Highway of the Sun

Patrick

I’m on a bus out of the endless city having just finished a proof-read of our eighth issue. A dubbed film about the moon landing plays on the screens. We pass stalls selling carnitas, a row of mechanics’ workshops, a furniture showroom, underpasses decorated with the World Cup’s axolotl mascot. Murals, adverts and slogans. Neighbourhoods built by their inhabitants and gated suburbs with roof gardens. No matter the postcode, there are trees. It’s been raining for two days and the city is green.

I’ve taken the Highway of the Sun hundreds of times. When it leaves the city, it passes through beautiful fields and pine forest in the skirts of the Chichinautzin. After the toll, there's corn and maguey, horses grazing, and a massive cardboard jar of McCormick’s mayonnaise. I can see bee hives among the eucalyptus. Trunks left blackened by a forest fire. Adverts for FUD sausages, Comex paint, and Roshfrans motor oil. We’re driving down a road built so goods and visitors would flow between the capital and the port of Acapulco but we’re driving through protest country too. Six weeks ago teachers blocked this motorway for better working conditions. Twenty-five years ago, the Marcha del color de la Tierra passed through these hills in the footsteps of Zapata’s peasant army. Like any landscape shaped by dozens of cultures over the centuries, this one has many in- and out-roads. It’s a joy to travel through it with everything I've just been reading still fresh in my head.

So from the hot afternoon road: Issue Eight is now available for pre-order!

In it, we read of dream palette rafts, childhood hunting grounds, and the self's thin places; military compounds, tear gas, and nuclear facilities. Its array of sensibilities reach out from the Gàidhealtachd, Kansas, the Wicklow Mountains, Athenian industrial zones, Zapatista territory and beyond. Helena Fornells Nadal writes of the way Scottish poets are exploring land politics in recent collections. Nasim speaks with the architect and visual artist Mathilde Dewavrin about drystone walling and living matter. Kirsten Norrie offers us a fairyological tract exploring Highland landscapes through the magic of the Sìthichean and Yásnaya Elena A. Gil reflects on the cultural legacy of Mexico's most important agrarian movement since the revolution.

Our contributors: Peter Mackay, Helena Fornells Nadal, Zoe Friedland, CAConrad, Ektoras Arkomanis, Holly Pollard, Kirsten Norrie, Jack Emsden, Jack Westmore, Leo Bussi, Victoria Spires, Mathilde Dewavrin, Christie Williamson, Nicky Melville, Eamonn O'Sullivan, Ida Sieciechowicz trans. Sarah Luczaj, lisa minerva luxx, Yasnaya Elena A. Gil trans. Ellen Jones, Michaela Coplen and cover art by Astra Papachristodoulou.

You can pre-order a copy online on our website shop by emailing our communication manager at: diana[at]wetgrain.co.uk. We also have limited availability of physical copies for past issues, and you will be able to check our stock and request a copy of a past issue.

We'll be launching online on the 29th of September and hope you'll join us. Further readings and workshops are planned for the autumn.

It's nice to look out the window after trying to catch typos. Nicer still to feel the ebb and flow of what I see and what I remember having just read, having anticipated the issue for months. The bus reaches the big loop called La Pera (The Pear), swinging round to face the ridge of wonderful names that rings the town I'm bound for. There's the Peak of the Treasure, the Peak of the Light, of the Man, the Dwarf, and the Jaguar. You can feel how each name crowns a mountain of belief. An articulated lorry full of bread overtakes us. On the screens, several Channing Tatums conduct television interviews on behalf of NASA. Taxqueña - Tepoztlán is often just an hour and ten minutes of dozing but today - which has got brighter the closer I get to my destination - the route feels reverberant. Toll. African Tulip. Roundabout.

From a dusty petrol station,

Patrick