After a few false starts, reconsiderations and revaluations since the first issue, work has commenced on issue 2 of Managed Retreat. The image above is part of the prototyping phase for the cover. The pink shape is the outline of the Dengie peninsula after retreat to the 5-metre mark, this vision is core to the issue, which is also to be known as The Great Rewetting.
The determination to produce a new issue now has been provoked by a range of factors including, but not limited to, the ongoing climate crisis, recent flooding in the United Kingdom, persistent creative itching and Graham Burnett’s Southend-on-Zine project.
I’m beginning this time around with images, the production of which I have found slices through the procrastination surrounding textual commitment. On the Spiralseed Permaculture Design Course which has just finished, Sunniva from OrganicLea got participants to engage with the production of a zine answering the question ‘what does system change look like?’.
Every person created a single page and I got involved too. It was a reminder of the power of ‘activating the canvas’ – getting a mark, of any kind, down on the blank space immediately in order to defeat the creative block of infinite possibility. It mirrors something of the different characteristics of the writing phase and the editing phase, and the anti-perfectionist phrase ‘get it down, then get if good’. This is a simple but effective magick.
I’m not making any promises about a publication date but there’s some chat going on about a 2020 Eastern Permaculture Gathering in September and as I launched Issue 1 at the 2013 event, there might be a certain symmetry in launching Issue 2 there.
Dengie Bioregion 