When you have time on your hands, not that I ever need that excuse…

But here is a great idea for combining two easy-to-access methods for producing and printing your writing, albeit on a small scale with a large scale ruse.

The first is the one-page zine, an old idea, but one I came across recently with an easy-to-follow video and template, which you can find here. My first production is the following short set of Lockdown Poems, so a serious endeavour, but enjoyable to make as well as post to a few people at a time when receiving mail is hopefully quite welcome:

The second is using an online generator to produce either a Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics front book cover, as with this post’s lead image. It is a brilliant idea that has been made/released, I think, very recently but which has already gone viral. You can get it here.

So I have combined these two ideas for my next zine product, still to be printed, and below is a screengrab of what will be the front and back covers [I don’t want to give the writing away] here:

With thanks, and to art by JC. Read here.

1.

One night on Telegraph I woke to feel him closing a Coors fliptop into my palm. He was smiling down at me. Terry was a young cowboy, from Nebraska. He wouldn’t go to foreign movies. I just realized it’s because he couldn’t read fast enough.

2.

“Yes,” you said. A simple Nebraska statement.

This May’s supermoon will be the last for 2020. In the UK, it will apparently be its fullest today at 11.45am, not that we will see this, and in terms of our being able to spot as such, it will be at 8.45pm, weather permitting. These shots were taken yesterday evening across a period of 4-5 hours and I don’t believe I would get any better if waiting until tonight when technically at its brightest. I am mentioning in the spirit of fullness, excusing the pun, and also the theme of this posting.

With my good friend Nick Dormand, artist and photographer, we have been collaborating in words/images for a few years, these wonderfully spontaneous links in that my writing is always prompted by the – mainly – photographs he takes and posts [Facebook/Instagram] but also other images, including sketches/paintings.

It is a ‘found’ collaboration, never structured/organised. We both seem to have an urge to capture, and finding whatever that is then becomes an ongoing and homogenous process.

This facemask image struck me immediately, for obvious reasons. Probably more than ever, the compulsion to write with this was powerful. For Nick, the image is hugely personal in that it is of his daughter who works in the NHS. My response was one no doubt shared by so many in this Covid-19 world where we all have deep-rooted, emotional attachments to and thankfulness for the caring and compassionate commitment of nurses and other frontline workers: the facemask now an image firmly fixed to that selflessness but also the personal risks involved and, speaking for myself, unacceptable abuses from lack of supply and those responsible for this, including making excuses for it.

Where my accompaniments, especially found prose poems, normally come from quite wide searches, these words just seemed to be there.

I will obviously never know, and it would be paradoxical, but I guess her wish, maybe just a beginnings of one aged 15, was to in fact leave, eventually. This cannot detract one bit from the honest and poetic description of the town of her birth – classic, small-town America, population in 2010 still modest at 662 – but my mother did move away to an eventful life, filled with personal trials as well as ultimately moving afar completely to Europe and taking charge of her family – myself and three sisters – for those journeys and the number of moves and that forever distance from home, until returning to the West Coast where she was at least near to her daughters, my sisters: me deciding to return to and stay in England.

Although I was always aware of my mother’s love of writing in her many letters to me when we were apart, as well as her journals about travels and living abroad, it is only more recently I have become to appreciate her urge to write, and to write well. I’d like to think in the nature/nurture dichotomy, this latter does apply to however I have been able to follow in her footsteps.

A review comment from Jackie Moore on Self-Isolation, a collaborative words and images response to the current situation by Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell. With our thanks,

‘I have just been able for the first time to open the wonderful Self-Isolation. What a knockout combination. This is profound material and I’ve only looked through it twice. The range is remarkable – from the beautiful, to the philosophical through to the deadly dart at our corrupt politicians, where they ‘insulate the message from the meaning’. It moves all over the place: interior, exterior, abstract; personal, national – into the ether. The paintings are glorious, exactly in harmony with the words. Clever use of the colour bar: is it a thermometer taking the nation’s pulse, or the anxious individuals? Seems to capture the general anxiety of us all.’

Read/download Self-Isolation.