"It's basically knitting and chatting."
"What do you mean?"
"Like old ladies who meet up and knit and gossip; same thing."
There is a feeling of chaos in Manuel's studio, but everything has its place, and everything is as it should be.
"And from this chatting and making we get structure influenced by writing - writing influenced by structure; physical and not!"
The idea is to explore by opening ourselves up to the possibility that we don't need books. What other ways are there to tell stories? What can a bookbinder and a writer do together that they couldn't do separately? What can collaboration reveal?
This is a Writer in Residence with more than just writing, but also making. Together we will create books, and what will that teach us about physicality, and words, and form; how will it affect the stories we tell?
The engineer in Manuel seeks perfection. There must be an appropriate way to present each individual thing, someway unique – a book does not always have to be the same as every other. After all, not all words are the same, not all images, not all papers. So the binding should be just as important and unique.
And perhaps this goes deeper. Manuel and myself are attached to books in a way that so many people are, they are physical items you hold in your hands and cherish – Some you read once and shelve for the rest of your life, but God forbid it were thrown away, because it still reminds you of that moment. That one time. That girl. That boy.
So how can that relationship change when we explore the digital world?
And is the book really the greatest form of storytelling?
But in order to understand this we must also try to understand what physicality is and explore this. We will remove the grey space between writer and book and see how a writer may connect with a certain type of binding, a way to present, and how that changes what they write. Simultaneously what we chat about, and what we are interested in, we will delve into online.
We will be publishing everything we are thinking about; stories, research, interviews, everything and anything on our minds with the only goal being to explore.
Knitting and chatting. Making and exploring.
My interest is in what language and words can change to offer something else regardless of form. What opportunities does the internet offer for story telling? How can the written word embrace this? How can we reach more people?
Manuel's is in exploration, both of physical forms but also abstract. Any opportunity for something new and Manuel is there. What if digital didn't need to mean 'without physicality'? What if we had the opportunity to explore everything that was on our minds at any one time in multiple different formats and see if there was something new to be done?
So we got together and decided to collaborate. Together we will investigate ideas - knitting and chatting - I will write it all up, and we will publish it online through newsletters, social media, on websites, in physical form, whatever feels right to us. All the time I will be in the studio with him learning, making and then, at the end, something physical, a book, the printed word, and what will we learn in-between?
What this is really about is finding different ways to say things. Embracing the internet, the digital, and routing it in the physical and learning everything we can on the way about physicality and challenging our held beliefs about the importance of books.
We can’t wait to get started.
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