Footnote is a new journal for artistic exchange. Each issue, invites writers, photographers and artists from around the world to respond to a word, phrase or idea in a central text, fostering new connections between disciplines and approaches. For the central text of the first issue, the poet and novelist A.K. Blakemore has written Peg, a hallucinatory story of mutation and decay. Blakemore’s style has been celebrated for its “animating tactility”; in a review of her award-winning first novel, The Manningtree Witches, the journalist Claire Allfree describes her writing as “lingering with almost wanton sensuality on taste, touch, colour and smell.” In Peg, Blakemore’s precise, visceral prose forms a rich source of inspiration for an original series of writing and artwork, and the atmosphere of her murky, unsettling story runs throughout the issue. Photographer Jack Davison explores the themes of transformation and the occult in Peg, while the poet Nam Le expands on the line “while they sink down, down” in a reimagining of a katabasis, the descent to the underworld in classical literature. Brian Dillon’s essay “Complexion” makes a case for “a prose that in its logic and its rhythms, its choice of words, seems involved, involuted, ingrained, but never polished.” Elsewhere, writer John Sunyer speaks to Feargal Sharkey — the punk singer-turned-activist trying to clean up Britain’s rivers — for a profile photographed by Jack Johnstone. Eley Williams and Kevin Brazil have each written a series of three short stories, illustrated by the artist Joe Gamble, and 'Pemi Aguda takes “rotting hits” as a starting point for a captivating tale of a struggling musician finding fame in Lagos.
