Dear Reader,

Welcome to Issue Eleven

It is over six months since I last sat down and composed a letter to StepAway Magazine readers. Following the publication of Issue Ten, we devoted our summer to the publication of Voicewalks, a collaboration with Durham University dedicated to the creative exploration of inner speech and voice hearing experiences within the context of walking in the city.

The project was a great success. It was a pleasure to work with the Hearing the Voice team at Durham. We were also proud to finally hold the first print copy of StepAway in our hands.

Voicewalks was launched at the Durham Book Festival. Contributors Adam Steiner, Martyn Halsall and Roz Oates read their work to a packed St. Chad’s Chapel, before Iain Sinclair delivered his keynote piece, ‘Scoring Silence’.

Following the launch, Voicewalks was distributed across the globe, from Yorkshire to Yerevan. The online collection received over 4,000 downloads.

We now look forward to our second special issue, an exploration of the streets of Fitzrovia, London. This project will form part of The University of Westminster’s Fitzrovia Atlas project and will be published on March 21^st 2014. Submissions are now open.

2013 has also been a momentous year for past contributors to StepAway. Maureen Oliphant’s poem ‘Chained’ was published in the Human Rights Consortium’s poetry anthology. Many of our writers have published books. The most recent include Debotri Dhar’s Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel, Adam Berlin’s The Number of Missing and Elvis Alves’s Bitter Melon. We wish the very best of luck to all of our writers who will publish or are planning to publish in 2014.

This year also saw one of the publication of one of the best walking books of the past decade: William Helmreich’s The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City.  This awe inspiring study is more than a series of field reports delivered by one of the rare few individuals to have walked almost every block in the five boroughs. It is a celebration of urban wandering, a street level personal account of one man’s relationship with the city, and a vast footstep by footstep panorama of the metropolis in its glorious and ever shifting entirety.

In his introduction to The New York Nobody Knows, Professor Helmreich writes: “Walking is critical…because it gets you out there and lets you get to know the city up close. However, you cannot merely walk through a city to know it. You have to stop long enough to absorb what’s going on around you. And the only way to do that is to immerse yourself in it – spending as much time as possible in the streets…”

Professor Helmreich echoes the mission statement of every StepAway Magazine contributor. His study emphasises the importance of the walk, not only for the writer but for every urban wanderer who longs to understand the city in fine detail. In short, it is essential reading.

Princeton University Press kindly offered StepAway Magazine a number of copies of The New York Nobody Knows to share with our readers. To enter our NYNK competition please go to our Twitter account @stepawaymag and describe an urban walk in 140 characters or less. The authors of our favourite tweets will receive a complimentary copy of NYNK. The competition closes on January 31st 2014.

Turning our attention to Issue Eleven, we have a wonderful line-up of writers for our winter solstice publication: L.S. Bassen, Gabriella Brand, Lorraine Caputo, Joachim Frank, Anne Hugo, Lane Osborne, Margherita Ragg, Rouchswalwe, Steven Ray Smith, and Amy Schreibman Walter. Our cover art is courtesy of the New York based artist, Jean Shin. As part of her artistic process, Ms. Shin amasses large collections of a particular object. We found Worn Soles to be a most appropriate and striking choice for the StepAway cover.

As we descend into the depths of winter, may all of your cold weather walks end with a hot cup of tea or a dram of something stronger. Merry Christmas from everyone at StepAway Magazine. Here’s to a happy, peaceful and prosperous 2014.

Best wishes,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

Berluti isn’t alone. Other patrons are throned next to him on the pedestaled stand, busying themselves with their Blackberrys, and glancing at their Breitlings to check the time. Maybe they do these things to avoid eye contact with their shoeshiner, or to convey they have more pressing matters to attend to than having the exotic hides of their Ferragamos, Testonis, or other Italian imports buffed and shined. And yet, there they are. Taking the time.

Other shoes march the side streets of Manhattan. Oxfords. Monk-straps. Loafers. The stilettoed heels of Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos clicking the concrete. These shoes often show more personality than the people who wear them.

A blonde and brunette trot after a Yellow Cab they hailed, careful not to spill their Starbucks across the pavement. Nothing unusual about that, but rewind the mental footage and it tells a different tale. Now I’m David Attenborough, naturalist filmmaker, observing their animal print shoes as they leave a nearby watering hole, the cheetah pattern chasing the zebra stripes on the plains of the sidewalk Serengeti.

Or maybe I’m Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist, studying humanity through its footwear, observing the unique coexistence of the varied social strata of New York. This is indeed a well-heeled society, but one in which haves and have-nots roam these well-worn paths together. Because it’s not just Berluti, Ferragamo, or Testoni getting spit-shined, or Burberrys and Blahniks that stroll the streets. There are also standard Skechers, and Vans, and Adidas, and Reeboks, and Keds, and Timberlands, and well, you get the point. It’s fascinating to witness the interaction between the social classes of shoes, to watch the high tops, with tongues wagging, follow the quickened steps of the red-soled Louboutins, before each reaches the crosswalk and goes their separate way.

Or maybe I’m Rod Serling, your narrator, reminding you this is Midtown, a place that’s neither here nor there, and warn we’re traveling together through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. A place where shoes are the living beings, and the people are the accessories. I tell you that’s a signpost up ahead. Your next stop: The Twilight Zone.

Or maybe I’m just me, the writer, the people watcher, the observer, the note taker, the judger, the walker of a mile only in his mind, the wearer of Nikes who’s bored at Bryant Park before seeing Berluti sit down. Before watching him prop his buttery leather attaché near the shoeshiner’s row of Kiwi tins, horsehair brushes, and soiled rags, creating a disquieting juxtaposition between the disparity of their trades.

Now, Berluti sees the sign, “$5, $6 for boots” and adds an extra buck for the shiner’s troubles, extending a manicured hand. The shiner accepts the payment and tip with a nod and smile, then walks in his tattered Chuck Taylors toward the flow of pedestrian traffic in search of other shoes to shine.

Lane Osborne

In New York City the wide avenues
keep all the light to themselves;
cross streets catch what sun they can
to illuminate the windows of small
stores where you can learn
all there is to know
about one item at a time.

2

They weren’t even a pair of gloves the girl had left behind.
One was stretched over a mannequin’s hand, the other clasped
within its plaster grasp like a lady at a garden party,
about to make acquaintance, about to be enchantee,
about to be so glad to meet you.

3

They were white kid, the kind
his mother used to wear and touch
his face in the sun before entering
a restaurant. She’d kept them wrapped
in tissue in her bureau drawer, flattened
by a velvet box that held her pearls.
Bottles of perfume breathed her many moods
on the glass-topped bedroom bureau.

4

The girl had never actually worn such gloves,
probably wouldn’t buy them,
certainly not here out of the sun.
Snakes, he thought, yearly shed their skin,
and every seven years we also seal
our surfaces anew. He stood
pressing forehead to cool, shaded glass,
asking himself, Where was she?
All the hands in the window waved goodbye.

5

He went into the store
and bought the gloves,
size seven. Lucky seven.

L.S.Bassen

Natascha smiled as the thought twirled into her head. She was sitting on a park bench, open book on her lap, glancing sideways at her benchmate, who was listlessly eating pistachios. Odd. Sitting next to a stranger, throwing thoughts at him. He might be think-talking right back at me, and I’d never know.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Natascha brought her right hand up, spreading her long fingers and pressing her thumb against the pencil she clutched so that her longest finger was able to reach the spot between her eyebrows. She applied pressure in smooth and practiced circles, a motion she performed a dozen times a day.

Natascha stood, closed her book, remembering too late to bookmark the page. No matter. She tugged at her shirt. A good-bye glance thrown to the nut-eater still on the bench yielded no result. He didn’t turn his head towards her. Fine, don’t make eye contact then. The sun sizzled down and fractured into tiny sparkles on the gravel trail. Natascha decided to leave the quiet public garden. It had all suddenly become too melancholy and too hot.

She walked through the ornate gate, out of the silence into the city, astir with afternoon activity. She breathed in deeply and sighed. I do love your kind of chaos, sweet city of mine! Now show me the way to a pint of quality ale and a street side table! Finding herself on the sunny side of the street, Natascha headed toward the pedestrian crossing. Car after car barreled through the intersection. Devil let out his sack. She pressed the large metal button to trigger the walk signal. Come on little green man. I’m thirsty. Others joined the wait. Blocking the breeze. Raising the tension. A student hauling a huge backpack. A tired looking mother with a stroller on one hand and a little boy on the other. Two young girls reeking of perfume. The clank of the mechanical button being pushed over and over.

The red light continued to firmly hold them all in place. Across the street, the shade looked cool and inviting. Take a thought. Pull it from deep in your stomach. Pull. Pull. The strand stretches like melty cheese on bread. When you’re simply so hungry you cannot wait to taste a piece, you keep pulling to cool it so you won’t burn your lips. But words can burn. Heated words spoken by inflamed hearts. The unstretchable words. Now those are the ones to groan and steam in the ears of the listener.

Natascha had to get away from the perfumed poshballs talking with no regard for the close environs in which they found themselves. She stepped back and brushed the backpack jutting from the student’s back. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. No response. Fine, don’t say a word. Don’t even look at me. She wormed her way to the back and found herself standing at the edge of the crowd some steps removed. A slight breeze allowed her to breathe again. Green man still hadn’t made his appearance. Hands sprouted cell phones. And ever so gently starting as a hum, words bubbled up like water on the cusp of a boil in a pot on the top of the stove. Muttering into his phone, the student crossed against the light. The two scent-spattered girls skipped across next. And then finally, green man glowed go.

Natascha stepped forward but was stopped short by a stout man jogging past with red cheeks and white hair whispering in the air. Well, you go Grandpa! She watched his receding back before starting towards the crosswalk. Just as she reached the curb, the red “don’t walk” light stopped blinking.

No recourse but to step back and again punch the signal button, sticky with the sweat of a hundred impatient hands. Ach! That’s disgusting! Natascha wiped her hand on her jeans as she took a step back, colliding with the person standing behind her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she started to say, but upon realizing she was staring straight into a man’s chest, raised her eyes just as he started to sputter, “No, no. My fault!”

Zing!

This happens in movies not in real life my my what nice eyes I wonder if she drinks beer and maybe just maybe she does because she’s trying to cross the street too and the tavern’s right over there and I can’t believe I’m acting like this at my age get a grip and say something out loud dammit.

Natascha smiled. No longer am I a stranger in this ludic world. Chocolate eyes stood smiling down at her. Then a quick glimpse past her left shoulder. “Ach! We’ve missed the light!” Natascha brought her right hand up to apply pressure in smooth and practiced circles.

Rouchswalwe

A city is a vast open labyrinth of storefronts. Lucky is he who has the time to stroll, to dwell on the succession of reflections his passing invokes on the way he has chosen from A to B, especially on a brilliant day, with the significance of the brilliance being in the intensity and luminosity of the reflections. When I set out to take a picture of myself reflected in a storefront it amounts to a decision on how precisely to overlay my own picture on top of the display which is in turn overlaid by the irregular shapes and colors of the street-scape behind me. What I see is controlled by the position I take in front of the window, a position which normally has no consequences since every day I pass by hundreds of storefronts, but today, today is the day I happen to have a camera and that makes me pick a particular brilliant moment to record in my own digital imprint, a moment which would otherwise be forgotten. (One day, on a recent trip to Italy, I took pictures of storefronts in the town I was staying in, enjoying this kind of control over composition, but then left my camera at a restaurant. By the time I realized it, with panic, I was already back at my hotel, at the very opposite of the town. I tried to explain the situation to the concierge of my hotel, trying to ask her to inquire on my behalf if my camera had been found. But what I said to the concierge made absolutely no sense to her, since in Italian camera, as I found out afterwards, means room. I’d told her, in essence, that I had lost my room, and she must have concluded, from the way she looked at me, that I had lost my mind, aswell). But if we want, we can take the resulting picture as a metaphor for superposed identities, of the conscious (the recognizable face of a man) versus the subconscious (the landscape he sees, all now confined in a storefront, and superposed on the flashy display of merchandise, along with all his peripheral vision, and everything else he notices without wanting to); of the émigré in a vast urban setting versus the former self; the left, articulate part of the brain versus the other one which dwells on gestalts; the two pieces making up a Rorschach test. Others might see it as an escape; they’d argue that I’m trying to escape reality by immersing myself in a virtual one, the one of apparitions, of charmers, of shady characters, but to those I say: why, if what you say holds true, would I confine my existence to a storefront? Why wouldn’t I, again, if what you say is correct, immerse myself into the vast landscape that is devoid of the borders of the storefront windows of bodegas and hairstylists and Starbucks and antique furniture places and fashion boutiques, and the ubiquitous nail parlors, but, on the contrary, stretches way beyond the imagination — certainly mine?

Joachim Frank

South, into Viale Premuda. A few baroque fin-de-siècle buildings, their façades decorated with acanthus leaves and lion heads, stand alongside far more numerous postwar blocks of flats, austere and simple. They were built after Allied bombs destroyed a quarter of the city in a single week. Ancient planes line the road; their gnarled roots and knotted trunks are about to swallow the tram rails. These trees are older than the bombs.

Further south, in Piazza Cinque Giornate, nobody stops to look at the memorial in the centre of the square. Tiny, yellow violas border a tall, copper-green obelisk, surrounded by fallen and mourning statues. The stretched arm of a woman reaches upwards, towards the golden star on top. There are many names of women on the memorial, for the Cinque Giornate (five days) was not a war but an uprising, and its heroes were not soldiers but Milan’s citizens. They drove Austrian invaders out of Milan, after a five-day insurrection in 1848. Field Marshal Radetzky was their foe; his mustachioed mug the symbol of the Austrian yoke. The uprising marked the beginning of the First War of Italian Independence; but after a few months Radetzky returned to Milan, marching triumphantly through the city door, in the same piazza where the memorial now stands.

Every year, Radetzky March closes the Wiener Philarmoniker’s New Year concert. I always watched the concert with my grandfather, who hated Austrians as much as he loved Austrian music. He taught me how to waltz; his brogues creaked as we slid across the marble floor, spinning one-two-three, one-two-three, while the orchestra played Blue Danube. All of a sudden there was the roll of a snare drum, then the brass allegro rising, bouncy, bright; I wanted to keep dancing to Radetzky March. “We can’t dance now, this is a march. For soldiers”, he said. We sat at the table: he looked up, glanced out of the window. He spent three years underground during the war, hiding in a cellar after deserting the Fascist Army. In the last years of his life he hardly ever went out, except to pick me up at school. He was a foot taller than everybody else: I never missed him in the crowd. He brought me bread and chocolate, and as we walked towards the tram he taught me the capitals of every country of the world. He used to say that, whatever happened, he would come to pick me up every day. Whatever happened, except for one thing. One day he was not there. I understood. I caught tram number 23 by myself, for the first time.

Margherita Ragg

Steven Ray Smith

Amy Schreibman Walter

He squatted in a tin-roofed shanty like a troll,
staking claim – legal claim, they said-
to the dull dust of the urban vacant lot.

There he kept a small garden, sentineled with sunflowers.
sometimes surrounded by the skeletons of rusty bicycles,
or the carcass of a Moped.

Perhaps he was harmless.

As I rushed by, I would keep my head down.
staring at the flopping tassels of my good black shoes
and gripping my bookbag until my knuckles paled.

Even if I weren’t running late, I’d elongate my stride like a cartoon
tiger.

The street mostly belonged to the petite bourgeoisie:
the coiffeur, the tobacconist, the barrister with the polished brass
doorknocker.

But the borgne endured.

He boiled cabbage on a Butane stove, and the thick smells
of fuel and mustard
seeped into the pavers of the sidewalk,
etched their way into the city stones.

His woman changed from time to time, but there was
always a child crying, diaper-less,
its little zizi
hanging down red and raw like a shrimp.

I would try not to look.

Gabriella Brand

Anne Hugo