Printed Matters: Where the Leaves Fall

IMAGE COURTESY OF WHERE THE LEAVES FALL

By Sara Bellini

“Indigenous thinking breaks the extractive capitalist rationalism that looks at nature  the same way it looks at other people, aiming to dominate them. When looking at nature with a holistic sense, we understand that we are part of it and that we are connected to this planet.”

These words are taken from the editor’s note of Issue 12 of Where the Leaves Fall, entirely guest-edited by Indigenous activist Txai Suruí. The magazine regularly gives space to activists and Indigenous people from all over the world to share their experiences and their view of a sustainable future.

Where the Leaves Fall aims at exploring “humankind's connection with nature”, through articles, interviews, illustration and photography on the themes of art, agriculture, technology, science, philosophy, human rights and any field where our impact on the planet is visible. The commitment to rekindling our relationship with nature goes beyond articles on how climate change is linked with social justice. The entire production process of the physical journal is sustainable, from minimised paper waste to chemical free ink and a wormery to finish the staff food at the printing facility. 

The contributors to the journal are diverse, including marginalised voices from the global south, Indigenous people, women, people of colour and people from the LGBTQI+ community. Community, at a local as well as a global level, is fundamental to reach a more balanced relationship with the world we share. Where the Leaves Fall was born out of this shared value at OmVed Gardens, a space in north London - partnered with the UN World Food Program - promoting ecology and agricultural sustainability, where people can engage with and experience nature in creative ways. 

Below you’ll find our interview with editors Luciane Pisani and David Reeve.

Image courtesy of Where the leaves Fall

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format?

At the time we started there weren’t many magazines looking at climate breakdown through the lens of our connection with nature and print felt like a good way to take people away from digital spaces – including social media. We were very careful in how the magazine is printed – printing with one of the most environmentally friendly printers in the world - if you smell the magazine you won’t catch the whiff of any chemicals.

However with the pandemic and the various lockdowns and restrictions around that it became apparent we needed to go online as well. So we now encompass physical spaces for events, print, and online. One of our Australian collaborators recently told us our magazine is a message stick – you can look that up.

One of the focuses of WtLF is climate change. How do you turn feelings of anxiety, anger and hopelessness into a force for change?

It’s difficult to feel hope at a time of climate and societal breakdown. Systems that have held us up for so long are slowly collapsing and that’s creating a lot of discontent. Capitalism has failed us and the planet and we’re now in a system where politicians and industries are desperately trying to hold on to what they had and many people are being cast adrift. The growth of the far-right is a result of this. With the UK government’s indifference, the National Trust RSPB and WWF came together to create the People’s Plan for Nature to engage the public in caring and connecting with the natural world.

Similarly the UK government is largely ignoring the National Food Strategy that it commissioned so there’s a movement towards how people and business can take action and affect change. Rob Hopkins came up with the Transition Network (you can read an interview with Rob in the mag) which is all about communities coming together and reimagining the future. In Brazil you have movements such as the Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho and MST (Landless Workers’ Movement). Where governments and corporations fail us, people can come together and affect change - it’s about demonstrating that things can be done differently and work. 

What’s the importance of community and connection for you?

Our focus is on growing our local and global communities. Community is everything. It’s diversity. It’s understanding. It’s collaboration. It’s imagination. It’s strength. It’s power.

Could you share some details about your creative process, for example in regards to finding themes and selecting submissions?

The magazine is a project of OmVed Gardens – a space in north London that has undergone ecological transformation. We meet up there to discuss the things that people might want to focus on or talk about. From these meetings come the magazine’s themes. We then meet again to discuss initial ideas around those themes before casting the net out to our global audience. We have a period of submissions and then from the ideas developed at OmVed and the varying submissions, we select the features (text and photographic) and dialogues (shorter essays) for the mag.

For the 12th issue we wanted to do something different. Everyone was largely disappointed by the results of COP26. We watched the opening ceremony with some really impressive speeches – but were the ears in the auditorium listening? One of the speakers was Txai Suruí – an Indigenous activist from the Amazon’s Paiter Suruí people. In the lead up to COP27 we were interested in what the magazine would be if we asked Txai to edit the magazine, bringing her perspective to our readers at this crucial moment in the climate emergency.

We wanted to step back and allow her complete ownership of the editorial direction, and it has led to a series of fascinating features from the perspective of Indigenous peoples – mostly from the Amazon but also other parts of South America. As Txai said: “For a long time, the stories written about the Indigenous peoples of Brazil and the world were told through the eyes of the coloniser, almost always stereotyped and from a perspective of domination and superiority,” she writes. “We are now protagonists of our own history and the narrators of it - a history that didn’t start with the invasion. We continue our resistance that has lasted more than 500 years and that does not end now.”

It’s a powerful issue. As the shaman Davi Kopenawa states in the issue – we, the westerners, are the earth eaters. Our relationship with the land is one of extraction and destruction. It’s not about us saving Indigenous peoples but recognising that we need to open up and that they are the ones who can actually save us. They are amazing storytellers, artists and experts in conservation. They have a deep connection with the land and have survived and developed alongside it for 1000s of years. 

What did you learn about humankind’s connection with nature since issue 1?

We are nature and a part of the ecosystems in which we live. The rivers and seas run through our bodies. Our family includes the flora and fauna around us and the living soil under our feet.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share with our readers?

If you’d like to know more about the magazine or become a part of the conversation then you can sign up to our newsletters, follow us on Instagram and check out the mag.

Printed Matters: Kyklàda

Photo © kyklàda.press.

By Sara Bellini

At the core of Kyklàda's publishing project is an “archeology of moods and emotions”, a research that starts with topography and architecture and moves through history, art, public health, social norms, and cultural heritage. The small Athens-based press was born in 2020 and its catalogue has six active titles at the time of writing, with two more coming this autumn. Their multidisciplinary, collective approach focuses on the production of mini collections of texts and visual essays inspired by the Cycladic islands - hence the name - and in their specificity, their themes have universal appeal. 

The homepage of their website reads: “the Cycladic Landscape is both rural and urban: the Aegean Archipelago, south-east of Athens, extends into the city hills.” This interconnectedness between countryside and city, island and continent, natural and human-made, individual and collective, drives each publication and echoes across the six volumes: from the healing value of touch in Architectures of Healing, to the violence of uprooting in (Forced) Movement, the origin of the practice of the quarantine in Public Health in Crisis, the sexual freedom in Mykonos in Free Love Paid Love.

Kyklàda’s essays exist in the space between a question and an answer, and center on relationality and social dynamics rather than isolating phenomena and people. The relationship between humans (as individuals or groups) and the place(s) they inhabit is complex and diverse: What is the difference or similarity between refugee and migrant, pilgrimage and tourism, imposed confinement and forced movement? This is what Kyklàda asks, questions and explores, leaving the answers as open and multi-faceted as the sea.

Photo © kyklàda.press.

Here is our interview with team members David Bergé, Phevos Kallitsis and Juan Duque:

You define your book series as a catalogue of “liquid forms of modernity”. Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean with this phrase?

David: We don't see modernity as a celebration of a singular thing. In conceiving our books, we suggest parallel modernities. We see the world today as a complex and layered place where concepts and ideas are less solid and autonomous. An environment in which things are harder to grasp into one entity, where initially fixed objects may become liquid, can leak or spill into something else. I imagine this project, part of my artistic practice, as something as fluid as a human body, a living organism able to adapt to different climates, conditions, environments and contexts. A body can move around, travel, isolate, focus, loosen up, take different shapes, get sick, recover, relate to other bodies, eat and rest. 

How did you make the decision to distill your work into books rather than journals or a completely different format?

David: There are several motivations: I believe in the momentum of publishing on paper. The decision to make small books was made during the first lockdown, where we had the feeling we wanted something more tangible yet light enough to distribute and travel with.  Besides making the kyklàda.press series in the form of books, we produce formats for reading, writing and mediating tactile perception in gardens and large indoor spaces. 'The Conscious Effort Fort' is an environment conceived for reading and writing in the proximity of others, which then feeds back our research for future books. 

How is your creative process structured: What inspires you and how do you manage collaborative projects?

David: Our approach is not author or disciplinary-centered. Through dialogue and shared research, the team makes books often contaminated and strengthened by already ongoing research of involved team members. Four to five people work on each book. We research together, which gradually leads to taking positions and forms in writing, finally leading up to the book in question. As a team, we can read and research in about nine languages, are familiar with discourses in different fields and have access to a lot of practical skills that come at hand when self-publishing: from ideas to proofreading, from designing to printing to figuring out a webshop, understand how to parasite (or share?) already existing networks of logistics and distribution. 

Let’s talk about islands. You want to challenge the cliché that sees islands as separate worlds we can project our expectations on. What is your relationship with the Cyclades?

Phevos: The archipelago is a mesmerising experience, a place where you can easily navigate between islands, get lost and end up spending way more time than you initially wanted to. I always return.

Juan: Through navigation, our Westernized sense of perspective has established a common horizon, simplifying islands as visual spots at the surface of the sea. At kyklàda.press we believe that islands are not exotic entities alone in the sea waters. Islands remain interconnected with the mainland and each other, from the top of the mountains to the hidden topographies of the sea bed: a myriad of creatures and non-organic matter which lives in constant symbiosis with water; tectonic plates, fossil fuel pipes, and data cables.

David: To me the Cycladic landscape is both rural and urban and continues into the city hills of Athens. This is where the idea was born: a writing experiment disseminating knowledge on the Aegean archipelago, a project starting from this tight geography.

Interconnectedness, care and emotions are recurrent themes in your writing. What is the value of connection and in which space can these connections exist?

Phevos: Connection is an intrinsic element to existence, and we live in a time that the connection is multi-scalar and multidirectional. Physical or virtual space can be the medium that facilitates connection, but space can be what we connect to, and then it becomes a place. In the same way, we connect with people, the flora, and the fauna or objects. We live at a time when care, emotions, and interconnectednesses are foci and concerns, even when using a different lexicon to describe them.

***

Kyklàda’s books can be purchased online as well as in selected bookshops and museum shops in Europe and the UK, as listed on their website.
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Printed Matters: Point.51

By Sara Bellini 

The 51st parallel north is the point where continental Europe and the UK meet, halfway between Dover and Calais in the English Channel. This meeting point also inspired the name of Point.51, a London-based magazine of slow journalism and documentary photography.

The look is simple and effective: a red matte cover, a full-page portrait, one word that identifies the theme of the issue and a phrase to invite you in. The content requires time, a comfortable armchair and a cup of tea: Don’t flip through the pages, linger, take everything in. This is what I immediately loved about this new publication, the slow and in-depth approach to stories, narrated equally through words and images. 

We all consume the news, or more often than not, news headlines, and their abundance and speed detach us from the content and from the people the headlines are about. Point.51 gives you the opportunity to explore significant news topics through personal stories, focusing on ordinary people and how they relate to the bigger narratives of our multi-layered present. It gives you time to empathise, reflect and form an informed opinion, which is crucial in shaping contemporary conversations.

Issue 4 will hit the shelves in May, and meanwhile we caught up with editor Rob Pinney:

What was the inspiration behind Point.51 and what drives you?

We wanted to do something that gave us the space and time to really dig into complex stories – both in the writing and in the photography – without having to strip them down. We want to work on stories that challenge us, and challenge our readers, and I think that curiosity is really what drives Point.51 forward. 

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format?

I think we knew that Point.51 was going to be a print magazine from the outset. In fact, I don't think I can remember us having a conversation about the possibility of doing it any other way. But as we've grown, I think it's now clearer than ever that print is the right format for us.

I like to think about it by flipping the question on its head: how would we want to read these stories? For me, it is undoubtedly in print. I want to sit with them and read them through, following the story as it unfolds, without distractions.

Point.51 comes out twice a year, and so the stories we work on for the magazine are usually put together over fairly long periods of time. They're designed to last – we want them to feel just as relevant in five years time as they do today – and there's a permanence to pulling them together in a printed magazine that reflects that.

Then it's also important for the photography. My background is as a photographer, and we pride ourselves on commissioning and publishing really great documentary photography that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our journalism. There are 102 images in our latest issue, and without wanting to sound too old fashioned, I think that work really is at its best when seen in print.

At the core of your magazine are a strong sense of place and a genuine interest in people, what’s the relationship between these two elements?

Definitely. Both people and place are essential to the stories we work on. But they come up in different ways, and I think the relationship between them changes from story to story.

People are at the forefront of all of our stories – that has been a constant throughout. But place comes up in different ways. To give a couple of examples: there is a story in our first issue about Cuban asylum seekers arriving in Serbia to make use of visa-free entry for Cuban passport holders, which exists as a legacy of the Cold War. In that case, place plays a very specific and explicit role in the story. Then there's a story in our second issue about Port Talbot, an industrial town in north Wales known for steel production. When the steelworks opened there in the 1950s, it employed 18,000 people – literally half the town – but today that number has fallen to just 4,000. At the centre of the story are multiple generations of a family with a long-standing connection to the steelworks, and you get to see how those different generations – with different experiences – relate to their town. Bringing those different perspectives into our stories is really important.

So I don't think you can say that there's a fixed or static relationship between people and place in the magazine, but the stories are definitely concerned with the way the two inform and shape each other.

How has Point.51 changed since Issue 1 and what are your plans for Issue 4?

When we started out, lots of friends and colleagues thought we were crazy trying to start a print magazine for long-form journalism and documentary photography when other publications were disappearing left, right, and centre. They were probably right – it's certainly not easy. But we've seen the magazine go from being just an idea to an established title with a solid and growing reputation.

Issue 4 is well underway, and should hit the shelves in May. The theme for the next issue is Nations and Nationalism, but as with all of our issues, we're coming at it from a variety of angles – from the story of a "micronation" in Italy to the relationship between people living in Gibraltar and La Linea de Concepción, the towns on either side of the border.

The team of people working on Point.51 has also grown – Nick, Sara, and Meg have joined us, and their knowledge and hard work is already showing. So yes, there have been lots of changes.

But I also think that, in a fairly fundamental way, it hasn't changed at all. We had a very clear idea of what we wanted Point.51 to be when we started it: a straightforward magazine for considered long-form journalism and original photography. I think we've stuck to that pretty doggedly, and I think it's what a lot of our readers really like about it.

Can you tell us a bit more about the concept of little story/big story behind Point.51?

Yes certainly! "Big story/little story" is an approach we use when working on stories for Point.51. We can't claim it as an original concept – it has been put to use (and written about) widely – but it's something we try to put into practice wherever possible.

Essentially it comes down to the choice between doing something that is wide but shallow or narrow but deep, and deciding where you think the real value is. The stories we like to work on for Point.51 are usually concerned with pretty big topics: we've reported stories about migration and asylum, the climate crisis, mental health, Brexit, and the Irish border, to name a few. But in each case we're zooming right in to tell a smaller story within that, concentrating on just a few individuals, or a single place, or maybe both.

The small stories are the ones we can really relate to, and that stay with us. And I think that if you tell the small story really well – bringing in all the detail and complexity that exists in real life, and which often gets cut out – then you're also providing a much richer perspective on the big story too.

We're not trying to tell readers what to think or to persuade them to see something in a particular way. We want to bring people great stories that are told thoroughly and faithfully, but ultimately it's for them to engage with them on their own terms.

As usual, Berliners can find Point.51 at do you read me?!? and Rosa Wolf. Check out the website for online shopping and a free newsletter with more articles and photography.

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Printed Matters: Fare

Photo: POST

By Sara Bellini

Sometime during the first lockdown, I found myself longingly holding a copy of a beautifully designed magazine called Fare that I had picked up because of the word ‘Glasgow’ in all caps on the cover. It was already clear to me at that time that my trips to the UK were cancelled for the immediate future and possibly indefinitely - so I started exploring momentarily inaccessible places through literature.

Reading Fare turned out to be an immersive experience where I would go back and forth from the page to my memory. The texture and complexity of the city were there: the sounds and smells as well as the visuals, and most importantly the taste. Glasgow is not an obvious place where to look for outstanding culinary experiences, and yet if you’re open to serendipity, you’ll find plenty of them.

Fare is a travel magazine focusing largely on food, one city at a time. It was founded three years ago by Ben Mervis - food writer and contributor to Netflix Chef’s Table - combining his degree in medieval history, his experience working at noma and his passion for writing. It would be more precise to state that the magazine is about the cultural scene of a specific place, as it doesn’t feature only tasty treats. But culture is an abstract and general term, while Fare looks at the particular with a meticulous and gentle eye.  

Beside Glasgow, Fare has been to Istanbul, Helsinki, Charleston (SC), Seoul and Tbilisi and the latest issue on Antwerp is just out now. The choice of location as well as the themes of the articles set the magazine apart from more mainstream publications, which tend to stick to big names and offer a polished and homogeneous image of a city. Rather than featuring well-known Michelin-star chefs, Fare looks for stories of ordinary people that have managed to create - inside or outside their kitchens - something valuable for the community around them. The way these stories are captured in full colour - through words, photography or illustrations - makes sure they can be enjoyed by readers that have never been to or will never visit the place they’re reading about.

Food is a vessel to pass on traditions and link generations across time and sometimes across space, like in the case of Punjabi immigrants in 2019 Scotland. It’s also the glue of community, especially in multi-ethnic and economically diverse cities. Food brings people together to share something that goes beyond your five-a-day and is rooted into collective memory. Food is about people and the relationships between them, as well as their relationship with the place(s) they call home. That’s why it’s important to tell these stories and we hope Fare will keep doing so for a long time.

Here is our chat with Ben Mervis:

Photo: POST

What have you learnt from Fare in the past three years?

I've learned so much: about Fare itself (what it is and isn't), and about creating a magazine. Most indie publishers like myself have little or no prior experience with magazine publishing before getting started. As a magazine, we've really found confidence in our voice and design in the last couple of issues. In some ways, I regret Fare not being a quarterly magazine, because each issue is a chance to improve on the last, to tweak things that went wrong and try out new ideas! I'd love to have more opportunities for doing that.

Could you talk a bit about the connection between food, history, community and culture at the heart of the magazine?

Yeah! So my background is in history--medieval history--however, I fell into the food world when I moved to Copenhagen several years ago. Traveling around the world with my then-boss, René Redzepi, I began to understand new cultures through their food: meeting cooks and craftsmen and hearing local histories tied to food production or technique or ingredients. It was incredibly fascinating. When I started Fare it was a very natural convergence of all of those things.

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format? 

To be honest I chose print before I knew or had decided anything about the magazine itself! This came as a love of print.

How do you pick a city and which aspects of its culinary scene to highlight?

City selection is about creating a balance within the 'series' and choosing cities that are different enough to make each issue feel wholly unique and its own.

What are the literary inspirations behind Fare?

One was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I love the idea that the same city could be described in a thousand different ways.

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them? 

For the time being, Covid restricts our travel, so we're changing the structure of our magazine slightly to bring on a guest curator. They're an individual who intimately knows the featured city, and we collaborate with them on finding the right voices and themes for the issue. That's something you'll see for Issue 8 and Issue 9.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share with our readers?

One thing we're really buoyed by is the fact that, in times like this, a desire to travel has not faded--even if the opportunities to do so have. We're really encouraged by the fact that so many people have written to us to say how Fare has helped them 'travel' in this time when armchair travel may be the closest they get to the real thing! 

Pick up a copy of Fare at Rosa Wolf in Berlin or at one of their many distributors across the UK and Europe. And if going into a shop is not a possibility, you can order it online.

Printed Matters: Flaneur

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

By Sara Bellini

To relaunch our series on physical magazines, we started from the city where, for very obvious reasons, we have spent almost the entirety of the past few months. At the same time we wanted to reach out to the world, to emphasise what has become particularly evident since the beginning of the pandemic: How local and global are connected. Flaneur is a Berlin-based publication that aims at exploring this connection by centering each issue on a single street in all its details, and on how the details that build the individuality of a place also fit in a universal framework. 

Flaneur has a multidisciplinary and collective approach to its subject. This translates into physically exploring a place while collaborating with local creatives and stretching the artistic possibilities across different fields and beyond a predefinite structure. The launch of the Taipei issue in summer 2019 was a twenty-hour festival at HKW in Berlin, merging performance, exhibition, readings and music, to transcend the medium of the magazine and highlight the social fabric at the base of the publication.

While Covid has delayed their production process, we caught up with Flaneur publisher Ricarda Messner and editors in chief Fabian Saul and Grashina Gabelmann.

What are the goals and motivations behind your publication and why did you choose the physical magazine as a form?

Ricarda: The idea for the concept to go with “one street per issue“ was a personal tool to reconnect with known territory. I was born in Berlin and spent most of my life here. There was an urge for me to find my own place within the city without being too overwhelmed, so I started with something that was familiar to me, not knowing what would come out of it. Grashina and Fabian came up with the brilliant editorial framework around this very concrete concept, translating it into an unpredictable but still conceptual approach. So I guess, looking back, it wasn’t so much about the idea of making a magazine but more about establishing this “inner journey“ in an artistic, collaborative way that people can associate themselves with.

You define your creative process as “collaborative, impulsive and unconventional” - what do you mean by that?

Grashina: Since we often arrive at a place without knowing the city, its inhabitants or the street we will choose, having no flat-plan, editorial plan, or financial structure, we consider our method to be quite impulsive and unconventional. I think any magazine is collaborative but we emphasise this point as the content isn't written by us about artists but is made by artists specifically for the magazine and its concept.

How do you pick a place and what makes a place?

Grashina: We arrive in the chosen city oftentimes without knowing it at all. We might have one or two contacts but we basically start from the position of knowing nothing and no one and just walk. We mostly walk alone, sometimes with locals who we meet somehow and listen to their stories. Mostly though we let our intuition guide us and the street choice is based on a certain feeling, a sense of curiosity we feel or something disturbing or something for us unusual. Once we decide on the street - and this can take two days or two weeks - we spend almost every day there [for a couple of months].

Fabian: In collaboration with our contributors, we immerse ourselves into the place beyond what meets the eye and beyond the narratives of positivity that travel magazines perpetuate. We allow multi-voiced pieces that not always form one solid perspective but rather create a fragmented image that does not confirm [standard] exciting narratives but allows for contradiction. It is a very psychogeographic approach. The flaneur is concerned with things that may soon vanish and thus he walks the line between being a melancholic nostalgic but also being able to project into the future and beyond the realm of the visible, an avantgarde figure. Flaneuring is about seeing the plurality of truths in the urban fabric that surrounds us. It is those dark sides flaneuring can lead us to and the plurality of truths that form the literary realm we see the magazine in.

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

What’s your relationship with the creative scene of the cities you feature?

Grashina: Our contributors are chosen once we get to know the place and meet people. We like to call it a domino-effect where meeting one person will lead us to meeting three more etc. In Brazil we met 120 people during our time there but of course not everyone became a contributor - that crystalizes sometimes immediately and sometimes after weeks, through an organic process based on spending time with people, trusting our intuition and having great dialogues/walks.

You are about to launch a podcast - what are your plans for it and what’s its relationship with the magazine?

Grashina: Each season will feature a street we have already worked with. Season 1 will revisit Kantstrasse [in Berlin]. The podcast - though it's almost more like an audio play - does not simply regurgitate the content that one can find in the magazine, but approaches those themes in new ways. The audio format allows us to experiment with storytelling in a different way than the magazine does. What stays the same is that the content of the podcast, like the magazine, is fragmented, literary, subjective and experimental. We performed a sneak preview of Episode 1 on the rooftop of HKW this summer. We wanted to experiment with what a live collective listening session could be. There were four performers and three musicians performing and two voices that had been pre-recorded. We intend to keep experimenting with bringing the podcast into different spaces for audiences. 

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them?

Grashina: We were meant to start production in Paris for Issue 09 this Spring but Covid obviously delayed this. We are now back to speaking with the Goethe Institut in Paris, establishing new timelines and funding opportunities and plan to continue production this fall. Six months after lock-down began in Berlin, we feel a bit more able to assess the situation and will see this as an opportunity to challenge our own approach and come up with new methodologies.

Find out where you can purchase Flaneur in your city or order it online. Support independent bookshops and publishers!

Printed Matters: The Line Between Two Towns

We are really excited about this place-related project from our friend and Elsewhere contributor Laura Harker. The Line Between Two Towns is a new zine that explored the Esk Valley line between Middlesborough and Whitby in northern England, bringing together writers, poets, artists and photographers who have all been inspired by the different destinations on the line between the two towns. Here is Laura's introduction to the zine, and you can order your copy online here.

The idea behind this zine came from wanting to explore the differences between Whitby and Middlesbrough, and all the unique nuances and cultures that set them apart from one another. Though there are such stark differences between the two towns, there is still one thing that brings them together: the Esk Valley Railway.

It clocks in at only 36 miles long, but the Middlesbrough and Whitby line was once part of a larger network of railways that covered the area until many lines were closed after Dr. Beeching’s cuts. Thankfully, the line remained open due to its popularity. Originally intended to serve the mines and quarries across the region, the Esk Valley line quickly became a hit with Teessiders who realised that it placed the North Yorkshire seaside just over an hour away.

Over the past few decades, the area’s industry has disappeared, Brits have set their sights on sunny European beaches, and the line is now rarely busy except for Bank Holiday weekends. But it continues to be an important lifeline for many in the villages it passes through, connecting them to Middlesbrough and Whitby.

I was born in Middlesbrough but we moved to Glaisdale, just outside Whitby, when I was 11. Carefully picked up from my urban childhood, I was transplanted to the countryside where most other kids were members of the Young Farmers and thought my Boro accent came from Ireland. Even though my childhood so far had been spent less than 30 miles from Whitby, I realised there was a large gulf between these two locations – industrially, culturally and aesthetically.

This isn’t something that bothered me that much until I moved to Berlin and I was constantly asked the same question: Where are you from? When Germans and other non-Brits asked, the answer was easy – I went with North Yorkshire. But when Brits asked, expecting a more specific pinpoint for their mental map, I couldn’t bring myself to give just one answer.

I couldn’t just say Whitby and ignore Middlesbrough or that would be turning my back on my first decade, family ties, and roots as a Teessider. But I couldn’t simply say Middlesbrough, as I’d spent 15 years on the moors by this point. My Boro accent is long gone and my Middlesbrough geography gets hazy whenever I step off Linthorpe Road in the centre of town – I can’t quite stomach saying I’m a true Teessider. And so I thought about writing a personal essay on this identity crisis and the towns that sparked it, using the Esk Valley Railway to bind it all together. When I realised there was just too much for me to say, I decided to make this zine and open it up to submissions to try and create something of a printed tapestry of the area.

The zine includes works from local writers, poets, artists and photographers, all of which have been inspired by stops along the line. Threading together their work along the context of the Esk Valley Line, I wanted the zine to explore the cultural and landscape shifts that can be found taking this particular train journey, from starting in Middlesbrough surrounded by tired factories and ending in Whitby just steps from the beach. And it might actually help me figure out what to say whenever someone asks me where I’m from.