At the end of 2024, I devised a short, time-bound, writing project to finish the year in a nourishing and reflective way. Starting on December 1st, I called it my Writing Advent (the link will open a separate tap on my Substack for more detail on the project). The idea was simple: select a new text I wanted to explore, read a short chapter per day, write 100 words (or thereabouts) in response. I selected the book Bodies of Sound edited by Irene Revell & Sarah Shin (Silver Press, 2024) an edited collection of short essays and vignettes exploring sound through the lens of gender and identity. I selected the book, and devised the writing project method, as a type of learning protocol that would enable me to explore new research relevant to my professional practice, while also consolidating my learning through reflective or exploratory writing. Writing being my primary creative outlet. With a professional background in teaching and learning theory and pedagogy, I am always interested in exploring new ways of bodying knowledge and consolidating it into wisdom. The project was always, only, for myself.
But as the project progressed through the days of December I noticed a certain patterning develop in my written reflections, and the concision of 100 words a day invited a degree of poetic surrealism. I wasn’t only learning, I was generating. My intuitive fragmentary responses were memoried and strange - always in conversation with the source text (or the ideas held within it) but sufficiently different that the project grew a sense of its own shape and form distinct from the source material. I opted to continue the project until the end of December when the book was finished. I then spend some time with the resulting text, giving it a new name to reflect it’s theme, and decided to turn it into my second creative zine. As with my first, this zine represents ‘a project between’ longer book projects, exploring new terrain that might in time grow into something larger or be incorporated elsewhere.
An Innate Waveform is the resulting 28-page booklet/pamphlet exploring inner and outer soundscapes in memoir-ish, but often speculative, fragments. It contains my prose project in 30 vignettes, an introductory essay to the project, photo pages and an invitation to ‘sound the transformation’ through a contemplative movement practice.
The zine/pamphlet will be available to buy in a limited edition of 100 copies from February 2025.
