We discovered our first issue of The Usher just a few weeks into quarantine, at a time when only a single hour of joyless exercise was permitted. To sit on a bench, to engage in leisure activities, to pause for a while, eat lunch, sunbathe – all of these activities were, ostensibly, illegal.
The atmosphere was, to say the least, tense.
Picking up a copy of this single-sheet newsletter from a plastic folder sellotaped to a lamppost, in this tense atmosphere, felt like a risk. It was connection, of a sort. But it was a risk we took, and it paid off well. As hyperlocal micropublications produced during a global pandemic go, The Usher is in a class of its own.
Latterly, we reached out to the creators to see what motivated them. The following interview is the result.
The Liminal Residency (TLR): So… why?
Skip Henshaw (SH): Well it was your idea. Or rather, it was a way of doing what we really want to do while lockdown was happening. And a way of practising collaboration.
Saoirse Hammer (SH): Yeah I wanted to find a way for people to connect on some level at this time that didn’t rely on digital means. We had been talking about doing something collaborative for most of the nine years we’ve known each other but it didn’t happen until now.
SH: I’m glad you kept prodding!
SH: I think on some level I am concerned that my imagination has been destroyed by access to a digital world, and now that I wasn’t allowed to see ACTUAL PEOPLE that would get even worse. It was initially difficult to think of a way to connect with strangers outside of that world, especially when we weren’t allowed to make contact. Skip and I had met for a lockdown walk and were talking about different ways we might be able to do this and then I said something semi-disparaging like “I mean EVEN if it was just a printed collection of people’s stories from the area,” and then we were both like ….oh yeah no that’s it, let’s do that. With Skip’s influence it quickly became a newsletter. He also made an early intervention to stop it getting too saccharine, which I am eternally grateful for.
SH: To paraphrase a comment I have recorded in our chats somewhere, I hate expressing warmth to audiences… The connection during lockdown thing I’ve been turning over in my mind a lot. What are the connections we’ve made so far? To what extent are we facilitating people to connect across to each other, or are we simply offering an outlet for people to release? I mean that’s okay too, I suppose, but I really hope over time something might tip and The Usher will increasingly be a means of neighbourhood communication rather than an end or start point. That eventually there’ll be no need for an editorial, or either of us to write anything other than block out the sections and mask our wee mascot –
SH: – unofficial patron.
SH: I’m also nervous about giving this project too much meaning in the first place. It’s an ephemeral freesheet!
SH: Yes, this is true, and there’s also a self-serving side of it for me. I want to write silly things down and put them in the way of the public.
SH: Oh for sure, that’s one of my favourite bits actually. Nah wrong direction maybe we’ll actually slowly reduce the number of public contributions until it’s just us ranting.
TLR: What has the response from readers been like?
SH: Good question for a week when we’re short on contributions.
SH: I get excited every time an email comes into the Usher inbox. The variety of what people have sent in has been what I (and I think we?) hoped for. And we’ve had some really excellent submissions and emails. But yeah we’ve not had as many these last two weeks. Maybe something to do with lockdown measures relaxing a bit and people’s attention shifting.
SH: The variety has been heartening. We would like more street lust. Yeah I wonder about the effect of easing. I mean in a way, going back a bit to the why, I’m quite comfortable with The Usher being made redundant by lockdown ending, we can get on then with maybe other ways of doing what it tries to do. I also count the occasional ripping down as a response, which is to say, I’m surprised that they’ve not been ripped down more, which is great.
SH: Yeah definitely want more street lust. The slow uptake on “Who Fancies Who?” has been a bit disheartening. Why does no one fancy each other? Or are they just too scared to say? Or maybe it’s just not a very interesting part of the newsletter.
SH: This is the bit we admit that “Who Fancies Who?” has so far just been us making stuff up, tabloid horoscope style, and our public appeal for you all to pay more attention to passers-by.
SH: Excuse me, I have been putting in actual people that I fancy too. So basically “Who Fancies Who?” is just me telling a lot of people that I fancy them. See earlier point about self-serving.
SH: That is true. What can I say, I live in the suburbs and don’t have the same quantity or, dare I say, quality of material.
TLR: How did you decide where to distribute The Usher?
SH: I live in Leith and you wish you lived in Leith so that bit felt like a no brainer.
SH: Since when did I wish I lived in Leith?
SH: Sorry I might be projecting. We had initially planned to do a wider distribution including Newhaven and Duddingston.
SH: I remember Newhaven being on the list, as part of a very loose notion of “north-east Edinburgh”, a notion that gets even looser when you include Duddingston, which is only because I live there, it’s not north-east at all. It’s only nearby ‘cos it hugs the park.
SH: I think “north-east” was on early mastheads but got taken off because we’d prefer not to label what people think of as “local”, maybe?
SH: We wanted to put them in places that people were likely to spot them, which particularly at the time we launched (April), were either in queues for “essential groceries” or on routes people were likely to take for their daily exercise.
SH: I’m chuffed that The Liminal Residency found them on the Restalrig path.
TLR: What does it feel like working on this project?
SH: I feel glad – glad that we’ve finally done something collaboratively, glad that people like it and send us stuff, glad to have a creative outlet like this.There’s a proper child-like level of excitement for me when I see we have a new email or submission – yesterday, reading an email someone sent us made me stop in the street and laugh.
SH: I feel all that gladness too. And the child like feeling! Each week I get to play a game of pretend when I’m a newspaper editor, and then the head of a printing press, and then a newspaper boy, and these are all quite energetic, slightly frantic roles, which gives me a weekly energy boost. The feeling is also strange thinking about the effect we might be having on people’s lives and routines. Not so much those who get in touch or send stuff, but whoever it is that might be arranging their Tuesday mornings in a certain way to pick up a copy. Maybe there’s people like that or we’re just imagining it, but it’s a funny feeling of possible influence for such a typically mundane time in the week.
SH: You’ve mentioned this before and it hasn’t really occurred to me as something that people might be doing – to be honest, I’m always pleasantly surprised when I walk past or we go to put out the new edition and the old ones are gone. I still find it a bit of a stretch to imagine people actually going to get it each week, it’s easier to imagine quite a different readership every time based on random pick-ups. But we know from emails there have been a few regular readers and that feels exciting too.
TLR: Any advice for other budding hyperlocal publications?
SH: I think the advice I’d find useful to hear is: if you have an idea you want to do, don’t wait until you have “more time”. As much as there has been in many ways “more time” during lockdown, we aren’t doing this because we have nothing else to do – I’m still working flat out and so are you. But like you said earlier, it gives you a lot of energy and I really look forward to doing it every week. And it has felt connecting to other people at this time, for me at least.
SH: I don’t think I have any advice to give tbh. When you go distribute don’t forget the sellotape.
Read The Usher
Archived here for posterity are scans of all the issue of The Usher which remain in our possession (several issues were, regrettably, destroyed in a tea spillage incident in late 2020).
You can download archived issues below. If you have access to issues which we have not archived, please do get in touch.