The Leaf Writers’ magazine was first published in spring 2010 and comes out three times a year in both print (£6) and online as a downloadable pdf (£3). It’s a practical guide to writing, offering advice on all areas of creative writing with the intention of bridging the gap between professional writers and amateurs. They run various themed competitions for poets and writers alike, with publication for the winners. Although some may be sceptical of publications that charge entry fees for competitions, it does offer a realistic opportunity for new writers to make that all important first step into print. It’s also a pragmatic way for magazines to supplement income brought in through advertising.

Each issue has a general theme. Issue three was ‘Travel’ and I wrote a literary guide to the then World Book Capital of the World, Ljubljana, and James Joyce’s Trieste. I also did a feature/interview with Sir Andrew Motion, discussing his planned follow up to Treasure Island and how the internet is enabling poetry to reach a wider and more varied audience.

The theme for issue four is ‘creative collaboration.’ For this I reviewed Howl, Penguin’s debut foray into the world of graphical poetry. For the purists out there this is further evidence of the dumbing down process, the reader is no longer required to conjure images up for themselves. Or could it be that it’s simply a new means of keeping poetry alive and appealing to a wider audience. The original is still available after all. These were issues we debated in the WriteLion 6 podcast with students from ncn who were illustrating the poetry of James Joyce in a project with Candlestick Press and the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.     

Ethical considerations aside, I wasn’t a big fan. Not for the issues raised in the high/low culture debate above, but because I didn’t like the illustrations. There’s no doubting Eric Drooker’s proven ability and Allen Ginsberg completely endorsed his work, but they looked like something out of a Pixar movie which detracted from the darkness of the poem: smooth edges don’t work with the raw and uncooked.

My interview/feature was with Staple editor Wayne Burrows who has collaborated across art forms to help him think in character for the purposes of developing his novel Albany 6. Albany 6 is about a musician who invents a playback system that affects memory and is ‘a little bit like the history of music since the 1960s, crossed with a bit of Phillip K Dick.’ One of his characters, Robert Holcombe, started out as an afterthought, whose only purpose within the narrative was to give insight into the main protagonist’s ideas. However, Holcombe has become a  bit of an obsession for Wayne and developed a life of his own. This saw Wayne give a 30 minute spoof lecture at Hatch on the life of his fictional character, including over 70 collages of artwork supposedly made by the artist. More recently Holcombe is celebrated in a short film for Annexinema, rather fittingly about a man obsessed with finding patterns in random images. But what I love most about this project, other than it being a practical means of recycling work, is the way Holcombe is slowly willing himself alive. He’ll be poking you on Facebook next…