[For buried place-and-time lede, see, paragraph 3.]
[Audio conversation segments: first part delves into details of poet and artist Katy Bentall’s zine-making practice, her development processes and production rituals / then at the 28:50 mark we hop back twenty-five years to a rebellious Katy’s early cloth and typewriter books, which now cyclically connect to her present-day photocopy zines.]
Clearing away the cobwebs from this archive today—careful to avoid active bases—with an extended conversation I recorded with dear Bored Wolves author Katy Bentall: poet, artist, zine-maker and zine publisher, and within the community of our catalogue, the author of evergreen Greenwriting (BWolves, 2022/2023/3rd printing coming 2025); of two forthcoming publications: an artist’s book, For the Love of Seasticks, and Rockwork, a zine (the latter a co-edition with Katy’s Punnet Press); and of Promenade Pearls, a germinating sequel of sorts to Greenwriting and part of an eventual trilogy, which shifts from Polish village to East Anglian coastal community.
I suppose I could have reorganized that paragraph so it wasn’t such a Tatzelwurm sentence with, Noah’s ark style, two colons, two semi-colons, and a pair of em dashes to boot, but as all of our collaborations with Katy across the seasons and years are connected, both in terms of content and confabulatory process, anything less than chock-full wouldn’t have done the job.
I spent the past weekend embedded in Katy’s magical house in the countryside of eastern Poland, a few kites away from the Wisła River and tucked under an escarpment topped by orchards. Was a rejuvenating what-it’s-all-about immersion with Katy and my younger daughter, Hania, both often scissor-handed, cutting paper before the paper could cut them, working on projects involving all of that paper as well as tracing transparencies, needle and thread, cloth, string, tape, stickers, pencils, colored pencils, crayons, Quite a Lot of watercolor paint, and an unnerving quantity of glue. And rocks and parts of the house that had fallen off, too.
Our conversation (a laid-back 48 minutes and 35 seconds) was recorded while comfily ensconced in cater-cornered couches. If you’re listening on headphones, you’ll hear me sinking deeper into the cushions. We began at a level of granular detail in terms of Katy’s multi-material zine-making practice—back to the creation of my all-time favorite Bentall zine, the GOAT, Pear Man—with Katy setting off on multiple trips to photocopy shops in multiple countries. Whether in Poland or England, Katy is fiercely devoted to her go-to gods of Xerox.
We ended up ranging back decades to Katy’s early rebellions against the mind-slapping stringency of institutional schooling, the children at the mercy of teachers wielding bloodying red pencils. Katy countered with material moxie over the ensuing years with a cloth dissertation, tenaciously soft handmade bundle-books, typewriter poems incorporating purposeful “mistake”-making, and a red pencil of her own, set in motion, up to the Punnet Press present, with radical curiosity and tenderness.
