A flower for the dashboard: Poems from Aerial 1998-2019
and
The last time I lived anywhere real: Stories from Aerial 1998-2019
By Gillian Rennie
This is a year of momentous anniversaries. The 50th National Arts Festival! The 30th year of democracy! The 120th year of Rhodes University! Here now are two appealing collections to join the party. Jointly, they celebrate a creative project that, for many local writers, has made all the difference.
Aerial Publishing, founded 21 years ago, has allowed hundreds of writers to find their pens and their voices by encouraging us to tell our stories via a 16-week workshop run once a year. Covid halted the project (and this celebration), but the annual course is off the shelf again, and it’s time to celebrate 21 years of writing and reading amazing storytelling.
Robert Berold, a literary way-shower and bakkie lover, established and ran the course alongside writer Colleen Higgs, who has since become a pathfinder for women writers with her imprint Modjadji Books. Together, they developed an approach that allowed novice writers from all over the Grahamstown / Makhanda community to gather the words to say what they wanted to be said in ink, on paper, and across the page. Following each workshop, a committee of participants edited submissions from their year into a volume called Aerial. Every edition is a mixed bag of reading options, and every edition is a joyous hodgepodge of voices hailing the world through megaphones made of ink.
The editor of this year’s celebratory anthologies is writer Shirley Marais. She has scoured all 21 editions of Aerial and returned with one collection of poems and another of stories. The resulting happy couple tell a double story. One layer is the thick plait of individual voices telling tales of loss and love and wonder, which Marais’s deft editing has braided thematically. The other layer is the remarkable story that is 21 years long and which deepens and enriches the writing landscape of South Africa. These are volumes that acknowledge the consistent work that was also persistent: year after year, offering a diversity of writers an opportunity to say their piece, to see themselves in print.
Both books are satisfyingly chunky mosaics: fragments of beauty that make something greater than their individual parts. Of course, there are some stand-out pieces. Of course, I am not going to name them. For one thing, as a workshop facilitator one year and a contributor to one of these anthologies, it would be inappropriate to highlight a subjective few when every page offers shafts of reading pleasure. Just one of the joys emerging from these pages is finding where those beguiling titles come from. Another pleasure is witnessing the themed sections unfurl as the pages turn, guiding us towards fresh insights. Of course, also, not every page succeeds. Some pieces are too epigrammatic to offer easy access, some come over as early drafts, some might beg for stronger narrative motivation.
But this becomes immaterial when stacked against the greater achievement of keeping on for 21 years in editorial climates increasingly inhospitable to paper-based productions. This quixotic mission, its resulting tales bumping into each other in their shared showcase, is ripe for celebration.
Here is a portrait of all that is human. In other words, it’s a little bit mad. It’s beautiful. It is so brave. And it makes me want more.
Happy birthday, Aerial, and many eloquent returns.
- Aerial writers are reading work from A Flower for the Dashboard and The last time I lived anywhere real this Sunday 28 April at 11.30 am at the Bathurst Book Fair. The anthologies will be launched at Amazwi on 8 May at 5.30 pm.
