Ceris Aston

And I think that was what we were very much going for and something that we still really promote.

But even from the beginning, it was darker than we ever imagined.

So much darker.

It was interesting because obviously you go into any issue, particularly coming up with a theme, with a rough idea of what kind of submissions you might get.

Which we'd partly expected, but not to the same extent.

We'd made a list of, okay, we have these pieces, and are they poetry, are they prose, what kind of tone do they have?

I think partly it was in the selection process, and partly to decide what order things should go in.

And it was sort of, oh, goodness, okay, this is bleak.

Well, this one's nice, and then they all eat the queen.

And it just went on and on.

I think he submitted in summer, and he published in winter.

So the point was that it was partly...

Beth and I spent a wonderful summer effectively living in Charlotte Square

during the book festival, and we were sitting on these literary deck chairs, and I said that I'd love to make a zine, I thought that would be really cool, and promptly forgot about the idea as one, you know, sort of a, oh, that would be a nice thing.

Yeah, well, Beth was a designer, I forgot when I said that, I was talking to someone who studied design, for whom the idea of making a zine had a very...

particular sort of attraction.

So we had this conversation and that would be really nice and it could be something small that would fit in your pocket and I think the original idea was something that you could make that was really small and sort of cheap to make but beautiful and that we would leave on tables in pubs and cafes and it was sort of poetry by stealth was the idea and then

I went off to Germany to do my masters and I came back for a weekend and Beth and Trevor, who's our web designer, and I was sitting around and Beth said, you know, I still really want to do that thing with the zine.

And we spent about two hours looking at all of the poetry magazines that I had and deciding what kind of font we were going to have and what the aesthetic would be.

I think we're always nervous and we're always joyfully surprised.