From north London to the North Pole, from the crowded arrondissements of eastern Paris to the sparse edge of the South American continent, this issue of The Junket assembles a footloose collection of new writing. Welcome to the departure lounge.

In ‘Birds and the Breeze’, Philip Sidney strikes out for the frozen spaces of the Arctic to take the temperature of modernist literature. His sharp essay explores the surprising effects of climate in novels by Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and other early 20th-century writers. Meanwhile, at the other end of the thermometer, Claire Wilkinson travels the arid landscapes of coastal Colombia, finding tradition and modernity locked in an uneasy embrace between the desert and the sea.

Leaving dry land behind, J.R. Carpenter’s digital experiment ‘Once Upon a Tide’ invites readers aboard an uncanny vessel, crewed by insistent voices drawn from the works of Shakespeare and Conrad. Its shifting, iterative form provokes striking and unpredictable convergences between the two authors, demonstrating how new kinds of text can draw on – and renew – canonical works. And if Carpenter’s writing shows how innovative effects can be generated out of familiar materials, Thomas Marks’s appreciation of the painter Nick Goss describes a parallel practice: a way of making art ‘out of what feels foreign on one’s doorstep.’ Compelled by the diverse visual registers of Green Lanes, Goss’s paintings investigate the islands of otherness that dot our urban landscape; in their carefully restricted palettes and suggestive rendering of forms, they give a provisional kind of visibility to the city’s overlooked spaces and inhabitants.

From London, a short hop to Paris, where Matilda Bathurst joins the staff of a modish arts magazine only to find herself trapped in a strange workplace psychodrama with a difficult boss and a group of downtrodden colleagues. Her wry account catches the absurdity, as well as the desperation, of life in the internship economy. A different version of Paris emerges from Karl O’Hanlon’s two poems, ‘Verger’ and ‘Notre Dame de La Salette’, which speak of a city held in cross-currents of eternal and secular time, buoyed up – or perhaps weighed down – by the whole history of European culture. That history also haunts Laura Kilbride’s sestina ‘Boy With a Coney’, where, in praising the sculptor’s art, the poet painstakingly constructs an intricate form of her own. Composed on the volcanic island of Lipari, the poem makes of its metre another kind of time in which Olympus and Calvary meet in startling alignment. 

Two short stories round out the issue. Matthew Sperling’s ‘Cloak’ plots a sexual history which is also a map of bodies connected through viral contact. Recasting Henry James’s dictum that in life, unlike fiction, ‘relations stop nowhere’, the narrator finds in the thought of his own contagiousness a kind of endless connectivity with ‘no outer limit anywhere’. Conversely, the narrator of Jo Lennan’s ‘A Land of Hope and Glory’ encounters nothing but impediment as he travels from Melbourne to visit his brother in Oxford. From the uncomfortable confines of a Heathrow interview room to the rebarbative architecture of the colleges, everything seems to emphasise the sense of a country closing in on itself against the rest of the world. 

Be that as it may, the pieces collected here are still able to remind us of the connections we make in writing: connections with the past and future; connections with the elsewheres of the present; connections with readers and with other writers. There are plenty of destinations to choose from in this issue of The Junket. We hope you enjoy the journey.

James Purdon