The superb outsider / underground / no audience music magazine TQ has just published its 50th edition. It's brilliant & I am honoured to be included. Here's an interview I've done with them. After you've read it, head to http://tqzine.blogspot.com/ to find out more -:
What was the motivation for the magazine? And why the name glove?
In short, my enduring adoration of marginal and outsider art, combined with a desire to provide an outlet for writerly voices that wouldn’t ordinarily be heard, provided the impetus. However, the devil remains in the detail and I’d best tell you a little bit about myself, to put everything in context and explain how I arrived at this point, as I turn 57.
Without question, my cultural life changed on December 24th 1976 when I heard John Peel play two particular songs on his Christmas Eve programme; Richard Hell’s (I Belong to the) Blank Generation and Roy Harper’s When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease. I do realise Peel also gave Anarchy in the UK its first spin on radio during the same programme, but I’ve never been a fan of glam rock, so we’ll move on. Instead, that night I fell in love with music that seeks not commercial success, but artistic integrity and I remain happily besotted, by all genres of slightly off-kilter eccentricity, though not by whimsy or punishing extremes. Yes, I like commercial music, such as British Sea Power or Teenage Fanclub, but even there I detect a dedication to art and an uncompromising seam of creativity. As I get older, I find that increasingly I like my gigs to be intimate, my pubs to be cosy and my sporting adventures (both cricket and football) to be at a grassroots level and part of a defined community.
One irony is that while there are plenty of outlets for cheerful obscurity in terms of bands, pints and team games, it is the authored, tangible printed word, as opposed to the plethora of personally created blogs and peer compiled on-line journals, that struggles to find an outlet in this country. For the creative amateur and artistic outsider, hammering away at keyboards in a literary vacuum, far from the rarefied climes of agents, editors and publishing houses, including even the likes of Rough Trade Books, where is the printed showcase for their endeavours? We, as a species, need the continual replenishment of the pool of written endeavour. Don’t get me wrong, as someone who lectured in English Language, Literature and Creative Writing to adult learners for 30 years, I have an intimate knowledge of the canonical greats of English Literature. Most of them I love, but they are respected mainly for their iconic status than any sense of enduring relevance. Even recent (post WW2 in academic terms) fiction is starting to ossify. As someone who studied the American Novel at postgrad level, I recognise that Kerouac, Burroughs, Miller, Vonnegut, Bukowski and a thousand other brilliant, semi-outsider writers aren’t saying much new these days as their work starts to be categorised as being of a particular time and cultural subset. Obviously, it is a million to one chance that I’ll have a contributor whose work will be discussed amid such storied circles one day, but that isn’t really the point of glove; I’m more concerned with samizdat and zeitgeist. That said, P. J. Smith from Liverpool first had something published by me and he has just had his first collection of stories published, by Rough Trade, ironically enough.
Having spent three decades encouraging young and not so young learners to express their thoughts in the best word order possible, I became aware that those of my creative writing students who were developing an individual voice had few options when it came to getting their stuff in print. Personally, I’ve written for an enormous range of publications about music, football, politics and cricket since the late 70s, so I was aware of the scarcity of literary zines, as opposed to scholarly poetry magazines (which absolutely have the right to exist and cater for a specific audience). Basically all we have these days is: the brilliant Razur Cuts from Falkirk, in London, the novelist John King edits Verbal and Sean Preston from Ninjatune compiles Open Pen, while Jim Gibson in Nottingham, runs Low Life Press and a round of applause must go to the Farnborough Fante, Joe England, who created the ground breaking Push. His encouragement and support for my writing ended a decade-long hiatus from about 2002 when I didn’t write anything literary at all. In Newcastle, it’s a long time since Basil Bunting, Allen Ginsberg and Gordon Burn performed at Morden Tower (the first place I ever saw Whitehouse incidentally) and there was nothing up here, not that I had any interest in narrowing creative parameters by being a regional magazine. I just wanted to provide a vehicle for outsider writers, both thematically and culturally, to get their stuff read.
Hence, after I stopped doing a Newcastle United fanzine The Popular Side in 2017, I wanted to stretch myself administratively and creatively and so I introduced glove to the world. I did the whole thing entirely by myself, as I had an uncompromising vision of an A5 photocopied magazine, of about 40 or so pages, with no adverts or editorial. I found a printer who did a run of 150 for a quid a copy. Postage in the UK is about another quid, so with envelopes on top, selling it for £2 a copy including P&P means I lose 15p a pop, not to mention costing me about £60 for contributor copies, but so what? The enjoyment I get from it makes up for being a few quid in the hole twice a year. The contributors are listed on the inside cover, with only brief social media contact details instead of thumbnail biogs, partly to save on space, but mainly because I wanted the words to speak for themselves. Being candid, I also worked solo on glove as I’m a frankly cantankerous old sod who can start an argument in an empty room.
The name glove came from an art project I undertook from 2015 onwards, whereby I collected every lost or stray glove I saw on the street, or on a bus, or tied to park railings. I never went out without a spare carrier bag to transport them home, where they’d go through the wash, be scented by Comfort or Lenor and then, after a gentle spell in the tumble drier, they’d stop being hand warmers and become vital parts of an organic piece of art. I placed all the coloured gloves in one transparent Perspex cube, calling that piece glove box, and all the black ones in another Perspex cube, calling the other piece black box. They were exhibited at Sotheby’s London in Summer 2019, though both remain unsold. The front and back covers of every issue has been one of my discoveries in the wild, as it were. Incidentally, I no longer collect gloves.
How has the zine evolved and do you have plans for the future?
From the very outset, I was adamant that I wouldn’t have a
website. I am not a designer. I am a writer. If I tried to build a specific
on-line presence, it would look shit, because that isn’t my skill set. It’s the
same with TQ I would imagine; our
readerships are happy to consume a physical document, but would baulk at the
idea of scrolling through a PDF on a smart phone, as it would be headache
inducing. In that sense, the magazine has remained true to its roots. Being judgementally subjective, I feel issue
7# from January 2021 was the best one yet, because of the strength of
contributions. Sadly #8 is, for me, the worst. This is partly because of issues
with the layout, as the printer transposed the two halves of the booklet; what
should have been pages 3-18 are now 19-36, and vice versa, which has spoiled it
for me. I still paid the printer as he needs to eat and apologised to all my
contributors whose work has been mangled but, in all conscience, I couldn’t
charge anyone for it. If anyone reading this wants a copy, send me an email or
a message to @GloveLitZine and remember to include a postal address.
As regards plans for the future, it is all in the hands of
the current and future contributors. If they send stuff in that I like, or even
dislike if I sense it is good quality writing, there will be further issues.
All contributions are welcome; simply send your stuff by email (Word document attachment preferably) to iancusack@blueyonder.co.uk
On a personal level, I would love to do a 3-track CD single
of certain bits of my writing, with an unmusical backing. I’ve got some bass
riffs I’d like to record as unchanging, repetitive loops, over which I’d intone
my words. Some really clattering Mick Harvey Birthday Party style drumming,
Laura Logic atonal wailing sax and discordant, feedback and fuzz guitars would
be nice as well. All recorded independently of course. Anybody interested in
collaborating? Get in touch. I’d also like to do live spoken word stuff, but
I’ve never been asked. Also, I suppose I should write a novel at some point.
You have a
strong roster of contributors. How have you built that up?
Rewind 10 years. Joe England had just produced the debut issue of PUSH. I was alerted to its existence by my mate from University, Raymond Gorman, who was the guitarist in That Petrol Emotion incidentally, as he had a couple of poems included. I bought a copy and came across a whole galaxy of underground literary stars I’d never even heard of. I submitted a few poems, more in hope than expectation, then began to tentatively rediscover a love and a compulsion for writing short fiction, inspired by what and who I was reading.
Without doubt, the greatest contemporary, underground talent is Michael Keenaghan, a north London Irish James Ellroy. Read anything and everything you can by him. He is a genius. Other fantastic talents came to my attention; TJ Corless, Fee Johnstone, Ford Dagenham, Holly Watson, Dickson Telfer and about a hundred others. We used and still use social media, mainly Twitter in my case, to publicise each other’s work and to support other talented writers or new publications. As time has gone on, this has started to include many writers from abroad, so it’s a global grouping of not for profit prose specialists and poets. Through Twitter and email, we correspond and swap ideas. From this growing, nebulous community, new voices emerge and older ones are regenerated. By no means is it a closed shop, as nothing makes my heart sing more than a quality contribution from someone whose name is new to me. Even better, some of them have just started to write and are searching for their own style of expression.
I suppose the whole process is one of serendipity; I don’t know who is going to send stuff in. I’ve often tried to put it out there that I’d like to a female only edition, or a Scottish one, but it doesn’t happen like that. Contributions are the great unknown. I’ve directly asked people to submit, but with limited success; writers need to be loved, but many recoil from pressure. Therefore, the words I’m sent always guide me, not the author or even the form. If something has that vital spark of creative genius, I need to publish it. Sadly, I’ve not had many lengthy stories (we’re talking 5k words plus) submitted, but I wouldn’t rule them out, even if the length is prohibitive to other magazines. I try to lay glove out so it consists of a prose piece is followed by poetry and so on. I do occasionally include several pieces of flash fiction or poems by the same writer, but that approach is not applicable for those who submit substantial pieces. Of course, these guidelines are not unbreakable.
One way in which I’ve been very lucky is that I’ve not had to reject pieces from people who actually get what glove is about. Stuff that goes in the deleted items folder tends to be from the equivalent of poetic Twitter bots, who send in screeds of banal tripe about God or their grandkids, all in rhyming couplets, to about 30 publications at the same time. All I say in reply is, sorry but this doesn’t fit with our ethos. They don’t tend to get arsey or even reply, because they won’t have read glove or probably any of our writers elsewhere. I have to admit that people who submit and haven’t seen a previous copy do get on my nerves. It just seems arrogant to assume your work will fit in, without bothering to check what has gone before. Same goes for those I publish who accept a contributor copy but throw up their hands in horror if you ask them to buy an extra copy to help support the magazine.
Brilliant question, and one I could throw straight back to you. Who do you find more offensive: Sutcliffe Jugend or Coldplay? Undoubtedly the latter for me. Similarly, Barbara Cartland’s world view disgusts me in a way that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t; and if you’ve read his A Child of God, you’ll know he writes about taboo subjects in quite an unadorned, visceral style.
Needless to say, I won’t countenance anything racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or otherwise hateful. Taking that stance as a given, then if you don’t count rejecting pieces I find banal as censorship, then I have never knocked anything back on the basis I found it too extreme. In fact, I’ve only really worried about two stories I’ve published; in issue #5 Derek Steel contributed a piece about a domestic murder / suicide that troubled me, until I talked to him about it and he explained the point of the piece. This is the crux of the censorship debate in my eyes. As his motivation was entirely honourable and artistically impeccable, I had no reason to think that the writing could be interpreted as in any way immoral, whatever than means, or gratuitous. In the current edition, Michael Keenaghan’s Ring describes the activities of a fictional paedophile gang of rich and powerful London politicians, ending with the central character’s execution. The worry I have is that some people, mendaciously seeking a reason to affect outrage, are too stupid to read to the end of Michael’s piece and will abandon the story halfway through, completely missing the moral purpose revealed in the denouement.
This leads me to say that I would happily publish pieces that include graphic violence, explicit sex and other subjects some people may be offended by, though with a proviso. I would need to be 100% certain that the motivation of the writer in straying into such territory was justified at an artistic level and was not for the purposes of self-gratification, as I’m not a pornographer and have no interest in what arouses other people, or worst of all, gratuitous and exploitative. Playing to the gallery for likes or financial reward by engaging with the lowest common denominators in terms of style, plot or characterisation, is truly a sin in my eyes. Similarly, anyone who sets out to write a smash hit or a best seller is truly an enemy of art and creativity. I’d like to think I’m a defender of them both.
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