Cinnamon Blog

Sep 27 2021

Bringing the past into the present — two novels of extraordinary characters

One of the unlooked for gifts of virtual launches has been the ability to bring together not only an audience from different parts of the globe, but also to have authors from different places in one virtual space, sharing their work and creating encounters enriched by both the different and similar threads that weave into and out of their narratives.

This was certainly the case tonight at the launch of Aldermaston by Kate Hoyland and The Pathless Country by James Harpur.

Set in both the future and the past with the strapline: the future is a thing of the past, Aldermaston journeys with Jean, an archeologist of a future, wading through a drowning world and determined, at the end of her life, to find a time capsule from the 1950s. And it travels also with Ida, 19, searching for a life that breaks the stultifying conventions of post-War Britain and burying a time capsule, a love letter to the future, before joining the first ban the bomb protest in 1958.

Set in turn of the century cosmopolitan London among the glamour of theosophical circles and in rural Ireland in the early part of the First World War and the lead up the 1916 Easter Rising, The Pathless Country walks with Patrick Bowley as he preaches peace and makes an epic pilgrimage, discovering the true nature of ‘the pathless country’.

Both books feature protagonists who are prepared to challenge the societies they find themselves, prepared to find lonelier yet more authentic routes through life. Both raise questions about the nature of self, service and meaning and both place strong emphasis on landscape as a character that interacts with these important questions.

If you missed the launch you can catch up with the video here and the discount code in the video is good through October.

Sep 15 2021

Lost Futures Zine

Hauntology seems to describe the zeitgeist of our times — the sense of futures lost, almost as if we are becoming conscious of parallele universes, split away from ours by decisions and turning points large and small. It’s there in nostalgia for decades gone by. It’s there in our turning back towards landscape and pastoral. It’s there in politics. And it’s there in writing.We were impressed, recently, when we came across the zine Lost Futures, overseen by Christian Kitson and Kieran Cutting. It’s mixture of text and image is as impressive as it’s suitably haunting. But focus of vision, the emphasis on craft and imagination, are what bring us back and back to the zine. Here Christian and Kieran talk about Lost Futures and offer a few samples from past issues…

— Adam

Lost Futures: a zine about worlds that could have been, should have been, or weren’t

Impetus for starting the zine and where we see it moving

Lost Futures started as a project between two friends who spent a lot of time exchanging stories while wandering around the woods close to where we both grew up. We’d often go there together when we were back in our hometown, catching up on what we’d been up to while off at university, as well as nostalgically recounting stories from our school days. We’d talk about the experiences which at the time were so meaningful, of the friends we were losing touch with, as we all went off on our separate lives.

With the onset of the pandemic and lockdowns in 2020, we missed walking in the woods. As two friends at opposite ends of the country, we knew that in another life, we would be back among the trees, telling our stories over a few beers. In a sense, Lost Futures came from something as simple as that — the spark for this idea came from the spirit of our moment, when so many things had to be put on hold, and for so long we lived with the continual sense that the future had been cancelled.

We started Lost Futures to explore the worlds which could have been, and could never have been. We both read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and were riding high on her lesson that creativity is less about thinking something up than it is about getting something down. It’s this mentality which we sought to channel into a creative project together — and we were really attracted to the rough and ready, anything goes philosophy behind making zines. Lost Futures is an experiment in form following content. We believe that ideas find their own forms, and we follow the creative energy wherever that takes us.

What sort of work we are looking for and how to submit

We accept submissions in any format. If you have an idea we like, we will want to make it work. Lost Futures is a zine, but it is growing into something so much more than that. For now, you can find the poems, prose and visual art which makes up our volumes in physical zine — but we are experimenting with new formats that will allow us to better bring haunting music, harrowing experiences, and thought-provoking moving pictures to our audiences. We’ve taken poetry, fiction, essays, photography, film critique, collage, and musical musing, amongst other forms, and would love to see what’s on your mind.

Each volume has a theme: we’ve just started shipping copies of volume 3: meanwhile… and are open for submissions to volume 4, ‘thresholds’. We encourage submissions which respond to these prompts, but also consider submissions on the general theme of lost futures. We are interested in the worlds which didn’t quite make it into existence, and the ghosts that made it through to haunt us. In the lives you might have led if things were different, and what happened instead. Or of the paths you started going down, and when you turned back.

Further information, and links to buy and submit can be found on the Lost Futures website.

extracts from Lost Futures

Sep 10 2021

From darkness to light: poetic perspectives on landscape, memory and language

There’s wonderful buzz to hosting a launch and particularly when the poetry being read bears witness to our humanity and to the full range of questions that confront us as a result. As the Zoom audience listened to three extraordinary poets, Frank Dullaghan reading from in the coming of winter, Mick Evans reading from light airs and Nigel Hutchinson reading from do not enter alarmed area, the chat box filled — with metaphors and images that were resonating with the listeners, with deep appreciated and with a sense of recognition.

Good poetry is an encounter — with ancestors, with places, with music, image, with a creature or creatures — the poet, a snail, a hare, a shock of violet irisses — and with ourselves. Moreover it invites us to enlarge ourselves — to see a little differently, to ask questions, to make tiny yet seismic shifts.

I’m endlessly fascinated that even on Zoom we can feel this happening. The coming together of engaged readers with listeners who are attentive and open creates a presence that is more than the sum of the medium. It’s a bit of alchemy. It’s how poetry works.

And we’d love to share a bit of it with you. So if you missed the event, you’ll find a recording below and you’re welcome to use the discount code to explore these and other Cinnamon books further with a 20% discount that will run till the end of October.

Enjoy

Sep 01 2021

Always judge a cover by the book

The brief sounded easy: a pub table, a glass of beer and a newspaper folded to the crossword, three clues filled in, ‘ALAN’, ‘UXORIOUS’ and ‘THANATOS’.

This shouldn’t be a difficult cover to design.

Yes. And, well…

The book was the new novel from Andrew Dutton, The Crossword Solver, the follow-up to his excellent and well-regarded debut, Nocturne: Wayland’s Sky. Centred around a group of regulars at pub under threat of closure thanks to a corporate take-over, The Crossword Solver combines observation, whit, a healthy dash of politics and philosophy, and an abiding humanity with a deceptively simple style that belies the craft that underlies it. Andrew walks that fuzzy line between contemporary post-modernism and late-century modernism, ducking the irony of almost-ran literary movements like avant-pop but also side-stepping the choking earnestness of the (unrealistic) realist narrative. An understated stylist and innovator, he keeps a recognisably personal voice while crafting each book to suit the story. A good writer, in other words…

So maybe not so easy a design brief to meet.

A-hem…

Okay, so, first things first. Setting up on the kitchen table — newspaper crossword, beer glass, clues filled in — the first couple of photographs were enough to suggest exactly how the final image should be framed to give something that might fill a book cover. But — should the cover be just a photograph of the crossword?

A trawl through contemporary book cover archives suggested not but it also suggested very little else.

Inspiration? Not at home.

After chatting to Andrew a little over the time he’s been a Leaf by Leaf author, it’s clear music is a big influence on him and that he’s particularly fond of the (sadly overlooked) 80s band, Twelfth Night. Hmm… 80s…

The late 70s in the 80s was not only the point where post-modernist literature came firmly into its own, it was the time of scary corporate expansionism, the founding of the consumerist worldview, and a

rough cover design showing glass and crossword puzzle — The Crossword Solver draft 1

period when modernism rubbed a cheery shoulder with post-modernism as a design aesthetic. Think: The Face magazine and Factory Records and Kraftwerk and all that.

Even keeping all the above comments about Andrew’s writing in general and The Crossword Solver in particular in mind, the first draft of the cover was four-square, raggy and more hotchpotch than potlatch. But it was a place to start and it established a couple of ideas that led to later drafts: don’t fill the cover with the pub table photo, use cup-rings and distress marks as design elements (on the one hand, the cover looks like it’s been passed around the pub a few times; on the other, it’s visual metaphor for thanatos — erosion, impermanence, entropy, but also the way in which corporate culture wrecks human and community cultures), halftone screening (the dots of a pre-digital newspaper photograph, another metaphor for imperfection, and also imperfect perception, and a straight-up nod towards 80s graphic design), and intersecting typography.

Rough design with crossword puzzle cut in two by a red triangle — The Crossword Solver draft 2

The next major draft came after another period of research and staring into space, sweating very slightly over the prospect of there being no next major draft. This time around, Neville Brody’s referencing of Constructivism in his early work (especially for The Face) mixed in with the cover of The Man-machine to help shape the design. The photo element got smaller to allow the typography to dominate. The off-set between the title words was emphasised — no easy answers, no perfect answers, only the search for answers. The dividing triangle — a nod to El Lissitzky’s ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ as well as Brody — cleaves the design, breaking up the old comforts and forcing a search for a new equilibrium.

Great! A good design. Coffee break…

Except…

No. Not satisfied. The very elements of disruption worked metaphorically but not graphically. First Rule of Book Cover Design: the cover has to get a reader to pick up the book. Everything above that is icing, if the truth be admitted. And the second draft didn’t live close enough to the First Rule to pass.

Okay. So… What works? What doesn’t? What next?

Still with The Man-machine in mind but also Neville Brody’s layout for The Face’s March, 1982, Kraftwerk interview, ‘The Werk Ethic’, as well as thinking of El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko. Thinking: bold, off-kilter. And also certain that the title text should be the core of the design, although it had to interact or interconnect with the crossword photo…

Title of the book slanted and cross over puzzle between coloured disks — The cover of The Crossword Solver

And then, one of those wild card moments, leaping off the halftone treatment of the crossword to thinking of the brilliant Swiss designer, Max Huber, as modernist — a-hem, pardon: Modernist as they come…

So: skewed title text, bold and 80s-modernist. Likewise skewed author name. Red and black rules, heavy pencil lines to recall the lines of a crossword grid but absolutely no respect for the regularity of such a grid. Coloured circles — part Huber, part Rodchenko, part Brody, suggesting centres and focus points colliding. Cup rings. And plenty of scuff and distressing.

Then sit back and hope…

Nope, not disappointed at all. The opposite, in fact…

Cheekily sending Andrew only the final draft, he very sensibly asked to look at the previous iterations, following the development of the cover and deciding that yes, this off-kilter meeting of modernism with a post-modernist sensibility certainly abided by the First Rule of Book Cover Design and possibly a bit more besides.

Icing, indeed.

Andrew Dutton’s The Crossword Solver is a compassionate, vivid look at the ways in which we find meaning in a world that, by its own admission, is usually meaningless. It’s also the work of a fine and true voice. Look at the cover by all means, but read the book.

Andrew Dutton’s The Crossword Solver will be published in November.

Aug 23 2021

Wished you were there?

Since launching this new website just over a week ago we’ve been beavering away at all the invisibles that keep it working. We decided to finally go for a full legal documenation solution for the GDPR and privacy policies, especially as we design and edit from France, but largely work (virtually) in the UK. The software has been an interesting learning curve, as has the new security software that now sends me terrifying messages each day. It seems it’s over-sensitive to any plugin on the site not updated in the last few minutes but it has also captured some real threats so I’m learning to like it. And a whizzy new vault software that uploads the whole site daily or every time a change is made to an off-site location (which is reassuring having just written over 400 pages of it). It sends a message each evening to say that “apparently” there were no errors or warnings. Hmm — apparently?

All this has taken lots of time, but it keeps the site up to date and safe. However, what we really want to be doing is editing, designing and sharing the love for the wonderful books. With this in mind you’ll notice our newsletters at the moment are all about forthcoming events and we hope lots of you will join us.

We also wanted to alert our readers to two lovely events from the Spring. We recorded both of these launches but our internet has been so appalling that we haven’t been able to upload the large files to our Vimeo channel. We’ve finally got a satellite dish on the roof and have remarkable internet speeds for the first time in over two decades (though Wales wasn’t as dire as it’s been in a remote rural hamlet in Brittany).

Lots of people have been asking for these videos and we’re delighted to have them at last. The first is a superb double reading from David Batten and Robin Thomas featuring their new collections Winterreis and A Distant Hum. The discount codes from the launch have now expired but we want you to give good homes to these collections so we’re offering a 25% discount if you buy both books. Add them both to your basket and use the code WINTERHUM21. The code expires on September 18th.

Add A Distant Hum to your basket:

Add Winterreis

And for an embarrasment of riches, we also have the launch of The Dancer at World’s End by Tricia Durdey. Our internet failed completely on the day of the launch so we’re grateful to Cottia Fortune for stepping in to host the event at very short notice. As you’ll see, the launch went superbly and this is a novel no one should miss.

The Dancer at World’s Ends stands well on its own, but you can definitely enhance the experience by immersing yourself first in the prequel, The Green Table. Add both to your basket and use the code WORLDSGREEN21 at checkout to benefit from 25% off both together. The discount runs until September 18.

Add The Green Table

Add The Dancer at World’s End

Enjoy the videos!

Cinnamon Blog

Lost Futures: a zine about worlds that could have been, should have been, or weren’t

Impetus for starting the zine and where we see it moving

What sort of work we are looking for and how to submit

extracts from Lost Futures

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