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Lines

Issue 4 May 2022

In This issue

Lines can be drawn, and lines can be crossed – they possess a lightness and flexibility. As you will see in this issue, our features interpret “lines” literally and metaphorically, creatively and artistically. In this issue of The Lit, we seek to understand the impact of the lines that have been drawn around us, and to illuminate the power of crossing these lines to find new horizons.

From audio walks and activity books to the taboo world of toilet graffiti, we explore how words and story lines have the power to transport us beyond the page.

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Credits

  • Lauren Evans
    Assistant Editor
  • Anna Kiernan
    Publisher
  • Hazel Beevers
     Managing Editor
  • Rosie Hearne
    Art Director
  • Bhumika Popli
     Poetry and Fiction Editor
  • Orla Mackinnon
     Editorial Assistant
  • Yudi Wu
     Digital Content Creator
  • Imogen Phillips
     Creative Production Intern
  • Abby Crawford
     Writer
  • Alice Eaves
     Writer
  • Rosalie Alston
     Writer
  • Nur Alan
     Writer
  • Lucy Beckley
     Writer
  • George Harrison
     Writer
  • Phyllida Bluemel
    Writer
  • Shuvashish Roy
     Contributor
  • Callum Mitchell
     Writer
  • Maxwell Gutteridge
    Photographer
  • Nick Pumphrey
     Photographer
  • Ellen Wiles
    Speaker
  • Clare Howdle
     Mentor
  • Zander Grinfeld
    Mentor

Editor’s Letter

Lines can be drawn, and lines can be crossed - they possess a lightness and flexibility. As you will see in this issue, our features interpret “lines” literally and metaphorically, creatively and artistically. In this issue of The Lit, we seek to understand the impact of the lines that have been drawn around us, and to illuminate the power of crossing these lines to find new horizons.

From audio walks and activity books to the taboo world of toilet graffiti, we explore how words and story lines have the power to transport us beyond the page.

Strange Books for Strange Times

Folded curiosities, postable performances, and pamphlets that speak – we look at some lesser-known publishing species, in an ode to strange books.

Words in the World | Latrinalia

Where does the written word appear in the real world beyond the realms of advertising and road signs? From politics to love, the toilet stall has always been a place of public expression. Here, we leave the page behind and set out to document how words can belong in the strangest of places.

End of the Line | Every Day He Went To Work

A poignant search for home, security and a cure for writer’s block unfold in Callum Mitchell’s tale - a gently devastating critique of Cornwall's housing crisis

Photo Essay | End of the Line

Photographer Nick Pumphrey on living in a town where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Cornish coast; swelling with people in summer, contracting in winter. Tourists and artists. The final stop of the bay line. Nick describes how these ‘natural rhythms’ affect his creative output.

Open Call | Selected ‘Lines’ Open Calls – Poetry

Whilst the Coronavirus pandemic brought grief, the crisis also allowed us to look deeper within ourselves. It brought us closer to our interior world. Although somewhat blurry, many of us drew boundaries, lines, a map around ourselves, which helped us move forward. These poems and short stories meditate on these experiences.

Photo Essay | Crossing Over

Photographer Maxwell Gutteridge documents a misty Vietnamese funeral procession, and in these soft-edged photographs, reflects on the liminal border between life and death

Open Call | Selected ‘Lines’ Open Calls – Fiction – Blue Screen Error

Whilst the Coronavirus pandemic brought grief, the crisis also allowed us to look deeper within ourselves. It brought us closer to our interior world. Although somewhat blurry, many of us drew boundaries, lines, a map around ourselves, which helped us move forward. These poems and short stories meditate on these experiences.

Interview | The Sound of the Underground

Audiobook sales continue to soar, yet big tech’s dominance of the market prevails. We meet Kelli Fairbrother, co-founder of xigxag, an upstart audio startup that blurs the lines between audio, visual and community.

Border Line | The Fuzzy Line Between

A multidisciplinary response to our ‘Border line’ open call to writing responding to the war in Ukraine, Nur Allan plays with form and language to explore what lines and boundaries mean in our lives. Do they separate? Moralise? Define? To be crossed or obeyed? And what do we make of them in a time of war.

Linguistic Borderlines | Mother Tongue: On the Language of Migration

Deeply entrenched in the global movement of people is the push and pull of the Queen’s English. From the loss of tribal language to new literature by refugees, we speak to academics and literary journal founders to map the fault lines of language in a shaken world.

Creative Journals | Ja Ichcha Tai: Lines That Shape The Page

Creative entrepreneur Shuvashish Roy shares his blueprint for thinking laterally.

Podcast | Dr. Ellen Wiles on Live Literature and Leaping Over Literary Boundaries

In this podcast for The Lit Issue 4, Ellen tells our host Orla Mackinnon how in-person events enable people to interpret a text differently through the way it’s performed, and the sensory impact of a ‘temporal liveness.’

Open Call | Selected ‘Lines’ Open Calls – Fiction – Roadkill

Whilst the Coronavirus pandemic brought grief, the crisis also allowed us to look deeper within ourselves. It brought us closer to our interior world. Although somewhat blurry, many of us drew boundaries, lines, a map around ourselves, which helped us move forward. These poems and short stories meditate on these experiences.

Hold the Line | The Writers Experimenting With Form

Within poetry and fiction, structure and form are constantly evolving. Here is a line-up of experimental writers that are blurring the boundaries between prose and fiction, and in doing so, showing us the power that a line can hold.

Writing Life | Story Lines: Some Instructions on Writing (and Life)*

Distractions. Procrastination. Fatigue. Getting the words down can often be a gruelling process. It’s also highly personal; no two writers go about it in the same way. We spoke to creatives about their writing habits and rituals, and what boundaries they experience as they endeavour to empty their minds onto the page.