12 Months of Paperthin: March
Beginnings
At the start of the month I had an interview for an arts fellowship that would have changed the shape of this whole year. I didn’t get it but something good did come out of writing the application.
The book that has been haunting the edges of my brain since the end of The Shenk has crept out of the shadows and begun to take corporeal form. The last few weeks I’ve been revisiting old sketchbooks where the beginnings of this project were recorded. I was surprised by how much I had already been thinking about it.
The last year has felt like being on a ship at sea in the midst of a fog. I can feel myself drifting but I can’t quite tell where I am or what’s around me. This spring I felt those low, low clouds lift their bellies from the ground and stretch gloriously. The horizon is a clean blue line and what might be a path can be spied amongst the dry, winter grasses.
I cannot see yet what this graphic novel will look like. How it will lie on it’s pages or knit these broken pieces into a coherent tale. So much of The Shenk was written during hikes and rambles. The early drafts long walks exploring narrative trails from which a story emerged.
In contrast Paperthin, the new book’s working title, has already taken a clear shape in my head.
There are parts of it based on things I wrote a long time ago. Things that haven’t yet found a way to be made real until now. Unlike Murmurs, this story is going in search of anchors. I am walking with intent. As a forager gathering the details that will hopefully give the book flavour, power and substance.
There are things in these notebooks I will share in time, but these little zines felt like good questions to ask as we begin this journey.
An inquisitive starting point to an ode of sorts to Channel Four short films of the 80s and 90s. A study of the witchery of stop motion animation. The familial snarl of mothers and sisters and the intensity of friendship between girls in a violent world.
There will be witches with the understanding that there are no witches. That the witch trials of medieval and frighteningly present times were and are weapons of violent state and religious persecution and oppression. There will be witches in so much as there will be women gathered and making with their hands. The collective imagination and rage of women and girls will be places of the manifestation of new power. The magic will be in the uncanny realities conjured by not being allowed to thrive in a world built against you.
This is where Paperthin begins and I invite you to start walking with me to see what she might become.