SO MUCH WATER: Sometimes themes arrive when we’re putting a magazine together. It happens organically. […] We like the poems and stories in Brittle Star to live with one another no matter what they’re about, to love one another, build houses together, wage wars, form community gardens, go on rallies, shout out loud about a million things, whisper about a million more. We like the magazine to reflect something of the variety of the worlds in which our writers and readers live, the relationships they might have with other people and things. […]
One thing we do know is that, if this watery work does anything, it does the thing we, as editors, want it to – what I spoke of at the beginning of this editorial – it reflects strongly the world in which we live. It’s a world where the ice-caps are melting, water levels are rising, shorelines disappearing, where plastic bags choke whales. And it’s a world where creatures made up of almost 70% of water respond to it with art, passion, and care for the other creatures made up of water. The next issue may be very different. We may have poems about deserts, stories about nuclear winters, or we may have nothing at all. It will be interesting to see what comes in. (Editorial extract by Jacqueline Gabbitas)
Issue 44 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by Avril Joy, Ben Verinder, Ciaran Buckley, Gill McEvoy, Gillian Somerscales, Haley Rice, Howard Wright, Ian Patterson, Jack Houston, Jeremy Page, Jill Townsend, Joe Cullen, Jonathan Totman, Jonny Wiles, Josephine von Zitzewitz, Josh Ekroy, Julie Mellor, Kitty Coles, ky li, L Kiew, Lydia Harris, Miriam Patrick, Morgaine Davidson, Phil Knight, Ruth Esther Gilmore, Sarah Passingham, Serge Neptune, Sophie Hopesmith, Stuart Charlesworth, Zoe Mitchell
Column by Sarah Pasingham – Titles are the writer’s shop window
Article by Jacqueline Gabbitas – And the Poems Came