It’s up there!
Stereoplate is a new Stonewood Press podcast that we’ve been slaving over these last few weeks (and especially these last few days) and the first series will help us here at Brittle Star to launch Issue 46 and celebrate 20 years of publishing new writing . Yes, 20 in 2020!
As we mentioned in the last post, Brittle Star will be kicking off the podcast (which is nice because it was a catalyst for Stonewood Press beginning in the first place). It kicks off with a series called We Have Lift Off! How do you Launch a Literary Magazine in a Global Pandemic. Each episode asks one simple question then we see where the subject takes us…
…The first episode takes us to the source of the phrase ‘men of letters’, then to the first ever literary magazine published in 1684, all the way over to Magma Poetry’s hacked Zoom launch and of course the first lot of brilliant new writing from this issue read in the writers own voices!
We asked poets and storyists to drag their computers, tablets or phones into wardrobes and under blankets to record their work and they did – they’re madder than us! But the result is wonderful. We hope you’ll go and have a listen and then agree! As for us? We pinned up quilts and blankets in our office, blacked out the windows with cushions then read off scripts, ran off at the mouth and drank copius mugs of tea and coffee (provided by the wonderful people who bought us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/brittlestar). We’re knackered, but it was worth it (just to hear me call Martin a ‘cheeky bogs’).
The Brittle Star work featured in this episode is: ‘Natural Selection’ by Rebecca Shore, ‘How to Visit with Puffins’ by Heidi Beck, ‘Siberian Landscape’ by Louisa Hooper, ‘Crosh Cuirn’ by Simon Maddrell, ‘The Stone Kiss’ by Peter Burrows, ‘Sequoia’ by Jill Townsend and ‘Tomorrow’ by Maddison Feshler. We chose them because they all had an outward looking feel to them. See what you think.
You can download Stereoplate at Spotify, Anchor FM, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Radio Public, Breaker and others (and ITunes soon). Click on the players below to listen to the trailer on Anchor and Spotify.
Anchor
Spotify
If you like what we do, buy us a coffee over at https://ko-fi.com/brittlestar or click on the button at the top of the page – we’re saving up to buy a new website!
Issue 46 would have launched at the Barbican at the end of June. In our 20th anniversary, we had a lot to celebrate. What were we to do? Something that had to feel right. Our own lives had changed fairly drastically during lockdown because Martin and I were locked down with Martin’s very elderly parents (his mum saw her 92nd birthday in April) making sure they kept safe. We didn’t have time to organise a live launch (and we thought it would be super stressful anyhow) but we knew we’d lose a lot of revenue from not launching. As it happens, we had an idea we thought might work. Last year, as part of the creative developments at Martin’s small press Stonewood Press, we talked about launching a podcast for poetry and fiction. It would bring original writing to an interested listenership, and each episode would have a focus on a specific question, for example: how does poetry work on the brain? It would have a fairly relaxed tone and try to explore and demystify poetry and fiction a little bit. We would interview people, commission work etc. But we knew it would be a lot of work and our time was already pressured as it was. So we shelved it for a future date.
How could we launch Brittle Star Issue 46 in a way that felt right to us? This podcast. We reached out to contributors to see if they would be up for recording their work and we had an overwhelming response – almost everyone in this issue sent us recordings. We thought about a daily podcast – a week-long launch as it were. Then we had a cup of tea and a calm down and decided on a series; one that would look at the lockdown and the little mag/writing world.
In our new normal, we’re doing things differently. This week, Issue 46 will be softly padding onto the welcome mat of our subscribers, patrons and contributors ready to have its envelope disinfected and ripped open to reveal a bit of gorgeousness filled with wonderful new writing, articles and reviews. It will be read and hopefully enjoyed, and maybe read again.
We’ll be accepting work in the submission window 5th–14th May 2020 and are really looking forward to reading your work. We’ve purposefully kept the window short so that we can manage the submissions. We’re afraid if you’ve sent work outside of these dates we won’t be able to read it and your email will remain unopened, but you are very welcome to re-submit when we open up our next online submission window.
