Editorial - Markings - in the Beginning

(Editorial for Markings 10th anniversary issue by John Hudson)

Fantasies and imaginings are often traitors. They exist so far removed from reality that when tested against the world they easily crack and snap and leave a bitter disillusionment inside. That could have so easily been the case with Markings.

Who, among the literary community, wouldn’t like to see themselves as an editor? Who wouldn’t want to challenge preconceived ideas, play the idealist, knock the establishment, tell the truth?

Just over ten years ago, Anne Darling and I were in the kitchen of Jeff White. Over coffee we all expressed our desire to get something in print that might stir the world a little, kick some intellectual butt (assuming that many know-it-alls think through their asses) and raise some idealist dust. Jeff already put together an argumentative, satirical broadsheet called “Forsooth” and its biting, often anarchic satire, was our first brush with reality. We all agreed we needed something more balanced than “Forsooth” to get a broad readership in conservative, southwest Scotland. We also agreed we needed some help.

I spoke with Donald Adamson, a friend and fellow poet whose acuity of mind and attention to detail I admired. Donald was enthusiastic and also suggested we meet Elspeth Brown, writer and joint editor of the anthology, “With Both Feet Off The Ground” recently published by Dumfries and Galloway Library Service.

Anne, Donald and I met with Elspeth and we got on from the start. The new literary magazine was getting underway, taking on a life of its own. This was the second hard lesson from reality. A magazine cannot belong to one person alone and it will have a dynamic and an energy all its own. We might bring it about but it will take its own course. But what was it to be called? What do we put in it? And, most importantly, how do we pay for it?

A couple of days latter Anne and I were having a drink in the Laurie Arms at the Haugh of Urr with then Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association Writer in Residence, Harvey Holton. Harvey had been running workshops and, when I told him of our publishing ambitions a voice chimed in from another table by the log fire in the pub. Tony Bonning had come along to the Laurie Arms because he had struck up a friendship with Harvey as a result of attending one of Harvey’s workshops.

“I’ll get you the money to publish the magazine”, said Tony. Harvey winked at me, tipping his head in the direction of Tony. “Tell me how much you need, and I’ll get it.”

Tony turned out to be a good poet as well as a good salesman. A further lesson had been learned. We had to carry advertising – and not all of it pushing high art. Second-hand furniture, tea-rooms, bike hire... many of our advertisers have remained loyal to us until this day.

Okay, so we had the money but the content and the name remained elusive. To be honest, I can’t remember how many titles we came up with. We didn’t have brain storming sessions, more brain beating, till we all hurt. Then, I remember, Donald paused and crooked his finger, mid-air, as if dragging something down into the real world from an imaginary ether. “Markings”, he said. It seemed to capture something. An effort to make your mark, a nod in the direction of the past referring to the cup and ring marks that litter the countryside of our region, Dumfries and Galloway, and which represent the earliest human efforts at recorded abstract communication in Scotland. It seemed to capture the striving after meaning and, at a more banal level reminded me of the endless road resurfacing that seems to take place in Galloway every Spring and Summer when the highways are at their busiest, “No Markings for the next 5 miles”. On the contrary, we thought, Markings were going to be found everywhere!

Now to content. Well, there were the editors. We had become half a rugby team. Then there was Harvey Holton. We agreed to contact our literary friends and Tony produced a book of drawings made from cup and ring markings which I could scan in and insert into issue one to provide visual variety – and the front cover. Rapidly we gathered material. We were frightened to realise how many people we knew, we were pleased to realise that they wished to be in print and that we were providing a service that pleased them. Soon, the next real-world lesson was learned: demand for space outstrips supply – editors have to learn to say “no” and risk becoming unpopular. Previously we had all seen ourselves as knights in shining armour to the literary community.

However, all was going well. I set about putting all the material on my PC and doing the layout in a reasonably cheap DTP package. In 1995 computers were not what they are today. I had a 486 SX 25 Mhz, pretty much state-of-the art when I bought it two years before with its 4 megabytes of expensive RAM. Not long before starting Markings I had added a coprocessor that changed the initials SX into DX. It meant it could do maths faster, though this shouldn’t have affected the DTP side much (in fact it did make quite a difference).

I soon realised that 64 pages of a magazine, built in a DTP package that was designed to produce newsletters at best, brought my marvel machine to its knees in a clattering of clicks and whirrs. As the magazine neared completion saving the damned thing took minutes then tens of minutes. Printing the monster on a black ink only HP deskjet with iffy drivers took half a night. A labour of love was becoming and object of hate.

I learnt a lot about working, the universe, and appropriate behaviour from those days. I learnt to take myself seriously. I realised that the time I spent on jobs was valuable and that squandering one’s personal resources was folly. I have seen, since then, so many people working on projects of their own design, driven to bitter resentment because they feel that they are giving too much, that the world is taking them for a ride. I got into that state as the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months. I never seemed to be away from the bloody computer and always working to publish other people’s work or reacting to my co-editors’ observations, wishes and criticisms. It was trying and I leant my lesson.

On the day before printing the inaugural issue of the magazine in high quality to be sent to the publisher as camera ready copy, I made a final check and closed down the computer at one a.m.. I was wrecked. Sick of the bloody thing. I gave a last thought to my PC as I left my office to climb the stairs for bed – it went something like this, “If you don’t bloody start in the morning...”

It didn’t. It didn’t start. I switched on. Nothing. I tried several times. I left my office, made a cup of coffee, went back in, switched on. Nothing. I knew enough about computers to know that so dead could mean really dead. Power supply? No. There was a brief dazzle. I begged any force that may be on my side that it wasn’t a hard drive failure. All my back ups were on floppy. This was a big file. I had made a backup across several floppys but if the PC was kaput what did that matter and anyway the backup was several days old. The time it took to make such backups was even more arduous than printing the thing.

I prodded and poked. Took out memory. Checked connections. Nothing. Finally I took out the hard drive. Maybe, just maybe I could find someone else with a PC, check the hard drive and if it was okay work from there.

As I lifted the hard drive from its mounting I saw the relatively new DX coprocessor close to the hard drive’s underside. I had an idea. Processors need ventilation. The increase in performance meant that it was doing a lot of work. Could there be a design fault that didn’t allow enough air around this new piece of silicon? The SX processor was free of encumbrance but the position of the copro was stuffy, cramped. I took it out with a tool that looked like a hyperactive fork. I put the PC back together and switched on. It worked. It worked! It worked!

.... But at almost half the speed. It took seven and a half hours to print the camera ready copy. I got to bed at 3 a.m.

Markings came back from the printers two weeks later. It looked incredible. We all rejoiced. We were happy. We launched it in Castle Douglas. A huge crowd turned out. Everyone read. We drank. I think we had really achieved something. Everyone.

Over the next days we got in our cars and delivered it to every outlet we came across. It cost a fortune in petrol and time but we wanted Markings to be seen.

Unfortunately, many shopkeepers were not as enthusiastic as the editors and the contributors. We learned another lesson. Not everyone takes poetry as seriously as we do. The magazine would often be placed behind the latest editions of the tides tables or the self published ramblings of colonels recently returned from Africa who felt strongly enough that their indignation at the wogs insisting on their birthright and upsetting civilisation as we know it was reason enough to pour out 500 pages of incomprehensible drivel, call it “My Life among the Monkeys” and plonk it on the shelves of their local newsagents in order to justify their prejudice and prove their point that monkeys deserve, at least, to be protected while darker humans deserve to be shot.

Many shops complained that the magazine hadn’t sold. In truth it hadn’t been seen. Where it was seen, it sold. That was good enough. Markings was here to stay. At least until issue two. But that’s another story...