A Hog Blogs: New Year, Just Like The Old Year? Hopefully not.

It has been quite strange planning for what I want us to do with Hedgehog in 2024, as compared to previous years, for the first time it hasn’t involved the Sticklebacks. (Apart from that there are still quite a selection to be released as eBooks this year, and a few that still need to be printed – but they are in hand and it is very much the end of things for them.)

When I killed the wee fishies last year, I think I said that it was because I felt that they had become part of the wallpaper, and that is still very much true, but it wasn’t so much about what was ending, I very much saw it as an opportunity to do a few thing differently.

There have already been a few examples happening this year – the 0-60 launch of our lovely Little Black Books is the obvious one, with the first two coming from Mr Ratcliffe being closely followed by our Short Poems anthology – and a Competition to join in too, of course.

Our Crimson Spine series of pamphlets will also start to appear this year. I’m really chuffed that the uber talented Katrina Moinet agreed to be the first to have a collection published in this new format, and that is one that I am expecting to have us in print very soon. These will be quite beautiful objet, and for me that is the whole point.

There are other things too. I’ve not ever mentioned publicly ‘Deconstructed’ which is something entirely new that will see the light of day soon. Again, a brave poet in the shape of Sarah Barr has agreed to be the first to enjoy/endure that new approach to the pamphlet and I think it will be quite the Wow when it lands.

But more generally, the point is that I needed Hedgehog to be new, vibrant and exciting. It is no secret that Hedgehog is just me, that it is done ‘just because’ and that I am always running behind whatever my latest best-intended schedule is.

But this year, I very much want to be catching-up with the overdue, but alongside the new or it becomes a chore, and poetry and art should never be that.

Because that is the point of Hedgehog. It isn’t meant to be a business or a way to attract funding or whatever else. I don’t even want interns to blame for my dodgy spelling.

There are no wages or profits, just everything going into the publishing of poetry. Nothing else matters.

But it needs to run on something for me, and I have to enjoy it or what is the reason to try?

And the payback for me is the ideas – seeing things come to fruition that you have only imagined, and making it all beautiful, even the ugly bits.

And reading people’s books and pamphlets, work in wee anthologies and everywhere else and knowing that other people are reading them too and hopefully treasuring the form as well as the words. That matters to me.

So this year, more than any year, I want everything that gets done to be beautiful. I want Art Cards and Limited Edition Prints, books and pamphlets that people treasure and generally art that isn’t disposable.

I want poetry and artworks intertwined and treasured, not piled onto a TBR heap, never to see the light of day.

So that is what losing the Sticklebacks will hopefully give us. Little Black Books, Crimson Spines, Deconstructed, a load of Limited Editions and the word quality running through the middle like Weston-super-Mare rock, whilst all the time publishing a lot of poets who have been patiently waiting for me to get my act together, only sticking the odd pin into my effigy, alongside some talented and genius people who I haven’t even begun to read or work with yet.

Because that is the point of it.

And so I sit here today, waiting for the beauty of a Watanabe Seitei Print to turn up from the printer in all it’s posh paper Limited Edition glory, rubber stamp to the left of me, numbering pen to the right, listening to the brilliant Emma Anderson’s album ‘Pearlies’ –

Which of course you can too.

And hoping that it doesn’t get derailed too much this year.

As it may not be rock ‘n’ roll, but, err, I like it, even if nobody else does.

Will it be a smooth year?

Nah, it never is, but what doesn’t kill us, gently maims.

Scars can be beautiful too.