BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

Bristol Grammar School, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SR

Tel: +44 (0)117 933 9648 email: betweenfourjunctions@bgs.bristol.sch.uk

Editor: David Briggs

Art Editor: Ed Hume-Smith

Design and Production: David Briggs and Ruth Bennett

Cover artwork: Lukas Szpojnarowicz

© remains with the individual authors herein published November 2019

All rights reserved

BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS is published twice yearly in association with the Creative Writing Department at Bristol Grammar School. We accept submissions by email attachment for poetry, prose fiction/ non-fiction, script, and visual arts from everyone in the BGS community: pupils, students, staff, support staff, parents, governors, OBs. Views expressed in BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS are not necessarily those of Bristol Grammar School; those of individual contributors are not necessarily those of the editors. While careful consideration of readers’ sensibilities has been a part of the editorial process, there are as many sensibilities as there are readers, and it is not entirely possible to avoid the inclusion of material that some readers may find challenging. We hope you share our view that the arts provide a suitable space in which to meet and negotiate challenging language and ideas.

DOES IT MATTER IF A LANGUAGE BECOMES EXTINCT?

WHY PREFER AN ORIGINAL PAINTING TO AN

COPY eMAGAZINE CLOSE READING COMPETITION 2019

The four re-purposed junction boxes of Lukas Szpojnarowicz’s arresting cover art provide a fitting image for this second issue of Between Four Junctions, one in which the spaces between and the connections across the works in the magazine add something to our appreciation of each individual work. Such connections are perhaps best exemplified in the two ekphrastic pieces —‘Looking Beyond’ and‘They Bashed …’ — works that arose from a collaboration between the Art department and the English department during last spring’s HEARTS Week.Pupils inYear 8 andYear 9 produced paintings and poems in response to music byVivaldi, and those pieces themselves were then swapped across the two departments to enable pupils the chance to respond in poetry to a painting,in paint to a poem.Thus, an echo-poetic chain of artists responding to work by other artists was set in play, the results of which went to form the tapestry presently decorating a ground-floor window in the PerformingArts Centre. I only had room for two of these echo-poetic pieces in the magazine; take a walk across to the PAC if you’d like to see more.

In a less deliberately orchestrated way, other chains of association emerged. The prose-fiction section demonstrated a strong interest in the presentation of dystopian worlds, with the ambitious world-building of‘The Chambers’ by Georgina Hamilton-James and the impressive economy of‘The MissingArtwork’ by FreddieArmitage and Michael Lucas both leading the reader to finales that powerfully snuffed-out any hope for their protagonists. Devin Birse, working in the same genre,but within the tighter constraints of flash fiction, chooses to focus on the psychology of a futuristic robo-soldier-cum-Frankenstein, a piece that calls back across pages to James Ormiston’s vivid painting for the beaches of D-Day.While Charlie Groombridge and Lara Smith, also writing within the restraints of flash fiction, manage to evoke and suggest wider resonances in pieces that add up to much more than the sum of their parts, Anya Clegg’s winning entry for the History department’s inaugural historical fiction prize makes the most of a longer story form to transport the reader back and forth between civilisations.

But family and domestic settings proved to be equally as plangent, equally as fertile, as the more overtly dramatic scenarios preferred by the fiction writers. Lottie Williams uses a prose-poem to fondly evoke a grandmother’s kitchen, and Zoe Wakling uses acrylics on paper to hint at the massy significance of everyday objects in her deft still life. In a similar vein, Jennifer Benn shows her understanding of the importance of detailed observation, of the need to show respect for your subject by taking the trouble to look at it closely and precisely, with love but without sentimentality.