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BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

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

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

Editors: David Briggs and Luke Evans

Art Editor: Jane Troup

Design and Production: David Briggs, Luke Evans, and Ruth Bennett

Cover artwork: Bella Lazarides

Copyright © July 2021 remains with the individual authors

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.

Visual Art

PROSE NON-FICTION

Script

The artist is a creature possessed of finely-tuned antennae. Whatever’s out there in the aether, they’ll sense it. And that something’ll find its way into the work. OK, great, I hear you think. But what has any of that to do with a story about falling in love with a bowl of soup in the new issue of Between Four Junctions? Peculiar times, I’ll reply. Locked down in our houses – isolated from each other, away from human contact, from the usual distractions, and forced to confront the emptiness of space, the slow, drawn-out progress of hobbled time – we learned to appreciate the smaller things. And, well, in such times, maybe more than just simple appreciation might develop, as Holly Osborne-Jones evocatively shows in her accomplished piece of flash-fiction ‘Inanimate Attraction’.

The majority of the written works in this magazine were submitted independently, rather than having been harvested from existing school projects, showing both that the magazine is beginning to establish itself as an idea in the BGS community, and also that there’s a burgeoning community of students and teachers who have discovered writing for pleasure. Both are very encouraging signs. In the poetry we find a tendency to imagine life in other realms, other worlds, or on other planets, such as in Kai Drysdale’s ‘Kepler 452-b’. These writers are alert to the possibility of alternative states, keen to imagine other, better ways of doing things, an idea conveyed with especially poignant force in Sol Woodroffe’s poem ‘Want to Want’.

In the non-fiction section, a similar concern with better ways of doing things finds expression in two selfcommissioned essays, on the legal status of recreational drugs and the legacies of ‘the age of exploration’, while a sharpened political sensibility similarly informs script and prose fiction submissions, especially the prize-winning piece of ludic fiction by Rosa Thorne, written in the voice of an imagined future linguist reflecting back on an earlier yet uncannily familiar age, which put me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges and the epilogue to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The editors are grateful again to Mrs Bennet for production assistance, and to Ms Troup and the Art Department for providing us with such a rich body of visual art from which to choose the few pieces for which we have space. While we still aim to produce a limited print run of physical copies of the magazine, economies of scale keep us to 80 pages, and that makes the tussle for each page increasingly competitive. Absolutely no filler guaranteed. Finally, I am especially grateful to now have Mr Evans as co-editor. His talent as a writer is equally matched by his skill and nous as an editor and designer, and that has made the production of this issue so much more enjoyable.

As this strange time persists, we both hope that you find yourself developing a fondness and appreciation (perhaps something deeper even than that) for this small thing we’ve produced in its midst. I read mine last night, while spooning a bowl of French onion soup so good I knelt and wept.

David Briggs

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