worn away to create hollows, the body is
reflected in the landscape of stone. Particular pieces still retain resonance
for me: Gerrie Fellow’s piece ‘Text for a Scattering’, her description of
her father’s rock collection; Alistair Paterson’s feather floating in a pool
of water gathered in a heart-shaped stone; Anna Crowe’s capturing of the
spiral of grief felt at seeing a fossil of fishes desperate for the last drop of
water; Elizabeth Burns’ poem ‘Horse’ with its image of the sifting
fragments in the earth:
‘…making
– as we on earth have always done –
something whole from what is
broken, separate:
mud and fire that make the pot
chalk and grass the horse,
still galloping over the hill.’
And
then the sense that everyone has at some point wandered the landscape gathering
pebbles, thrown a flat stone across a loch, slipped a treasured stone in their
pocket or placed one on a desk to remind them of a place, or a time, or a
person. It is these strange connections we maintain with the landscape, these
elusive relationships that we pursue, this ability to see our emotional
experiences captured within a ‘natural’ landscape to which we often feel we
do not belong, that island seeks to
provide a means to express.
Julie Johnstone