LeftLion has been homeless for a fair few years now, living in and out of various bedrooms in the Carrington/Sherwood area of Nottingham and surviving on discarded chip wrappers for sustenance and warmth. But finally we have our very own offices in The Corner which we lovingly share with I’m not from London, a Spanish language school and a Pole Dancing Club. This means we now have a place to store the mag so that anyone can pop by and grab a copy. Although this is more convenient for punters it will inevitably remove some of the aura associated with the magazine. Part of our self-created mythology is the fact that nobody can ever find the damn thing as it goes as quickly as it’s plonked down. Another significant effect of having our own gaff is we no longer need to meet up in the Orange Tree and complain about how ridiculously expensive the beer is. Instead we can have a full-on Blow Out mag launch for every issue and use the occasion as an excuse to draw the local creative community together. Surviving ten years without any funding is something we should be celebrating at every opportunity, particularly given it’s only a matter of time before digital technology rips the heart out of print media and a video of the event is posted on YouTube. As it happens I didn’t make it to the mag launch but that’s just because I’m boring.
If you pick up a copy of issue 52 you’ll find an interview with the girl with the Byron Tattoo, Christy Fearn. Her debut book Framed is just out and explores the frame breakers of 1811/2. I commissioned Christy to explore some of these issues for the Sillitoe Trail on The Space so it’s great to see her talks and research materialise into a book. I was disappointed with the page layout, though, as you can’t really make out her tattoo. We should have shot her doing an arm wrestle or something. The lesson here is to give more specific art direction, particularly as we knew the headline in advance of the shoot. There was an absolute blizzard on the day of the shoot so most of our plans quickly went out the window. I also squeezed in an interview with scriptwriter Adrian Reynolds and director Jack Delaney who’ve just produced Making Sparks, the world’s first serial-based drama for mobile phones. So a nice scoop. I’m about to embark on a new project called Dawn of the Unread and Adrian will definitely feature in some capacity…
Katie Half-Price developed a little bit more with the creation of ‘Six Degrees of Strelley(ation)’ in which I hope to tenuously link every great writer to this relatively ignored and shabby quarter of Nottingham. A big thanks goes to Katrine Brosnan for the illustration.
In the world of WriteLion there was a good balance of book reviews, featuring four debuts. These were two self-published titles (On Ashover Hill and An Engineer Abroad), Miggy Angel’s poetry collection, and Post journo Mhairi McFarlane’s romcom You Had Me At Hello. We covered sport through The Glory of Forest by LTLF creator Alex Walker and a digital version of Zoe Fairbairns feminist classic Benefits. There’s a tonne of other books desperate to get on the page. Please be patient. You’ll get there eventually. And if we’re really lucky, the book reviews from the last issue might even get uploaded to the website as well. Anyone fancy being an online editor?