I go to my local probably about once a week if not more. I was brought up next to a library, in Bradford and in Newburn. They were places I could go to for some sense of freedom and adventure.
The librarians knew me and would recommend books to me and events. They wouldn’t rush me, I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.
Today, I love to pop in to see the book sales at my local libraries. As I have a few on my doorstep now. I flit between them, collecting worn and torn books that I repurpose.
I was brought up to know it was ‘wrong’ to write in books. They were sacred in our home. Probably because we were poor and if we bought books, usually from the indoor market in town, we knew it was money we couldn’t afford to spend on books. But my parents spent it anyway, as they valued books, learning and education. It was our way out of poverty.
I wonder what they would say now, if they saw what I did to books?
10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock. I have to feel the paper first though before I buy them. Even if only 10p, too shiny the page and the paint won’t grip it as well. The paint just swirls around and doesn’t stick.
I like my pages rough and matt finished. Ready to absorb whatever I put down on it.
This sketchbook was my side hustle for the last month. Side hustle to my main creative sketchbook. Here I just lay down colour and see what happens.
I like when what’s underneath the paint bleeds through. I like when the different layers of paint and pencil and pen bleeds through to the surface too.
It’s like a palimpsest. The marks beneath is the feeling I’m after. The haunting, the trace, the evidence of time and the passage of time. The archive is present now.
Yesterday marked 50 days of my creative sketchbook practice. 50 days of consistently turning up to the page to play and experiment.
What I’m learning is that I can trust myself to turn up for myself. I’m learning that my practice muscles can be strengthened. I’m learning that I love creating colour fields. It like what I create with visual journaling but different.
Here with these colour fields, there’s layers built up and then stripped back. Marked into. Scratched away to leave textures I like to see and feel. This practice is definitely expanding my palimpsest exploration and obsession.
I’m learning that I want this my creativity to be the main focus of my day and everything else is the add on, not the priority. Not the main meal. My creativity is my life source/force.
I’m practicing taking my creative sketchbook practice into my life. The attitudes, the risk-taking, the consistency, the trust in self and my art-making, these values and practices I’m carrying with me throughout my day, no matter who I come into contact with.
This creative sketchbook practice keeps me centred and focused on my feelings of joy and abundance. This practice keeps me present and checked in with myself, moment to moment.
On top of my visual journaling practice, this safe space of play and to {BE} me, is enough. Is more than enough to fill my day with bliss and connection. A practice that I’m finding opens up doors inside and outside of me, for me and others.
I started reading this book, hardback, a few years ago from the university library. It got recalled before I could finish it.
I was reading it after reading about how for decades the remains of two MOVE children had been kept at Penn Museum and later Princeton University illegally.
How they were using these children’s remains ( bones) in an online course for demonstration purposes as if they were nothing. Just fine specimens to illustrate a scientific point and not actually once being human and that their family was still alive and none the wiser. They thought they’d buried their children after they were bombs but piece of them were missing. And this wasn’t a mistake or oversight, the family had been lead to believe that all remains had been released to them to lay their children to rest.
I took an interest in this case along with the fascination of bone collecting/ salvaging/ pillaging to study and use as evidence of race hierarchies.
I even started a creative hybrid piece around it all as a means of trying to understand it as well as shed light in the continued extraction and exploitation of black bodies even beyond death.
the zine that documents the zines I want to create moving forward into 2026
I’ve just been over on my Patreon page sharing about the first zine of the year. Do you want to know what I shared about it?
Okay, I’ll tell yo here too!
A few years ago, I gave myself the challenge of creating a zine a month. Check back using the ‘zine’ tags and no doubt you’ll find them, still there ready to download and peruse.
This year, I vaguely set myself this challenge again, to create a zine a month and share it here. I think. As I’m still in the process of committing. But last night, at a Zinester Sanctuary that I’m creating witha fellow fugitive, I had the time to create my first zine of the year. See the video above.
I looked back at one of my zines from my first challenge, this was a zine about the zines I wanted to create. I looked back to see if this list of zines with illustrations were still zines I wanted to create.
After this reflection, I then set forth to create the zine that hopefully is the blueprint for 2026 creations.
In the video what you are seeing is the front cover stating that ‘Abolition is a Global Struggle’ with FREE PALESTINE but also the caveat that this has to be completed ‘with patience and care’.
The next page with a wheel of a VW Campervan and the text ‘ like a bird flying into’, is a nod towards my love of nature and how she will always appear in my zine creating, some way or another.
The next double spread with an image of two little girls standing on the beach, myself and my estranged sister and the text reads, ‘me in all my fucked up glory’. This signifies the task of creating perzines, using the format to explore my life stories.
On the green page with a roughly drawn book in black pencil refers to my desire to dive deep into my black studies, studying blackness as fugitivity, fugitive spaces. ‘You will find comfort in blackness’ the text reads to accompany this intention.
The next page is a quote from Octavia E Butler, from Parable of the Sower which states, ‘All that you touch you change, all that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.’ This was a small print I received from a printmaker friend called Theresa Easton.
The second double spread, because I hadn’t finished yet with my intentions (so who says you can’t add in another page?) is a recognition of my word of the year which is AFROSURREAL. I’ll be exploring what this means further throughout the year here and on my website.
This is partnered with a splash of purple/ mauve as the text reads, ‘ in mauve there is a quiet power.’ This is a reminder for myself to use my zines to share my poetry. My voice is my power. This was how I started making small zines, booklets before my first collection of poetry, Family Album was published. Because I was reading at all these gigs and people would come up afterwards and say where can I buy your work and I had no where to point them to. So I got creative and created these little zines , one dedicated to the poems I’d written about my daddy and one other dedicated to my mummy, and sold them for £1 each. I’d forgotten about them until I just wrote about them here now. Don’ you just love the creative process?
And then moving towards the end of this first zine of 2026, which apparently has been announced as the year of the zine – 2026, we’ll see what happens there as zines could become if not already commercialised and co-opted and become unrecognisable from their origins ( which I’ll be exploring and sharing further about here), there is a polaroid photo of myself smiling. This was taken last year at a Outdoor Citizen gathering, and these were taken to put on the wall with details about ourselves so we could be putting names to face,s be recognised within the crowds. This image is here with the title ‘fugitive sista’ as a reminder of who I {BE} but also who I {BE}coming through my continuing thoughts and praxis around fugitivity.
The final page with the outline of a goddess in black pencil and spiral within her gut/ womb and the text, ‘ Today I will praise. I will praise The Black Woman.’ Today ,tomorrow and always, I will praise the Black Woman. I support this praise with my continuing reading and practicing of Black Feminist thought and praxis. This is my foundation always.
The back cover ends with another sticker and this time it states, ‘ From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ Again reminding myself that I do this work, explore my creativity and share whatever comes up within a constantly changing context of struggles, struggles for liberation, peace, justice, self-determination and love.
2026, the year of the zines. Let’s make it the year of the zines that give voice to the struggles near and far , struggles for liberation, peace, justice, self-determination and love.
Living Wild Studios 