This month brings to a close the year-long zine collaboration known as Disinflection, between Emma Kirsopp and myself. Through this project, I’ve learnt that deadlines are made of rubber and that I’m pretty shit at consistently tweeting and posting. I always have been – Disinflection just put it up in lights!

I’ve loved receiving the five pages each month from Emma, putting together my Southern Highlands half of the zines, revelling in the satisfaction of creating the packets of colourful correspondence, and receiving fabulous feedback out of the blue from all over the place. Most of all I have enjoyed rediscovering my sister as a person, poet and artist in her own right, via a method that is at once an apéritif and an effective aperient. Words are often too much and not enough when a reconnection is made – you can talk and talk and never even touch on a moment of feeling, let alone the soul’s content after ten years. That’s where poetry coupled with images comes in, as Emma writes. Not one or the other. Both are required.

Disinflection’s reason has made itself apparent during the collaboration – we indeed have been told by our own tales. The zine has been a public letter between Em and I, that tells without telling and says all the unsayable stuff; it’s been the impassioned letter written only to be burnt or eaten, or typed with glee and and hahahahas and capslock on and given over to the bottom drawer along with the biro sketches on forgotten telephone bills. It’s all there, covert in invisible ink, overt in imagery, the words trimmed before the breath runs out at the end of the page.