Out now on Little Toller, Where?, by Simon Moreton, is a striking and unique memoir:
In 2017, Simon Moreton’s father fell suddenly ill and died. His death sent the author back to his childhood home in rural Shropshire trying to process his grief by revisiting his family’s time as transplants to the countryside. In a memoir that combines prose, illustration, photos, archival texts, and more, WHERE? weaves a gentle story that slips and slides in time and geography, creating connections across geographies, histories, families, times, and circumstance all to answer the question – ‘where are you from?’
I recently caught up with Simon to chat about Where?, his inspiration and background.
“My name is Simon and I’m a writer and an artist, I guess. My work these days is about the landscapes we live in, history, identity, and how those things mingle in our everyday lives. I’ve been making zines – homemade, self-published booklets of writing and drawing – since about 2007. I was doing my PhD at that point (in Human Geography, looking at arts organisations in London) and I started making zines because I was scared of living a life that didn’t involve doing something creative (when I was a teenager, I’d wanted it to be a musician but luckily for everyone within earshot that didn’t happen). I’d heard of zines – I like underground music and I knew DIY art communities existed and so on – but I didn’t know that’s what I was making. I just thought I was making little booklets of art to try and sell, or to give to friends. Then I made the connection and found this whole other world of people self-publishing. I’ve been in that world ever since.”
Zines
I came across a zine (Minor Leagues #1 zine) by Simon a few years ago, although I didn’t appreciate at the time how prolific his output was.
“I’ve made about fifty publications to date. Some of those were books published by other people – like WHERE? (Little Toller) or Plans We Made (Uncivilized Books), which is a nearly wordless graphic novel about being a suburban teenager – but most things I make and release myself. My first series was called, SMOO, which ran between 2007 and 2015. That contained comics about my life. After that, I started Minor Leagues, which is my current regular series – one or two issues a year of writing, drawing, photos, whatever – that is also broadly autobiographical but very much seeking to connect our stories and places to the weird connections and resonances of the past. Alongside that, I’ve made various other little zines. Most recently, I’ve made zines about Alfred Watkins and the English landscape (Lie of the Land, published by an American publishing collective as part of their ‘Ley Lines’ series) and What is Britain?, a critique of English nationalism. Those zines contain old photos, found text, and my own drawings, collaged together.”
Zines play an important role in Moreton’s creative outputs, which begs the question “why this format?”
“Firstly, that zines aren’t about scarcity. Sure, they tend to have small print-runs – because your reach can only go far – but I can always print more if I want Something funny happens when you make a ‘piece of art’ and decide to reproduce it loads of time it in a print-run of a zine instead of keeping it ‘unique’ on a gallery wall. Secondly, their immediacy; I can put something together on my computer or on paper, I can print it on my printer or on a photocopier, and I can fold it in half and staple it, then I can send that to someone else, and suddenly I’ve published a book.”
Zines are often strongly linked to self-publication, something Simon is more than familiar with. It comes with a number of advantages, including a closer relationship to the reader.
“I come from a DIY/punk sort of mindset, the version of punk that’s about self-expression, not necessarily the kind that’s about a specific style or genre. Taking control of the means of production to make things without waiting for permission or validation, and contributing to a like-minded community through doing that. The really good parts of the zine community are not about exclusion – high art, high price – but about inclusion, at least in intent. At their best, the networks that are forged and are continually evolving to support and distribute them – zine fairs, distributors (distros, as they’re called), shops, zine exchanges, zines about zines. The most wonderful thing about that is that you can develop a very direct relationship with your readers. I count many of my regular readers as friends, because they become pen pals and real-life pals over the years. Many of them make zines, too, and I am a reader and their fan, as well. I’ve got friends all over the world because I made a little pamphlet once. How great is that?”
He touches on some of his own favourites, most of which are new names to me.
“My tastes change over time, as does anyone. I think I just like stuff that is idiosyncratic or weird or honest. I like words and pictures, I like a bit of humour but not necessarily ‘funny’ zines. Mostly, though, I just really like people writing or drawing about their lives. Perennial faves for me include: King Cat by John Porcellino, You Don’t Get There From Here by Carrie McNinch, Black Tea by Jason Martin, Basic Paper Airplane by Joshua James Amberson – but I’m forgetting more than I can remember. I have boxes and boxes of zines I’ve collected over the years.”
Before interviewing Simon, I ordered a copy of his Minor Leagues issue 11. There was quite a contrast to the first issue with this later work containing a more varied mix of prose, drawings and photography – much more like Where? I ask him if he has seen his work develop in a particular direction over the years…but that’s not the case at all.
“I’m rather restless, artistically, especially so in recent years. I’m not interested in doing the same thing again and again. I have themes that I’m drawn to, and maybe I’ll explore them forever, but I’m always interested in coming at them from a different position wherever possible. When I started Minor Leagues, my aim was to write more prose, experiment with different kinds of visual material, and beyond that, to have no rules about format, contents or whatever because SMOO was very comics heavy and I ended up feeling tied to a particular look and feel for that zine.
“I started work on WHERE? knowing it’d again be a bit different to what I had done before. I wanted to write richer and longer prose, rather than these short vignettes I’d been experimenting with, and I wanted to be more expansive with the topics I wrote about. And I wanted to approach the visual elements in a new way, too.”
Where?
Having parked up zines, we turn to his latest book Where? which has been published by Little Toller.
“WHERE? is a book which tells the story of my dad’s sudden death from cancer in 2017 and its aftermath, the story of growing up in rural Shropshire in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and my return to that countryside while I was writing the book 2017-2019. It’s a big book – about 370 pages – and is roughly half prose, and half pictures – drawings, comics, photos, that sort of thing. It is a memoir, but it also connects very deeply to the folklore and history of that bit of Shropshire – specifically Titterstone Clee Hill – and connects lots of past events to my experiences. I originally serialised WHERE? in four issues of Minor Leagues, each of which was about 100 pages long. I printed them all at home, and hand trimmed, stapled, and assembled them, and sent them into the world.”
EXTRACT: Preface
When my Dad turned sixty, I promised him a painting.
One reason I made this promise was because the summer after finishing university I had moved home and agreed to keep my unemployed self useful by painting my parents a painting for their newly decorated sitting room. I was not – and am not – a gifted painter, and the painting in question is categorically Not A Good Painting. Nonetheless, it has hung – been hanged – on one wall or another wherever my parents have lived for the past fifteen years. I find it somewhat mortifying, but Dad had said he’d only take it down if I made him something with which to replace it. So the first reason for offering a new painting was a selfish one.
The second reason was because the painting I wanted to replace, and the painting I wanted to replace it with, were supposed to depict somewhere that was very important to our family and I thought Dad – having at the point of his sixtieth birthday recently retired – might like to have a more thoughtful memento of that place than the odd dull grey beige thing that I had previously given him. So the second reason was probably (a little bit) less selfish.
The painting was going to be of Titterstone Clee Hill in Shropshire, where Dad had worked as an engineer on a radar station. Shropshire, most maps will tell you, sits in the West Midlands, on the border between England and Wales. Cheshire lies to the north, Staffordshire to the east, and Herefordshire and Worcestershire to the south. Wales is due west.
We lived in the borderlands, halfway between the larger towns of Shrewsbury to the north and Leominster to the south, in a little village called Caynham. It was all very picturesque, and a time our family remembers fondly.
In 2017, Dad got ill and died. Cancer and premature death are a fucker for playing with the things you once imagined static or stable, so it’s no surprise that during the period of his illness thoughts about growing up, of how our family came to be, and where we were from, bubbled up as we sought in trauma and in grief to find common narratives to our diverging life-courses, things that would keep us connected with him, and each other.
With all this in mind, the idea of a painting started to feel insufficient, and wanting to know more about where I had grown up and whether knowing more would make any difference to me, the painting became this book.
So: this book is (mostly) about that one specific place that my Dad worked, and that one specific place that my family lived; it is being written in lieu of that painting, like one big apology for ever having started this whole ‘painting’ business in the first place. I hope this settles the debt, though I no longer know what that debt is, or to whom it is owed.
One of the things that drew me to Where? was the variety of mediums Simon uses to tell a story. I was intrigued as to how that worked in practice and what factors determine whether a story is told in prose or a series of line drawings.
“A lot of that was intuitive. I was already thinking about our time in that part of the world, so it was just a case of capturing that however it came out – sometimes with words and sometimes in pictures. There was plenty of trial and error, of course.”
Despite shifting from prose to image to prose etc. the book is very cohesive in its storytelling. I expected him to tell me he’d sketched out an idea to maintain such focus but that would be far too obvious…
“On the one hand I had an overarching sense of what I wanted the book to do, with a mix of words handing over to images and back. I knew how from the beginning how I was going to resolve the book, so had the broad arc plotted. Then again, because I was writing it instalments, I was very aware at the beginning that I didn’t know how I was going to progress down that path. So I just made it up as I went along, and by the third instalment I knew almost exactly what I was doing. Doing the research around the autobiographical fragments and anecdotes helped give it all structure, though; I’d find a fact in an old newspaper, or someone writing about geology or folklore or whatever, and it’d ring these bells and then I’d have this material to stitch in to all the other stuff.”
Moreton’s drawings are quite unique in their style, and he reveals that his approach is more intuitive…maybe even spontaneous.
“My primary aim was to draw quickly and capture a kind of ‘first-take’ energy, without being precious about how figurative the artwork was – or wasn’t! I would just scribble things down in pencil, and take it from there. Some of those scraps of drawings went into the book pretty much as they were, some I refined a bit by redrawing until they felt right. I also used a lot of black poster paint – that stuff we used to have in school. I did all the art on different bits of cheap A4 printer paper, linework on one, black paint on another, then scanned them in, and collaged the different elements digitally – like putting the linework on top of the black paint patches and adding elements of photos or whatever. But it was all very rudimentary – I was trying not to get tied up doing something I would never finish because it was too precise! Besides, memory is sketchy and blotchy, and imprecise, so I felt that this approach worked for that.”
With Simon’s background in geography, I naturally turn to landscape…and memory.
“I think on the one hand I’ve been interested in places and landscapes for a very long time, from when I was little and playing in the countryside, which the book deals with, and then through to what I was learning studying geography at university; a great deal of geography is about our relationships with places, about identities and histories, and politics. I’ve also been interested in folklore, folk music, and the role older ideas have on our contemporary lives, for ages, too. But when I started making zines, I was more interested in memory and understanding myself – the anxiety of my twenties, I guess, or maybe because I was trying to escape my ‘academic life’ at that point – so it wasn’t really until I started on WHERE? that I really drew those two overlapping interests explicitly together.
“One thing I have realised recently is that specific landscapes have a very real effect on my emotions. For instance, I lived in Penryn when I was about 21 for a year and I was anxious and depressed the entire time. One of the hardest years of my life. I’ve been back to Falmouth a couple of times, and each time, I feel the same as I did when I was 21. The sights and sounds and smells and streets and everything of places can really affect my mood, like when you wake up from a bad dream and your day is ruined, or a good dream and your day starts of grand. I get this in different neighbourhoods in town, where I can suddenly feel as I did when I lived in them. I’m sure loads of people get this – I’m nothing special – but it does have a bearing on my work.”
I’m curious whether focussing on one geographical place has limitations on output, i.e. can you exhaust ideas? Of course, it’s never that simple, and Simon touches on several factors that suggest the opposite.
“I think that places are infinitely inexhaustible when it comes to finding stories and connections. Just as we are always changing, so too are the places that we are part of, and the relationships inherent in those connections. Often, we’re not really plumbing the depths of a place but ourselves, compelling ourselves to be relational – part of a whole – not individual, atomised. Of course, whether all places are accessible, physically, culturally, emotionally, for people to explore them is a slightly different question; we know that we live in an uneven society and that some of us pass through the landscape (literally and metaphorically) much easier than others by consequence of a variety of privileges.”
While I have experienced grief, Simon’s book did make me think more of how despite grief being a common experience, it’s also a very individual one, a great reminder that we all experience grief uniquely.
“The print run for the instalments was very modest, but my friends who are long-time readers and I have chatted over email or whatever about the book, and I think it has resonated with them. Grief is weird; it’s both utterly unique and totally universal, and I tried to speak to that contradiction in the book, and I think people responded to that.”
There was also some interesting revelations from readers…
“Then there were loads of coincidences that came out. For example, one person who I met through Twitter talking about something different turned out to have grown up in the area and had their own intense family stories about Titterstone that overlapped temporally with our time there – members of our families’ paths may well have crossed; I gave a copy to the landlady of our local the other day, too, after she told me quite by chance that she said her first words on Titterstone Clee. I feel culturally Shropshire can get overlooked, so it’s nice to find other people for whom the hill has a resonance. Clee Club!”
EXTRACT: From Chapter 4: Where We Lived
It was living here that I fell in love with the natural world. Everything was connected, wild, confusing, terrifying and comforting. I didn’t think of what people did as being separate from what the birds and the beasts did. Homes popped out of the ground like shrubs. People planted fences in the same way that the maroon docks seeded themselves in piles of builders’ waste. The earth birthed blue and white crockery pieces, while berries grew on barbed wire, and television aerials throbbed with incoming cartoon energy. I came to know – without even realising it – the smell of thousands of years of stratifying, rolling, earth, of sheep wool and cow shit and clay soil and rotting leaves, and the bright voltage of water.
I watched the purple plummish damsons ripen in the hedge opposite our house, plump like wrens. They hung by a gap in the foliage that dropped to a wonky plank of wood, pitched over a squelch of a ditch. I’d walk to the village school over that improvised bridge, up the small bank on the other side, over the fence and into the school field.
I read fantasy paperbacks containing things I understood and things
I didn’t, but which I loved unconditionally – swords and landscapes all of that, and the cover art – oh my the covers!
I learned about the vegetable patch with its potatoes, clay pipes and slug traps full of home-brewed beer; about the mysteries of the garage, with its tea chests and garden toys, Dad’s white cupboard with boxes of capacitors and screws; about the green oil tank behind the little bit of fence, with the plunge button you’d press to see how much oil was available; and about how the hornbeam Dad planted grew, and why he’d have his photo taken next to it every year.
I danced around to ‘Smooth Criminal’ in my bedroom, but didn’t understand that Michael Jackson had multi-tracked his voice on his recordings (it took me years – and I mean years – to work that out). I just thought all of his backing singers sounded exactly like him.
I learned to swim but wouldn’t put my head under the water. I learned what a horse sounded like when it farted, and how not to be scared of cows.
Before I moved to the village school, I was a quiet child; while other children – alluring, unpredictable, and unknowable – paired off like swans, roamed in packs, floated around like seeds on the wind, or fought like dust storms, I worked through various fixations; with birds and trees, with Michael Jackson, the animal kingdom, dinosaurs, astronomy, orcs, goblins, wizards and hobbits. I was bemused by my classmates at school in Ludlow who accused me of reading the encyclopaedia for fun as if that was a bad thing. Of course I did. Who wouldn’t?
I stuck my face in books about magic and about animals and animal tracks and I didn’t know about sport as practice, nor sport as a culture; I tended to catch balls designed for my hands with my face, and balls designed for my feet with my hands. I remember how heavy the football was when I tried to kick it in my oversized studded boots during PE lessons in the muddy field. I was small for my age and my ankles were pampas.
I didn’t know the language of bodies and clothes and names and numbers and stadium locations. I was more interested in the walnuts from the tree, marvelling at the black stains of their desiccating skins, monitoring them as they dried on the rack propped up by bricks at the side of the house, or watching them pickle in jars at the back of the cupboard, like little woody cortexes bobbing around in ink.
I did not know ‘teams’ and when I started at the village school, all the boys liked Liverpool FC.
‘Who do you support?’ they asked on my first day. I didn’t even understand the question, so there wasn’t any time to make up a lie. I had never grown up thinking that not knowing about football or rugby or racing or horses or cricket was a bad thing. Thankfully, neither did these boys. They weren’t like the other boys I had met by that point in my life; they just shrugged and tried to teach me to play football.
I sometimes think it would be nice to go back and feel like that again, and sometimes I am glad I never can.
While I’m a big fan of Little Toller, the independent publisher of Where? I’m curious as to what led Simon to their door or why he decided to go down a publishing route in the first place.
“I love zines and I hope self-publishing in some form or the other will always sit at the heart of what I do. But I felt that WHERE? might be the sort of thing that more people than I could reach on my own might like. So I knew I needed a publisher, and I knew I wanted to find a home with a literary publisher, as opposed to a comics publisher, because I knew the subject matter – landscape, memory, nature, death – resonated with a particular prose audience, but not one I was connected to.
“I came to Little Toller via author Max Porter. We’d met once by chance and stayed in contact online, and I sent him a copy of the homemade book version. Now, he is an incredibly generous and supportive fellow – I’m definitely not the only person he’s helped. He introduced me to Little Toller, and at that point for my sins I didn’t know about them as I’m relatively new to this area of the literary world, but as soon as I spoke to them, it was clear they were a great fit. Small, but with a big reach, audience focussed, interested in the same things I was, and just super nice people.”
Even for Little Toller, this book is different to many of their other publications, but a lot of thought has clearly gone into its production…it even has a nice smell, something to do with the printing process used.
“As I had already made versions of the book, the contents were pretty much already sorted. LT asked me to design the covers, which I did in consultation with them and which was a lot of fun. We had a couple of chats about paper stock, but mostly I trusted LT as I knew they understood me and the book. I tried hard not to be a micro-manager, because God knows they didn’t need one, but I’m so used to having to do every element of publishing that when someone else was doing it, it was very weird to let go! They were very accommodating of all my changes and my, shall we say, orientation to detail. Poor Graham who does their layouts had to endlessly put up with me making tiny changes, mostly about where a sentence finishes on a page so it could hand over to a section of images or something. But like I say, I did trust them, and they made something amazing. The smell comes from the book being printed by a lithographic, or offset, process. That involves wet ink on a roller that is then transferred on to the paper. Digital printing by contrast is basically powder fixed to the paper. Wet ink processes give a good solid covering and that rich smell, because the page is covered in nice pigment. I was over the moon when they told me they were going to litho print it. It was a nice surprise in what was a really great design process. And obviously now the book is out, I’m continuing to work with them, and they continue to be great.”
Final thoughts…
“Being so close to the material means you can’t really be objective about it, so it’s hard to know how to feel about the book being in the world. I’m proud that I’ve done it, and as with the zines, the biggest joy is hearing other people talking about it, and enjoying it. I’m grateful that it exists, and humbled to see other people recognising in the book the things I hoped they would see. That’s very rewarding. Plus my mum likes it, and that’s good. I wonder what I’ll do next? Make another zine I suppose!”
Where? is published via Little Toller and is available to purchase now via https://www.littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/little-toller/where-by-simon-moreton/
You can also purchase Simon Moreton’s Zines via https://smoo.bigcartel.com/
More: https://linktr.ee/simon.moreton