Prototype is a new series of collaborative, interdisciplinary events inviting publishers, writers and artists to come together and share their work. This first iteration is co-hosted by Bricks from the Kiln, with readings and performances from Astrid Alben (poet/translator), Paul Buck (writer), Rebecca May Johnson (writer), Lucy Mercer (poet) and Holly Pester (poet).
Astrid Alben is a poet, editor and translator. She is the author of Ai! Ai! Pianissimo, Plainspeak, Little Dead Rabbit and Klein dood konijn. Her translation of Anne Vegter’s Eiland berg gletsjer/Eiland mountain glacier received an English PEN Translates award (2022). She has worked with BBC Radio and Wellcome Collection with performance and animation. Alben was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in 2014 for her work across the arts and sciences.
Paul Buck has been writing since the late Sixties. His work is characterised by its sabotaging of the various forms in order to explore their overlaps and differences. Through the Seventies he edited the seminal magazine Curtains, with its focus on feeding French writing from Bataille, Blanchot, Jabès, Faye, Noël, Ronat, Collobert and two score more into a weave with English and American writers and artists. While editing and translating are still a daily activity – in partnership with Catherine Petit, the Vauxhall&Company series of books at Cabinet Gallery is their responsibility – he also continues to cover new ground: Spread Wide, a fiction generated from his letters with Kathy Acker; A Public Intimacy, strip-searching scrapbooks to expose autobiography; Street of Dreams, a collection of essays. He helped Laure Prouvost to write her film Deep See Blue Surrounding You, around which her Venice Biennale pavilion, representing France, was based. His novel Along the River Run was published by Prototype in 2020 and was Crime Time‘s Book of the Month. Last year he drew three narratives into one volume as Indiscretions (& Nakedness) (Vauxhall&Company). His most recently completed narrative, awaiting publication, Lies, Lies & the Rapture of Eden, is a satire embedded in Whitehole.
Rebecca May Johnson is a writer whose work has appeared in Granta, Fantastic Man, The Plant, The Happy Reader, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books online, Tribune, At The Table, and Grub zine among others. She earned a PhD in Contemporary Literature from UCL in 2016, and her research about a creative rewriting of The Odyssey was published as a book in 2019. Readings, workshops and performances commissioned across the UK and beyond have included, Royal College of Art, The Austrian Cultural Forum, The British Library, National Centre for Writing, British Council, and Port Eliot Festival. Rebecca co-founded the literary food salon ‘Voices at The Table’ and ‘Sitting Room’, a long-running series of readings in people’s houses and public spaces. In 2017 she created the Food Memory Bank, a digital project to collect public memory about food and eating. Since 2011, Rebecca has kept the online recipe diary, Dinner Document. Her debut non-fiction book SMALL FIRES – An Epic in the Kitchen will be published by Pushkin Press in 2022.
Lucy Mercer’s poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize. Her debut collection, Emblem, is forthcoming with Prototype, and is the Poetry Book Society’s Summer Choice. Lucy recently completed a PhD in which she developed a speculative theory of emblems. She teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths.
