What is Psychotopography?

I’d like to say that psychotopography was something I thought long and hard about and studied – and then considered – and turned this way and that way and hammered and knurled until I had a beautiful metaphysical machine that processed into pure excitement (and fizzing, electric meaning), the minds and sensibilities of anyone it touched. However, what actually happened, is I needed a name for the writing I was doing when I came back from fell and trail running in the Peak District and while it was similar to psychogeography – the classic, Lettrist and Situationist writing mode – it just wasn’t the same. So psychotopography was the name I became interested in and chose.

Psychogeography needs to be in the city and I’m out in the countryside. It also needs a kind of surreal, guiding map, and while those are present in my work, I’m also using a guiding map that’s real and solid, so I don’t get lost and have to stop running, because when I stop running, I do a very different kind of writing. A lot of my work is blended with Nature writing too – like Nan Shepherd, but nowhere near as beautiful – because I find writing about architecture dull and flowers and birds hillsides gather my thoughts into a kind of multicoloured sentence-heap that I like to try to unravel while I move.

Running zine, art prints & short fiction

Between 6 & 16 Miles is mainly a running zine (made of Nature writing, psychotopography and philosophy), but you can also find art and fiction writing here.

On the website itself, you can find a page for art prints, a page for writing (and that incudes fiction, magazine articles and issues of the fanzine), a page for free stuff (fiction and fanzines), a page for the newsletter and a contact page.

The Between 6 & Miles project comes from a love of Nature and fell-running and art. You’ll find those themes woven throughout everything on here, with the exception of the literary fiction which tends to be focused on city life, working class people and individual dreamworlds. All of the fiction is free to download as a PDF, but it’ll be collected into volumes eventually and sold as designed and illustrated books.

The running zine is what it says on the tin: it’s a zine about running. The PDF versions are free and the printed versions are usually around £7.99 and they come with hand-painted illustrations. It’s very local too; in fact hyper-local might be a better way of thinking about it. The zine is set in the Peak District and that’s not likely to change for a while. I call my writing psychotopography because it’s hard to explain to anyone what it is without a label of some kind, even if it is one that not many people have heard of. For me, psychotopography is simply writing about the effects of the landscape on the mind, in a similar way to psychogeography, which is the city and the mind.

There’s no AI used in any of the work on here. Its not that it doesn’t have it’s place, it’s more that it seems daft to ask a machine to do the fun stuff. If you use and enjoy AI in your art, then more power to you: however, you won’t find any here.

The art is all made on Clip Studio Paint Pro and painted by hand. Most of the prints are big and designed to be seen big, but if you want a smaller size creating, just ask. You can ask for a different print size here.

The art prints are printed here in Sheffield at Untitled Print. The stock is exhibition-standard Innova cotton stock that will last 100 years when you keep it under glass. The zines are printed at Hot Metal Press in Barnsley.

NEXT ZINE

The next zines are written and illustrated but not printed yet. There’s a route in there you can follow, but you’ll probably need to read between the lines.

Take a look here to download free PDFs (no art in ’em though – the art is only for the printed versions).