Written beneath a sleeping baby

It’s been a hot minute1 (11 months) since my last newsletter. I’m a parent now. It’s nuts. Our daughter was born at the beginning of November last year. Our world has exploded and turned over and become new and is a different place to be, while also being very much the same. I’m in love in ways I didn’t know were possible, full of fears and joys of kinds I could only guess at during the long and anxious wait for her to arrive. It’s a hoot, just now waltzing around the lounge to Electro Shock Blues, the second eels record, with her in my arms, somehow communicating to her that this bit of music (showing my age) is a magical inheritance, to love something and share it, to have someone to sing (badly) to? I’m not really sure why it felt so big but it did and I nearly had a cry

The world is a gnarly place right now. Nobody needs me to tell them that. It’s heavy and hard to be and to try and persevere. It feels glib and weird to be talking about my child and art but also this is the stuff of life, of resistance. When our ancestors were kicking about the place, just think: they let someone off the vital life-or-death hunter-gathering/cooking/mending/making duties so that they could observe what was going on and then orchestrate - either on their own or with others - these paintings into existence on cave walls. I suppose what we now call art has mattered from the beginning. That’s something.

I’ve been trying to draw my daughter but the results are not encouraging. My drawing muscles are unflexed.

This last year or so, since Minor Leagues #12 came out, I’ve been writing mostly, drawing rarely. I spent a lot of time writing poetry of varying quality and did a poetry reading in town in the autumn. It’s been nice to do that. I’m comfortable getting up in front of people and I like the idea of performing, a new dimension to the work.

In terms of what I’m writing, I suppose I’m trying to unbuckle myself, open myself up, see what comes out. A million ideas as ever - zines and books and all sorts of other things - far less time, here one-hand typing on my phone while the baby sleeps in my other arm, but knowing more than ever who and what I want to be.

Other bits and pieces

• Minor Leagues #12 and Gardening Beneath a Falling Piano which both came out last year are still available. I think they’re some of my favourite things that I have made. Do please consider getting a copy of one or the other or even both - donations to Medical Aid for Palestinians from sales of each. Plans for Minor Leagues #13 in the works.

• I’m coming to my last copies of my self-published book, Now is the Time to Know Everything. If you’d like one, well, now is the time. It explores the bewildering excitement of pregnancy and the heartbreak of miscarriage through a fragile blur of family stories, reflections on the past, present and future, and half-remembered dreams. Written against the backdrop of a burning hot summer, an unpredictable autumn, and a wet winter, it is a love letter to a person that never quite came to be. I’m hoping to do a new edition of some kind in the future, but it’ll be a bit different, and who knows when.

• What is Britain? finally came to the end of its print run. Raised £600 split between Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, and The Grenfell Foundation so thanks to everyone one that bought one. No plans for reprinting.

• Got a bunch of prints for sale still, too.

Visit my shop

Also…

• Chatted with my pal author Adam Gnade. He’s a great writer and a punk spirit and someone who cares about trying to carve out a way of being that works for making art and the world better, as hard as that is. We talked about this that and the other for his Sunday Conversations series. You can read it here.

• Working on plans a collection of my older comics. Will definitely contain stuff from my old series SMOO, and maybe some more comics from earlier issues of Minor Leagues, too. too. Weird looking back at the old times.

• As you may know I work at a university. This year I’ve been teaching again. I’m loving it, talking to art students about ways of seeing and the politics of creativity and being an artist and all that. Even got to spend a bit of time talking about making zines with some creative writing students (hi if you’re reading this). Driving home in the sunshine, cold/warm end of February felt good to be finally feeling like my art life and my day job life were merging and at home Ali and L were waiting for me. I am alive, I thought.

• My book WHERE? made its way into two academic texts, which is a novelty. They’re academic texts and maybe hard to get hold of due to their cost and paywalls. Let me know if you’d like to read them, and I can sort you out (digitally) with the chapters I’m in at least. Full fancy references are; Kapp, T. (2024) Self-Published Psychogeographies: Zines, DIY Communities and the 21st Century Drifter Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland; Lorimer, H Literary geographies and the limits of representation inAlexander, N., & Cooper, D. (Eds.). (2024). The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies (1st ed.) London: Routledge

That’s it for now. I can see a plane in the twilight passing behind the house over the road, and the front windows of that house are silver in the sunset opposite, which out back looks like when nineteen eighties airbrush artists wanted to create the impression that a piece of metal was really shiny.

S.M.

x

P.S. I found some drawings from our 2019 trip to Chicago

P.P.S Buzz and Dale say hi.