the road zine
Mark caught up with Lewis, Elise and Harry from the Road Zine, to chat about who they are and what they do.
Lewis: Hello. I’m Lewis. I’m part of The Road zine, along with Elise and Harry. We use creative writing, poetry and artwork, all focused around building a community to try to open up conversations around mental health. The Road started about a year ago, with Elise and myself just sharing some poetry that we had written with each other, just opening up this space to talk and be vulnerable. It all began when Elise sent me a poem that had a particular metaphor around mental health. Then I sent a poem back that also used the same metaphor, and we thought, "That's really interesting that we both considered this similar image when talking about our own mental health journeys." I found that it was a really affirming moment to feel that I'm not alone on this road and through mental health. So we decided, "Hey, why not think about this a little bit more?" We came up with a theme, an idea, and started writing. Harry joined our team as our designer and we did a call out for artists, particularly young emerging artists to submit their work. And then we curated it all together into a zine. We've created two issues over the past year. Going forward, we want to continue building up this scene and building up this community of artists and writers, and then start to develop some workshops in the community to try and open up spaces for conversation and community building around mental health.
Elise: We all met at Goldsmiths University. Harry and Lewis were in the same flat in first year and I was a few blocks down. I met them both through Lewis, who was on the same course as some of my friends. Lewis did a drag show every week at Goldsmiths and I would go to that. We were always friends, all of us. We'd go on nights out and do other things, but it wasn't until we properly started this and had conversations about starting The Road that we got very close and the dynamic of our friendship evolved. The vulnerability of it and sharing these things between each other definitely brought us all together.
Harry: We were at the park when Lewis told me about it, actually his ideas for The Road, because it was during lockdown, that's the only place we could go to. I was really inspired by what they were trying to do and I offered to help with the design and offering tips. Then they asked me to come on board and obviously I was thrilled.
Mark: All of your arrows, all of time's arrows led you to the same place, in London to do something very different in the same way. Could each of you tell me why you chose Goldsmiths and why you chose the course that you studied there.
Lewis: I studied a course called Performance Politics in Society, which is essentially a community arts degree and looks at socially engaged art practice and participatory arts. Theater and performance was always the path for me throughout my childhood, particularly my teenage years where things were particularly difficult. It always felt like a space where I could step away from whatever was going on for me, explore something different, and then return having learned more or even just given my brain space to decompress for a moment. When I was younger, I always thought maybe I wanted to be an actor. But it grew into wanting other people to have a similar experience, wanting other people to be able to use some form of artistic practice, to connect with themselves, to give themselves some space, to think differently for a moment, to be around other people and have those conversations. So that's when I knew I wanted to go and study community arts or some form of community-based arts at university. I went to a workshop at Goldsmiths, run by the theater department and it was a couple of months after I had come out of a long stay in hospital. And it was the first time I had gone out and done something by myself since I was admitted.
I traveled all the way up to London, had this amazing workshop, and I suddenly felt this real sense of comfort and freedom, which then stuck with me. And then when I came back for an open day a year later, I was with my mum and I just walked in through the doors and was like, "I have to be here." I was being pushed by school to look at Russell Group universities or going and studying a more academic subject. They were really trying to pressure me into doing something more worthwhile in their eyes. But then I went to Goldsmith and I just thought, "Actually, no. This is where I want to be. This is the course I want to be doing." And I'm so glad I did. I think I would have crashed and burned doing anything else. Whereas at Goldsmiths, doing the course I did around the people I met was so enriching.
I'm the first person in my family to have gone to university. My dad and dad's side of the family didn't quite understand it. And they just thought, "Why go and waste all that money?” But my mum has always been very open and just said, "You do what you want to do." She made a big point of never telling me what to do. So when I came back after the open day, I said, "I want to be at Goldsmiths." She was then like, "Good." She said how she saw as soon as I walked in that that was where I felt comfortable.
Elise: I used to be a drama kid as well. Back in A-level I did performance studies and drama and theater studies. There was a long time where I thought that's what I wanted to do. I had some unfortunate experiences in my time doing it at sixth form. It sadly just completely ruined it for me to the point where I didn't want to do the actual performance part of it anymore. I did my A levels, I got through it and I knew I was going to take a gap year. To be honest, I never thought I would go to university. That was not really something that was on my radar. I also studied sociology at sixth form, which I loved. But during my gap year I began to search around for a course, and then as I was doing more research into that, the course for Goldsmiths came up, which was Media Communications and Cultural Studies. I'll be honest, a lot of myself struggled with the idea of going to do a media degree. A lot of people were like, “What is the point in studying media?” But from my experience, there was so much point studying it because there was so much to it. When I went to the open day at Goldsmiths,, me and mum were walking around and I was like, "Wow, this place is really cool."We were sitting in a cafe waiting for a talk to start and I got an email from UCAS saying, "Your application has been updated.." and I had got a place, because I already had my A level grades. I was like, "Okay, cool. Guess I'm going here then."
One of the things that drew me to my Goldsmiths course is that it is 50% theory, 50% practical. One of the practicals you could do was screen fiction. In my first year, I was doing the film module and we had to make a documentary and we made it on Lewis, which was something that brought us together. I didn’t know Lewis well at that point, but my friend Layla did and she had the idea to do a documentary on Lewis as a drag queen. I loved doing that documentary and doing the film stuff, but I also did creative writing, which I loved more. I realised that this is what I enjoy doing, the actual writing is where I felt like I had come into my own. So in second and third year, that's what I specialized in. Gradually, I started to take my own poetry a little more seriously through my confidence in writing growing. I think there's definitely been things I've written that have been very disconnected from myself, but I think for the majority of the time, most of my writing, especially the poetry, is probably to process my own thoughts and feelings. It's a spilling out of words, of how I feel, I just release it all and get it out on paper and then I have to deal with it and feel those feelings. At first I found this difficult, because a lot of the time I write a story that's based on something in my life and at the end I can't remember what's real and what I wrote in the script. There was a script I did for my final project at university. It was based on the weirdest date I ever went on. I had to tone down the details for the script to make it more concise. And when I try and explain what actually happened, I know that there was so much more that happened in real life, but I read that script over and over again, so that's all I think of.
Lewis: In sixth form my passions were maths and fine art, which in the school setting sit at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Similarly to Lewis, I was conflicted over whether I go with something, as the school described, academic or artsy. So I looked at so many universities. I actually had a board in my room where I drew out England and plotted out all the universities that I looked at on it. There were strings connecting them and everything. It was like I was trying to solve a murder case. I had to visualize. If I'm going somewhere really far up north, I'm going to be really far from home. That's part of who I am, a designer. I needed to visualize where I was going.
I went to an open day at Goldsmiths to the design course, BA design. And that's what it is, design. It's so broad. It's multidisciplinary. You can do whatever practice you want. I actually went on the open day twice to understand what the course was, but that's when I decided. I was like, "This is the one for me," because there's people coding, there are people drawing, there's people doing textiles”.
It felt like a huge relief to have made that decision. The whole course is deciding what your practice is and who you are. I liked the fact that I still have those years to decide, I wasn't just going into a strictly graphic design course where I was like, "Now I am going to be a graphic designer." I'd gone into this course to find my practice. Now I’ve come out still a multidisciplinary designer, still doing a bunch of different things. As much as Lewis and Elise are amazing with words, I'm not, design is my form of expression. It's my pastime. I draw, I create. Making things is my thing. So being able to take all the brilliant poems and artwork and use them to make an amazing zine is just great
Mark: Tell me about the vision. What you're going to do and where you’re going to go with this?
Elise: We started in lockdown. We've done more meetings over Zoom than we have anything else. For a lot of people that could sound like a massive disadvantage, but even through us meeting on Zoom, you could see straight away we knew how we were going to work together and which would be good roles for us. I'm a creative editor, so I get the artists involved and liaise with them. I pretty much run the social media too. Lewis does the production editing and does all the stuff with money. I don't know how that side works. Harry does all the design for everything. As soon as we came together as a group, we could see immediately how our art and visions definitely aligned with each other. Each time we’ve created the next edition, we're so proud of it and it's one of those things where it feels exciting, like we keep on going from strength to strength and we want to keep sharing that with more people.
Often people comment that working with your friends can be hard, which it can, but also the support we have for each other is a priority and really strong. We respect how each of us work and how we are as friends too.
Lewis: I think having clear roles and coming at them from all these different backgrounds; Harry with a strong design eye, Elise thinking about media and creative writing and me using performance, talking with people and doing community-based stuff, is enabling us to start developing a really clear ethos and identity about using art and poetry and creativity as a more broader sense for building community. This past year, we have really learned how to be on this road together and have our artists join us on this road too. And now the next stage for us is thinking about how we can get more people onto this road, whether that is for the publications or whether that's with our workshops.
What I've really enjoyed is the fact that even when we haven’t had a meeting or spoken to each other for a while, we could still message in the group chat and be like, "So I've been thinking about this. What do we think?" We're all on the same page and I think that comes from the fact that throughout this year we've developed this really clear vision and this clear ethos of working that is supportive and respectful and positive for the future, but also allows us to be vulnerable with one another.
Mark: What do your families think of what you've done?
Harry: My family love it. I always post them one by surprise. When it arrives they're like, "Harry, what's this?" I'm like, "Oh, I made something. We made this together. These are artists and this is poetry." They love reading it. They've currently got both copies at home, waiting for the third one.
Elise: I remember my brother received it and sent me photos of the first edition up on his wall. My family are all so supportive. I recently had a great conversation with my grandma, she was asking to read more of my writing. Now that my cousins, my brother and myself have grown up, she wants to understand actually how our brains work and she knows that that is reflected in my writing. So I'd like to get her a copy of issue three, especially, is going to be a big priority for me.
Lewis: Well, the first edition I gave as gifts to pretty much most of my family members as a little part of their Christmas gift. And that was a really lovely moment of sharing because I always kept my poetry really private and it wasn't until doing The Road that I started to share it. So it was a really big moment for me. And it was a really interesting experience over this past year talking about it because my mum, my dad, or my grandparents, or my brother would read it and would talk to me. There were some really difficult, but heartwarming conversations that happened because of it. No parent likes to think of their child having gone through a difficult time and tapping into that through poetry and exploring those difficult feelings through words, allowed them to hear something that I didn't know how to tell them directly. So there've been some really quite emotional conversations, but at the end of those, some really affirming conversations. I remember my mum being like, "I didn't understand when you would say that you weren't feeling great or that this was going on and it was bringing you down. I didn't really understand what that felt like for you, but now I feel like I have a better understanding of it from this thing you wrote." So it's been a really enriching experience.
Elise: I had a similar experience to that. Both of my parents have had mental health issues. It was never to a point where it massively affected my childhood, but as I got older, I realized that they struggled with it. And then it was one of those things where, as I struggled with it, having me express my mental health through these poems and having my family read it, it was quite a bonding thing. I think if my mum just suddenly asked about things out of blue, it would have been quite jarring, but because it was in the context of things I know she had read and things that, again, it was a proper bonding thing of being like, "Okay, we kind of understand how it is and how it's been” and "Okay, cool. We've both been through this and I'm sorry you've been through it, but we're together in it," which is what we wanted the zine to be.
It’s all about awareness and people realising they aren’t alone in what they’re going through, and there are people who understand.
The Road Zine