Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone : on Sidekick Books

 

 

 

 

Sidekick Books is a collaborative, interactive, multimedia press, based in London and Cambridge, UK, and run by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving.

We started Sidekick in 2009, after four years of publishing a magazine called Fuselit, each issue of which was themed around a single word.

From the beginning, there have been strong elements of community and play to the books Sidekick makes: our very first series was a set of four micro-anthologies covering video games, Japanese demons, false memories and spells. Since then, our subjects have ranged far and wide, including: robots and AI, British birds, poetry comics, Catullus, bats, Angela Lansbury, the Titanic, urban gothic tales, and animal actors in Hollywood, as well as a bigger, better sequel to that first video-game poetry collection.

We have a fictional boss, and the press’s name comes from our own official titles on his payroll. Dr Fulminare is an excommunicated alchemist (he won’t say why the Guild kicked him out – just that it was an [unprintable] outrage), whose obsessions include mixing, meddling and cross-pollinating different forms of literary art.

There is usually a strong poetry element to our books, but they’re rarely straightforward poetry collections: we often blend essays, poetry and visual art, and we always include multiple authors. Our Team-Up pamphlet series had the smallest cast per title, with one writer and one artist devising each sequence together.

Last year, we released a set of anthologies called Hipflasks (named for their size and their ability to deliver a nip of something refreshing when needed). Each tackled a different theme, and we held open calls for submissions for all four titles: Roll Again: A Book of Poetry Games, Look Again: A Book of Hidden Messages, Say it Again: A Book of Misquotations and You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories. They had a real collage/patchwork feel to them, aided in each case by an introductory essay that kept popping up throughout the book.

With each tranche of books, we always want our contributors to shape and drive the contents, to a degree. Everybody brings their own spin to a theme, and the resulting surprises can be really magical.

Our latest series (Sept 2024) is called Ten Poets, and in each anthology, we’ve convinced poets to apply their skills to new genres. The titles are: Ten Poets Defend Their Cities From Giant, Strange Beasts (our homage to kaiju films), Ten Poets Tell You Their Favourite Ghost Story, Ten Poets Solve A Grisly Crime and Ten Poets Charm The Pants Off Ten Historical Figures. It’s been fascinating to see the lens through which poets approach crime fiction, erotica etc.

One of the main reasons we do things the way we do is a belief in art over individual artist. We’ve always found that writers create brilliant, strange and unexpected work through restrictions and challenges, and that’s where that element of play comes back in.

Multi-author books of this kind are ineligible for most prizes, at least in the UK, and while that can add difficulty to raising awareness of Sidekick’s work, it does shield us from the temptation to commission and write with prizes in mind. We’ve always got an idea of what we’d like to do next, based on our own interests and ideas, but it’s the contributors who bring the books to life.

Going forward, we’ll be issuing calls for submissions for increasingly ambitious mixed mixed-media, multi-genre projects. Follow us on Instagram (@sidekickbooks) and Threads (@sidekickbooks) or sign up for our newsletter at www.sidekickbooks.com to find out more.

 

 

 

 

Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born, London-based poet and editor, and one of the two editors behind Sidekick Books. Her most recent collection is Hot Cockalorum (Guillemot, 2022), an exploration of folklore, kink and general shapeshiftery. Kirsten has won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize twice, judged poetry competitions and taught courses on folklore in poetry. She works in a library, writes about toys for money and is planning her woodland burial.

Website: kirstenirving.com / Instagram: @kirsten.irving

Jon Stone is a Derbyshire-born writer, researcher and editor who specialises in hybrid, ludic and collaborative literary forms. His recent publications are Unravelanche (Broken Sleep, 2021), Sandsnarl (The Emma Press, 2021) and Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games (DeGruyter, 2022). He is a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. His website is www.gojonstonego.com / Instagram: @shotscarecrow