don't break promises with your own heart
on making art | my new zine | valuing your ideas
In my last Substack of 2023 – thinking towards the year ahead that we’re now well over halfway through – I stated the intention to lean into the art within my work. I cautioned myself and my readers against getting too deep into the pit of pleasing others, and I committed to not wandering from myself. That post was one of my most read and shared, because I also used it as a leaping off point for persuading you to see your Substack as your own Indie Press.
There have been disappointments in my plan this year (like grant rejections and futile residency bids) but there have also been fulfilments (I use this language deliberately - failure and success has no currency in such subjective terrains). I went on my own creative residency, which I shared in another popular post, and I have had several requests for collaboration on other people’s grant applications seeking creative input or mentorship. Similarly, new projects have sloshed their way into the pipeline, which are far better suited to my skills, it turns out. But perhaps most creatively special for me, is that I have finally signed-off on the print run for my first zine – Great Geological Controversies (GGC) – which is available to buy now in a limited edition of 100, and will be posting at the end of this month.
I explain more about the project in the zine itself, but there is also some information on my website explaining how I ended up making a small collection of erasure poems from an obsolete text book, and why I decided to grow the project with additional poetry and photography. The title doesn’t give much away – in fact, it seems rather dry – but following the lead of the original text was absolutely necessary for the coherence of this curiosity project. And sticking with my intuition was entirely the point.
The whole process of making this zine/pamphlet/booklet (whatever you want to call it!) was about having control of my work from inception to execution. Making a traditionally published book is always a shared endeavour, and thank goodness for that, but I suspect many of us carry projects of idiosyncratic love in our tender bodies that long to be created and expressed, but won’t ever be made manifest if we don’t take them on ourselves. These projects aren’t less than because they are for a niche audience, and they are no less part of the family because we initiated them ourselves and oversaw their production and postage. They might, in fact, represent what’s most true now. Or most emergent. Or most fragmented and experimental. They offer something entirely different.
For many years of my life I woke up feeling like I had something to prove. This is the nature of the first half of life, I suspect. But these days, I wake up feeling like I simply have something to share. The want is a basic one. I give much less thought than I used to as to whether anyone cares, or why they care (though I am always delighted to hear when people get in touch!); my driver instead is to satisfy my own curiosity, ask questions that matter to me, and keep developing my work, artistic or otherwise.
Creating my zine was quite simply a project to try things out. To hang things together. To order some latent thoughts. I wanted to tentatively explore something around resource extraction and burn-out in both land and human. I wanted to cast a new light on old poems I wrote (and photos I took) and didn’t ever really quite understand. Things from my fieldwork years. Scraps from the present. I wanted to collage my way to an answer of sorts.
I’m sharing it as much for self-expression (and the catharsis that can follow) as permission to others who need it. You are allowed to make things just for you. You are allowed to languor in your fascinations. You are allowed to make stuff just because it feels great to see an idea through to its end, and bad not to.
What feels like a long time ago now, I used to make and sell illustrative prints. I loved creating them, printing them, wrapping them, putting them in envelopes, writing out the addresses by hand. I loved the source-to-sea nature of that creativity. Publishing books gets close – it has different and exciting affordances entirely its own too – but there is also a big chunk of the experience missing.
A book is a slick thing. The shine takes you away from it, in some hard to define way. It becomes part-owned, and with a life world of its own. It matures. But a zine is always raw and young. It always has your thumb print on it somewhere. It is more vulnerable, tentative. If it comes with a document arguing for its existence, or proclaiming its merits, it is just this that you’re reading. There is no ISBN to legitimise it, no reviewer to rate it. It’s just the product of a frayed moment lived in the gaps between other projects on a grander scale with loftier objectives, intentions and purposes.
But somehow it still matters.
Whichever channel you choose to send your ideas down – with their varying degrees of socially-endorsed prestige – your ideas still come from the same bodymind. They don’t start to matter when you have a publisher, and stop when you take away the middle-man. Their mattering is not contingent on format. Stuff matters because you say so. It matters under your gaze, first.
When I say please yourself, what I really mean, is keep the commitments you make to yourself. Don’t break promises with your own heart. Afterall, most people will come and go, but you’re always with you, and no one is as invested in you as you are. It’s worth not letting yourself down. Make your art.
The zine is currently only available in hard copy in the UK. However, I am planning on making it into an e-Zine readable on tablets in the not-too-distant future if you are a friend located outside the UK and want to have a read.
You can also read:
Weathering (2024) - why not buy from Bookshop.org or from wherever else you buy your books!
Grounded (2021) - also at bookshop.org in chunky hardback with pictures
You have just inspired me to pick back up a project I started a few years ago and then stopped because my horrible inner critic kept asking ‘who wants to see a hand stitched book all about moss?’
I do! I want to see it and I want to make it and you have just reminded me that that is enough.
Thank you as always for your words
I love your idea of creative process from source-to-sea (I think you said). I too have been thinking about not breaking your own heart’s promises and how I can use the next few months for just getting on with making my art. I very much look forward to reading this latest addition to the Allen family of art xx