FERMENT No. 1
Winter 2010—11
£3
Literature and illustration zine
the
NAKED
issue
2
Hello. Welcome to the first issue of Ferment, a non-profit zine where the content is focused around exciting and original fiction, poetry and artwork. For each issue we choose a theme to inspire writers. The theme of this issue is ‘Naked.’ We gave this word out to writers who took that word and did what they would with it. We then gave the resulting pieces to artists and illustrators to use as inspiration for original artworks. The result of those pairings is what you have now. A collaborative process that has hopefully produced something you will enjoy. We’re really happy with the variety of work that we received. I was a little worried that with any theme, we may end up with a selection that was all along the same lines, but we’ve had such a varied response, I’ve thankfully been shown that my worries were unfounded. This is a collection that I am very proud to have been a part of putting together. I would personally like to say a massive thank you to all of our contributors who have all been extremely kind with their efforts and work which they have all given us for free. I fucking love you all. Paul
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Brought to you by…
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Paul Askew
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Sarah Plant
James Weiner
@misteraxl paulaskew.tumblr.com
@plantsarah
@jamesweiner
Sarah spent too much time in Birmingham and the
In a previous life James was a disorganised record
Paul labours as a wage slave serving incompetent
effects are only just wearing off. Nowadays she
cover designer and magazine editor. He then spent
members of the public. Inbetween he is an apprentice
spends her time designing nail technician manuals
some time inside the music industry machine where
literary academic and gets regular gigs inflicting his
and dreaming of a time when she will be art director
he learnt that listening to music is a lot more fun than
bizarre ramblings on unsuspecting audiences at venues
of the world. For Ferment, Sarah likes to look at lots of
marketing it. He left to reform his character and now
across Oxford and London. His number one heckler is
fonts and argue with James about white space whilst
works for himself. For Ferment, he has a pseudo-
his own mother. For Ferment, Paul is in charge of words
corralling our cabal of illustrators.
publisher role, making sure everyone else does the work
and keeping all our writers happy.
Exceedingly good cakes.
Can’t beat the real thing.
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Docvek
and that he gets the credit. Waffly versatile.
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Matt Lewis
Thanks Newspaper Club (www.newspaperclub.co.uk) for the mega
www.docvek.co.uk
mattlewis.deviantart.com
Born in Maidenhead, a young Keiran (aka Docvek) set
Matt Lewis was born in Hereford and taught himself
co.uk) for the advice, Matt Lewis for our awesome comic
about life to become the world’s greatest PE teacher.
to draw as a child by reading comics. He moved to
portraits and Docvek for the striking cover. Thanks also go to
However, upon the realisation that an E in his PE GCSE
Oxford in 1997 to study and lives there still with his
red wine, wine gums and of course all of our
signaled the end of a short lived dream he turned to the
partner Hannah and their son Frank. He enjoys charity
fantastic contributors.
path he has been following ever since – Design.
shops, long johns and detective fiction.
Reproduction rights
easy to use printing service, Comma (www.oxfordcomma.
He has been churning out his unique brand of vector
All content is copyright their respective creators. Please contact
based designs and illustrations for the likes of the BBC,
them with any inquiries for republication or commissioning.
Computer Arts Projects, The Times, and Ninja Tune.
Ferment
NAKED
The Naked Issue
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The Hairless Cat. w
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Paul Askew Shiv hello@makeanddoodle.com www.makeanddoodle.com Since graduating a few years ago, I have been trying to figure out what it is I want to do when I grow up. Apparently it’s to be an illustrator. I mainly do hand drawn and hand made illustrations and nic-nacks. If you would like to see more of my work, have a little peek at www.makeanddoodle.com.
No-one pays attention to the hairless cat as it kneads my legs to shreds. Everyone looks the other way, despite my paralysis. I’ll not forget this. If I regain any use of my limbs, you know, I’ll get my revenge. I’ll eat this fucking cat for starters. Drink its blood in front of them. Never mind that it was Granny’s favourite and Sarah promised she’d take care of it. Knowing my family, I expect they’ll take the cat’s side, but damn, that’ll just make it more satisfying. Now this naked cat has stripped my legs to the bone and that lot still won’t stop it. Actually, now they seem to be finding it kind of cute. I’ll remember who coos at this clawing. It’s extremely annoying and when I can move again, they’re dead. F
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Sophie F Baker @sophiefbaker www.just-somestuff.blogspot.com
Magician’s stooge contemplates a law of physics
Sophie F Baker has had work published in magazines such as Smiths Knoll, Iota, Horizon Review and Pomegranate. This year she was lucky enough to win the Andrew Waterhouse Award. She currently works at Mslexia, is learning to ballroom dance and blogs at www.just-somestuff.blogspot.com – all whilst working towards her first collection.
An accident of gravity, I am hovering above stage planks in Newcastle’s Theatre Royal when it dawns on me how long I have lain for him. I have pored these hours over amateur mathematics trying to figure it out; the wonder for me is not in suspension but how things must always fall. They say gravity is an overlap from another dimension, a dimple in the shape of our continuum, an equation no-one can override. Sometimes, when I drift off, my dreams are of waking fallen; all eyes on my gooseflesh skin. F
Ferment
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Sophie F Baker
Outdoor swimming
Jess Gill
Where we will strip off in public with only our eyes watching and you will want me and we will swim, sucking air in great big shocks as our bodies lose their heat and find each other rashed with cold. We will cling together, drift apart. We will savour our youth in the moment and not from the shore. You will trace your hands around my arms and the Thermos will be waiting filled with watery hot chocolate and as we drink it we’ll wear hats I’ve knitted specially to keep the autumn out. F
@jessgill www.jessicagill.co.uk Jessica is a freelance creative, specializing in fashion, lifestyle and decorative illustration, lettering and design. Currently based in the heart of England, Jessica works from her humble desk, romanticising, observing and making marks endeavouring to make the world a prettier place.
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Hannah Walker @hanwalker www.hannahjanewalker.co.uk Hannah Jane Walker is a poet and education facilitator. Her poems have featured on radio and she has performed at events and festivals around the country including Latitude, Truck, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and Shunt. She studied literature at UEA and a poetry MA at Newcastle. She is working towards her first collection ‘You interrupt my brain sweetheart’. Summer 2010 she took her first solo show ‘This is just to say’, an intimate show about apology set around a table, to Edinburgh as part of Forest Fringe. She is currently working on a new show with Chris Thorpe, about making massive mistakes at work, working title ‘The O fuck moment.’
Ferment
I struggled for years with belly fat and now I know a thing I say to myself that I’m art – I say to myself that my memory is a list box where I keep importants and not a manky crumb pod for left over crusts of emotional toast. But still at breakfast, in the shower, on the way to work the list bulks out the pod box and no amount of sit ups makes them thin. Pizza teenage 1991 - girls with calves smooth as bowling pins do dance routines in assembly to Ace of Base’s ‘all that she wants is another baby’. I think I am unusual, and wear my scrunchy like a coronet of hormones. In maths I sweat for smulch in the caretakers cupboard. I have no mobile, I know no poetry, I mine my complexion in spot light search of beauty self. I care if I blush when my bra strap is pinged I care enough to eat only oranges for 9 weeks while the won’t lick their lips boys, wolf donuts. 1993, Lee and I do things to the dark that makes it light and the reason for ‘parents say no’ things seem to be spanner keys to a radiator that never lets off steam. I strut down streets my breasts out saying excuses excuses excuses for people who don’t know how to live their lives properly. I sleep and dream conversational philosophies ‘I will never look like I will never be like I will never grow like you in your swivel chaired high heeled routine.’ And then the first jab, like ice to an arse hole, and I seethe so succinctly I make bats ears bleed. I seethe with wine bottles up my coat sleeves I seethe at adults who insist on supper meetings and everything so zebra crossing on a Thursday holding hands with a little sister parent child please me. But Lee in a club gets me dancing and on the drug he gives me I see eyelid trees and starlings with snapped back chins. We do origami skirt up round my knees routines across the town and the neighbours tell my dad’s business partner, what they’ve seen. The whole no front door key thing didn’t really matter I was locked in and until Esther found me half out the cat flap everything was cream. The wine pints spilt on CD sleeves the we don’t do TV the we don’t sleep the we only smoke weed routine through university until I make a boy with split glass feelings a frame being. That scene’s best cack blanked like a socially awkward accident where you mean well until you leave, but kiss everyone on the cheek in case they think you are mean. And the cleaning and the cleaning in the shower routine and the suds slip into your navel and you cant help but think about the reconciliation procedure between the ego and the ego and the way that that boy tore you like a tissue on a shoe behind a skip and you told everyone you didn’t mind and didn’t mind and then a little later, that you minded and then that you thought things could have maybe not been like a can of cold tuna left behind a curtain, and the books which lie unread like underwear unworn on a special occasion because the comfy comic ones fit your too swinging wide for doorways hips better and the way that Ace of Base track is spooling out the cassette tape and you have a pencil on your birthday and a mug of cold tea and you’re trying to get it all back in. F
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Skin Flint i
Rachel Wilson rachel@hellowilson.co.uk www.hellowilson.co.uk HelloWilson (better known as Rachel) is a Yorkshire girl living in Oxford. She works as a freelance graphic designer, occasionally escaping her computer to make hand drawn, patterned illustrations. Her versatile work spans everything from branding and print design to highly patterned illustrations of sea creatures. She dreams of being in ‘Mad Men’.
My mother used her skin like flint, said she hadn’t shaved her legs since Patti Smith got on stage and pissed on pop poster smiles. She cut our hair in lego lines, sung us ‘Pretty Vacant’ from the toilet seat, she left the door open while she got changed and got us used to no bra breasts. She said some people say they have no love to lose but that everyone has too much and that’s why only sometimes we notice that learning’s tough. She picked us up from class-mates houses tall and lean in her kohl black jeans, cycled us home while we bored traffic lights chatting on about Sylvanians and Micro Machines. She let us leave our hair in shampoo steeples race out naked with towels like kites she held our bath-pickled fingers while we clamoured to report school fights. She never said she hated hairspray or the way we later piled on blush she let us do our make up our own way and learn that sometimes, skin is enough. F
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Mary in Medias Res w
Humphrey Astley @humphreyasteley humphreyastley.blogspot.com Humphrey Astley was born in 1982 in Oxford, where he studies at Ruskin College. His main creative pursuit is as songwriter and frontman for the band Huck and the Handsome Fee. His poetry can be read at humphreyastley.blogspot.com.
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Chaos vs Cosmos chaos_vs_cosmos@hotmail.co.uk www.chaosvscosmos.blogspot.com Chaos vs Cosmos is Stephen Keane, a London based illustrator, designer and screenprinter best known for his gig posters and album artwork. His work is a mind-bendingly psychadelic cartoon collision of the wry, the absurd, the beautiful and the frightening; a nightmarish yet often comic reflection of the world in which he finds himself perpetually lost and amused.
Ferment
She’s thinking about the email from her parents and the reply she won’t have the energy to write by the time she’s home from the shoot. The debate is pointless in any case, since her father thinks his daughter’s a whore and her mother won’t persuade him otherwise. Thank god I’m a grown woman, she thinks, as her co-star Mike enters her from behind. Thank god it’s just their opinion. Still, she’s unsettled by the idea that her elders can be naive, a malaise her sister Lizzie calls “cognitive dissonance.” Once a week they meet for lunch in the cafeteria of their shared campus and have high-powered conversations about the world in a grain of sand. It was Lizzie who told Mary that taking a course would be the correct use of her disposable income. Neither of them guessed that cultural studies would include a module on pornography, in which Mary learned a great deal about the hypocrisy of men. “You guys need to make up your minds exactly how and when women should be fucked.” The truth was she hardly cared, and Lizzie’s input was less than edifying. “Well obviously you’re a whore. So am I. And mum’s no better. She talks about you making it on your back but I don’t see how that’s any worse than making it on your feet.” Their mother was a barmaid in her youth and they grew up with horror stories about amorous drunks and creepy landlords. Mary often thinks of their roving hands when a colleague slaps her backside to signal a change of position. So Mike flips Mary over and with a smile she rises to take him in her mouth. He winks and reaches for her crotch, which he massages in his funny way. He’s a sweet guy but she wishes he hadn’t asked her out to dinner. She’s heard from the other girls about the dangers of “taking the dick home.” She can taste herself now; it’s strange but not unpleasant. She knows this business is all about putting one thing in another. Not for the first time, though, she’s nagged by the idea that life makes objects of people. Eventually, they come.
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Bones Your dull yellow edges, stripes across the page. Your soft revealed skin folded too many times, a half-broken habit. A glance is all it took to find you again. I clutched you tight then shoved you away. Now you are nothing but a tiger’s skeleton. I watch the way the memories pounce back into place and your claws rip into me.
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Lara Ellison www.laraellison.com
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Lime Tonic
Lara describes her work as being ‘like a big bag of pick ‘n’ mix full of illustration, photoraphy, typography, print and graphics.’ She likes to ‘throw it all together, shake it, then see what i can work with out of the beautiful mess.’ She would love it if you took a look for yourself on her website, which you should go and do..
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Z. Valentine @z_valentine www.zvalentine.com Z. Valentine (1985) is a 3rd year English student at Ruskin College. She writes short stories, poetry and will soon attempt a novel (Pro-Plus supply depending). In her spare time she likes to take her daughter to the park, read Gormenghast, and be sarcastic.
The bar was named The Bare Princess, and it was the sort of place where sin hung from the shattered chandeliers like decaying spiders. The walls were splattered in blood from the frequent deadly fights and as Marshall pushed open the heavy doors, an aroma of smoke and whiskey seemed to curl itself round his face, and weave its way into his black hair. Children did not go to The Bare Princess, but some would argue Marshall wasn’t much of a child any more. At 13, he drew a few glances but mostly he was ignored by the drunken clientele. He was jostled at the bar and it was a long time before the barman sauntered over to Marshall, dirty grey towel over his shoulder and a cigarette lazily hanging from his mouth. “Wadda ya want, boy?” Sneered the barman. “Lime tonic.” The barman twitched and his sneer slid up his face when he realised he was being asked for a non-alcoholic drink. He stared at Marshall for a long moment before turning and spitting on the floor. Neverthertheless, he grabbed the nearest dirty glass and walked slowly to fill it up with lime tonic. It was hot in the bar, and Marshall was tired. He shrugged off his leather jacket, carefully trying not to touch the wounds on the tops of his arms. Bullet Ghosts, they were called, when a bullet scraped the skin. He noticed the group sat next to him at the bar go very quiet. The barman was returning, but when he got closer to Marshall and glanced at his arm he stopped suddenly and dropped the glass of lime tonic. It smashed on the floor and heads turned. ‘All this over some cuts?’ thought Marshall, but it was then that he remembered the CFF symbol branded onto his arm. The brand that every active member of the terrorist group had. The whole bar was quieter now, and the barman was hurriedly looking around for a new glass, a cleaner glass. Eventually he found one, and then ran to fill it up. When he brought the drink back, it had ice and lemon in it. “I hope this is okay,” he said to Marshall, glancing at him and then quickly dropping his gaze when Marshall stared back at him. Marshall nodded and dug into his pockets for the money, and held out the change to the barman, who jumped backwards like he had received an electric shock. His hands flew up. “Oh no, you don’t need to pay! It’s on the house. Please.” He sounded almost desperate. Marshall shrugged and pocketed it. When he left The Bare Princess a few hours later, people parted to let him through. And just before he pushed open the heavy doors, he heard someone say to the barman; “I’ll have a lime tonic please.” F
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Naked: imprinted memory He stands: pale chest, bony hands, so thin – I count the ribs noting them down And down… his pubic hair (which we shall show as grey) is carrot-coloured against the whiteness of his flesh. Across the room, frost, titanium white, (sometimes used as a sunscreen, absorbing UV light, and to paint lines on tennis courts – this guy’s no athlete, though, with skin pale as if he never sees the sun…) is melting from the windows, till the sky, French Ultramarine, bounces so much brightness I shade my eyes. His head, affront the window, is halo’d by the sun and golden autumn beech … His eyes, socket deep, Glow feverishly, carmine flecked. (That’s beetle juice, or cochineal…) No sound but breathing, and graphite rasping on cartridge paper (why cartridge, why?). Hot dry air, fanning from an ancient heater stifles breath… clock ticks, till
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Clare Weiner hodgepublishing.co.uk Clare grew up in SW London, (where the grandparents had hidden all the exotic stuff behind becoming Middle Class), studied at Newcastle Uni and OUDCE, and has three adult children. Her interests include popular science, art (practical and theoretical), and people. She’s currently working on a follow-up to her recently published novel, “Baby, Baby” (which is available from her website - www.hodgepublishing.co.uk).
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Vicky Bentham-Green vickybenthamgreen@gmail.com www.vickybenthamgreen.co.uk I graduated from University College Falmouth in 2009 with a BA Hons degree in Illustration and was lucky enough to exhibit at New Designers and New Blood. My style is minimalistic and honest. I enjoy capturing the look, emotions and movement of a subject through the use of line and colour. Everything I do is hand drawn then rendered digitally.
Ferment
he shifts his body, then one foot, then…silently he topples, crashes, loud and heavy, shaking the floor… Chloe’s hands, aghast, fly to her mouth, her pencil drops, and rolls… Open a window! someone cries… white thighs, bony buttocks, prone, beneath our popping eyes, a slain warrior a sick tree he lets out no word or sigh… Emma throws water on him, from the sink, but– the staff pulled draperies over, like he was ancient Greek, a plaster cast, then class dismissed they said, don’t forget – to leave your work by the door. From the canteen… through coffee, wide-eyed imaginings, and kit-kats, we heard the ambulance… All this was a long time ago… His identity, as nothing, His nonentity, whatever suffering it was, stays locked in me. F
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Darren John
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www.iamdarrenjohn.com www.fourpence.net Darren John is a Birmingham based Illustrator who likes to produce expression rich, character driven illustrations. He spends much of his time drawing, painting and thinking about goofy outcomes to scenarios. He is a proud member of the creative collective FourPence and has exhibited work across the country.
Special Delivery (or Morning Glory) It’s been six or so months. At first I’d get so excited I’d rarely get to bed in time to get up again, so I just stopped. Now I have a quick nap after the kids go to school, and then again at eleven when my husband goes to bed. That way I can be up at four with no ill effects. If the round changes at all, you see, there could be a variation of anything up to two hours. Four o’clock is better safe than sorry. That first morning I was up early because Kelly had an earache. There was a little bit of mist on the ground, and as he walked up the street he was like a greek god, except for the standard issue footwear and the flourescent bag. I thought I was hallucinating from lack of sleep, like when Kelly was a baby and I saw Patrick Swayze bouncing up and down on next doors trampoline, hand in hand with Mia Farrow. They weren’t naked, though. He was dressed as Johnny from Dirty Dancing and she looked like she does in Rosemary’s Baby, only old like she is now. And with fangs.
Ceri Ashcroft
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Ceri Ashcroft is mainly an actor/clown/puppeteer for money. At the moment she is playing Lola in Charlie and Lola’s Best Bestest Play at the Sydney Opera House in Oz. In between performing she writes stories and scripts, works at a circus school and takes photos of stuff.
I got up early the next few mornings, just in case. Even if he was an hallucination. The first four days we had another one instead, older and uglier, and thankfully fully clothed. But I must admit I was disappointed. And then, on the fifth day, he was back. Came right up to the house with a bundle of Andrew’s mountain biking catalogues and a charity letter. My husband doesn’t know, of course. The early mornings weren’t a problem, but I had to explain away the military issue binoculars I ordered. He thinks I’ve a new found passion for bird watching. Night vision was an optional extra, and a bit expensive, but what about when the clocks go back? It’s good to plan ahead. F
The Naked Issue
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