On Mondays and Thursdays through this July, the TSR team were privileged to spend time with emerging editors for our Jumpstart a Journal workshop. We invite applications to this workshop every year from participants who want to learn more about independent publishing. This year, as always, we found ourselves enjoying clever, funny, and thoughtful discussions about editorial practice, about how to deal with budgets and production timelines, and about generous, attentive reading. We discussed how to operate without sure access to grant funding, and the continual development of accessibility tools and practices. We discussed participants’ experiences of editing and being edited. We heard about their plans for publishing projects—which we can’t wait to see take shape and be realised.
This year’s workshop was sponsored by ClickUp, whose software we use to organise our time at TSR, and by Baidam, Australia’s leading Indigenous ICT security services and solutions provider. We are deeply grateful for the generosity of both of these organisations; with their support, we welcomed First Nations participants, and participants living in remote areas, on fully sponsored places. We also want to thank Kingston Arts for awarding each winner of their annual Artz Blitz competition a place in our program.
We especially want to thank Nicholas Croggon, who joined us as an experienced and knowledgeable guest speaker, and as a funny and humble peer. Claire and I are also grateful to the TSR staff members who took time to mentor participants over the three weeks of Jumpstart. You know so much.
We also thank the writers who shared their works of poetry and micro-fiction to be edited by our participants. Even more than it is a publishing opportunity, submitting to Hills Hoist is a decision by writers to help their peers to develop their practices. We sometimes talk about writing as a way of making worlds. Sharing your work in the way these writers have done—to help others learn, and to move through their ideas with them—is also a way of making a world with the people around you. I also want to thank my football team, DEW FC, and the Jesus College team who we’re playing with in the photo on this issue’s cover, for the generous permission to share their images (and for all the delight).
Our final note of thanks and congratulations is for our editors. It’s heartening to share time with such kind people, planning vital work in our sector.
We asked the editors about the themes they saw in the works they chose for the issue. They told us that Hills Hoist Volume 4 is filled with a sense of belonging and intimacy; it measures time and the degrees of distance between people; it works to ‘shine different lights on some of the myriad ways in which people come together’ (Annette Higgs). And we couldn’t be prouder.
Our editors for Hills Hoist Volume 4 are:
Alison Barton
Alisha Brown
Annette Higgs
Veronica Hopkins
Roya Ghodsi
Grace Greedy
Alicia Maskley
Isobel Morphy-Walsh
Ezara Norton
Susie Walsh