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: Jane Troup

Design and Production: David Briggs and Ruth Bennett

Cover artwork: Lukas Szpojnarowicz

© remains with the individual authors herein published November 2020

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.

The image on the front cover shows a detail from a painting by Lukas Szpojnarowicz

Editorial

Well, it’s been an eventful issue. The poems, stories, artworks, essays and scripts collected here were submitted in the spring and summer of 2020, many of them before the March lockdown. This, then, by way of a confession: what with one thing and another it’s taken me a while to produce this edition of the magazine. I hope you’ll agree that it’s worth the wait.

One of the uncanny features of art is its ability to speak across historical periods, to retain its relevance for individuals living very different lives in very different contexts from the one inhabited by the individual responsible for producing the artwork in the first place. What we take as twentieth-first century readers of Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, or George Eliot, for example, is likely to be very different from that taken by the contemporary readership for those writers, and even from the intentions of the authors themselves. But what does it matter? The construction of meaning is a personal matter for the reader. For the viewer. Once an artwork has made its way out into the world, the artist can’t go around as its chaperone. It must find its own way into the lives and memories of those it encounters. And if this is true of texts written on the other side of the industrial revolution, or of the great plague of 1665, then it’s also likely to be true of texts produced just the other side of Easter, in a pre-Covidian age.

Perhaps you’ll find that this potential for trans-historical exegesis resides more potently in the poetry with which this issue of the magazine begins? Or in the diverse range of visual art? But the big themes are reassuringly present elsewhere in the magazine too: gossip, narcissism, friendship, sibling rivalry, family strife, the individual and society, music. Enduring concerns of great stories, erudite essays, clearly-visualised screenplays. Anyway, that’s all out there in the following pages for you as readers to discover.

So, there have been some changes - not the least of which being the move to an entirely digital format and the attendant scrapping of the cover price. But many things remain just as they were. I hope you find some comfort in this.

David Briggs