Raspberry picking
Dear Wet Grainers,
Nasim here. After weeks of back-and-forth, I’ve just had a few weeks to settle down into a slower rhythm before another round on my forever carousel. I’ve been in a Glasgow Glasgow, grey with fits of sun that have got me leaping out of the door, whatever the day’s original plan. I’ve been eating apples from the young orchard in Queens Park, and finding the tiniest, most !!! wild raspberries dotted around. I wonder if people don’t notice them, and if they do, whether they dismiss them for their size. As if they weren’t parcelled thunderclaps of flavour.
I was lucky to grow up around raspberries – to know they are nettles’ bedfellows; to fall into holes while trying to reach the fruit and scramble out squishing ants into the ground; to cover sticks in dough, cook them over a fire and insert a mush of wild raspberries inside. I began writing this thinking I’d called it a Crusoe – because it had felt survivalist – but maybe it was a Columbus? It definitely needs renaming. If you’re reading this in a similar climate, I encourage you to pick your surrounding raspberries or blackberries and come up with something of your own.
Hard as I’ve tried to keep organised, this is the level of routine I can handle: apple, apple, apple, raspberry, raspberry, raspberry, raspberry, raspberry, apple. With similar foragers’ excitement, we have been picking and digesting the submissions, arranging, cleaning up, preparing you the feast to come. Expect Issue Eight in mid-September. There will be more prose than ever, and the poems will be as good as wild raspberries. I don’t say that lightly. We can’t wait to tell you more about the forthcoming issue – and some gifts I will be off to prepare next for our dear subscribers.
In the meantime, Kevin Cormack’s (‘The Object’ and ‘Exhibition’) and Iona Lee’s (‘Life Drawing I’) poems as well as mine and Patrick’s conversational piece on where the hell we might live, all from our latest issue, are currently available to read on our website. If you haven’t had the chance to purchase it yet, it’s available here.
Wet Grain- Issue Seven
Please include your address in the personal note box
I’ve also published a new pamphlet, Ultraviolet with Landing Marks, which you can order from Oblique House, its wonderful publisher. I share the book with Roberto Salvador Cenciarelli, whose labyrinthian pamphlet How to Repair an Echo forms its flipside. It’s such a beautiful and apt format for these pieces. My fragmented poem / sequence uses the letters of Georgia O’Keeffe to her husband as a bouncing-off point, captivated by her voice and the pull that she felt towards the New Mexican landscape, one so strong it competed with the rest of her life. It gave her inspiration no other place could. I delve into perception and the distance between mind and mind, which I find enduringly horrifying, fascinating, and largely responsible for my love of literature, which feels like mind-to-mind transmission at its purest. Though, of course, insufficient. But at least language gives us a taste of one another.
All the wild raspberries,
Nasim
