With it’s strange layout spanning over three pages (in less than 400 words) I am hugely appreciative and impressed that the good people at Valve Journal deemed to publish my prose-poem / lyrical-essay / whatever-I-don’t-know piece, A Swimmer’s Guide to the Front Crawl, in their third issue. The piece sprang from an exercise that gradually spiralled out of control and from there into it’s own thing entirely, and though I’ve always felt that it would work better performed than on paper I have yet to gather enough courage to perform it anywhere.
The publication of Valve 03 was doubly exciting for me as it was the first time that I was published on paper rather than online or in a web magazine, and so technically it was the first time my name had been in print, so to speak. Even though it should be obvious that web distributed magazine have the capability of reaching a far larger audience, there is something rewarding and intimate about holding a physical object that contains your work, deemed acceptable enough to be committed to paper by The Ones Doing The Selecting, and I fear I bathed perhaps a little too much in its glory as I told everyone down at the pub:
“They’re actually PRINTING this one!!!”
To which they asked, “Are they paying you?”
To which I said:
“No.”
And walked off to get another drink.