Month: June 2022

Finding My Way

I have never been so naïve to believe that I can do anything that I want.

In fact, I have never even believed that I can do anything that I set my mind to.

Were either of these things true, I wouldn’t be half as stressed by schoolwork, wouldn’t cripplingly suffer from impostor’s syndrome any time I attempt to complete said work, wouldn’t scrap the work within two minutes because it isn’t flawless on the first attempt, and I wouldn’t be unsuccessful in any of my endeavours rather than just a few of them.  

Hence, when I am told to write about what I want to do in ‘the future’, I am impossibly lost. Frankly, I have forever believed that such a concept as ‘the future’ is too distant and too obscure to be important to the present.

What I was naïve to believe is that the future stays distant; it does not. Let’s just say, that awakening was rude.

From an early age I have been in touch with creativity: reading, drawing, writing, imagining. I once utilised them as an escape.

As I aged, however, I subconsciously recalibrated those loves to recognise the beauty of the ‘How’.

How is that book so emotionally impactful?

How is that artwork created to convey tone and message?

How is this prose connoting broader messages?

How does art, in any form, inevitably reflect concepts of the world around us?

I like that I ask questions. It makes me an analytical person and somebody who likes to investigate with a fine-tooth comb, whether it be art or media or ideas or people or societies.

But upon realising that my ‘future’ is rapidly approaching, I am facing it in search for how my analysis will help me. Or, more appropriately, how it can help me.

When I began to ask ‘how’, I said that I wanted to work within ‘Art’. There was a period when I wanted to draw, there was a period when I wanted to graphic designer. But I reminded myself that I cannot do everything.

Some things are for specific people; I could call myself an artist all I wanted and I could watch as many YouTube tutorials as I possibly could, but never could I ever learn how to draw hands. I realised that within the visual art spectrum, I neither had the spark nor the skill to get it perfectly accurate or perfectly inaccurate. My pieces always looked like an attempt at one or the other.

So I turned to my other crutches – reading and writing – and it is there, in that corner of ‘Art’, that I began to think I could find myself. I can see myself in this elusive world known as ‘The Publishing Industry’ not only because I can see the possibilities of my analysis, but because I can see the possibilities of my contribution to art that begs to be analysed, investigated and appreciated for its facets.

Ultimately, I don’t know where I want to end up within such a gargantuan industry – writer or editor or designer (probably not that one) or agent or marketer or something in between at a publishing house or magazine company or news corporation – but I know that I want to be able to implement nuance in our written language, which ever so needs it.

Harrison Abbott
Busybird Work Experience Student

Savage Ironies

Blaise was a big believer in book launches. She saw them as a celebration of all the hard work an author’s put into their book.

At Blaise’s funeral, her mother, acclaimed author and artist Lin Van Hek, spoke about how she and Blaise had picked something out for Blaise to read at Lin’s funeral, assuming the natural order that a parent would precede their child in passing. Lin spoke about how it was a ‘savage irony’ that she was now reading that piece for Blaise’s funeral.

One of Blaise’s literary cornerstones was her novel, The Colours of Ash. She had been working on it for about twenty years, juggling it and the other responsibilities in her life.

In the last ten years, she also wrote and published three other books: the publishing guide, The Book Book: 12 Steps to Successful Publishing, and the two memoirs, The Road to Tralfamadore is Bathed in River Water (about her early life, growing up on a hippy commune in the 1970s), and 50 Days for Fifty Years (about walking the Camino de Santiago as a bucket-list item).

But I’d like to believe that her novel (and fiction) was her great love. She was a voracious reader – she’d read anything, but predominantly fiction. And the book was the literary love that she kept returning to, kept working on to get right.

She messaged me early in January to tell me she was planning to finally publish The Colours of Ash.

After she passed, her husband Kev, his friend/bookkeeper Kate, and I were going through Blaise’s work diary trying to get a sense of what else she’d planned for Busybird this year and found she’d tentatively pencilled in 15th May as a possible launch.

It’s another savage irony that she’d worked so long on this novel (over one/third of her life) and that she encouraged authors to throw book launches, to celebrate their book’s arrival into the world, and now we’ll have to launch her book without her.

But she’d finished with the actual manuscript, and was preparing to go to layout – that’s when the text is dumped into design software and formatted for printing. She’d also asked her son, talented artist Jack Howlett, to paint an image for the cover. It’s an image, I understand, she loved, as it perfectly represented what she had in her head.

She gave her husband, Kev, and myself just enough information that in the wake of her death, we were able to piece together what we needed to do finish The Colours of Ash.

That’s what we’ve done in the last couple of months. We hope we realised Blaise’s own vision as closely as possible to what she would’ve wanted.

The Colours of Ash will be launched tomorrow.

Here are the details:

When
7.00pm
Wednesday
15^th June

Where
Busybird Publishing
2/118  Para Road
Montmorency 3094

We hope to see you all there.

Les Zigomanis.