Last week we launched our latest book, If Any Thing Was Ever Done, by MW Bewick.

“Tell me if anything was ever done.

Tell me. Tell me.
Tell me if I ever did a thing.

Tell me if anything was ever made.”

LEONARDO DA VINCI

If Any Thing Was Ever Done gets its title from a line in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.

MW Bewick’s hybrid text – poems, broken prose, prose poems, notes, journalism, photography – confronts the artistic process head on to become a piece of writing that is performative of its own creation. It asks: ‘How do we know when we’ve said what needed to be said?’; ‘How do we construct a voice that is true to ourselves?’; ‘How do we know when we’re finished?’ And that’s where the da Vinci quote comes in…

A text of three loose parts

MW Bewick’s If Any Thing Was Ever Done is a text of three loose parts: Faltering Towards; The Spanish Riders; and Error Theory.

While the first sketches the setting out of a creative journey and the third offers the opportunity of resisting definition, the second considers background and contexts for artistic production, and sees them as contested sites.

Experimental writing that travels

The rambling text of If Any Thing Was Ever Done oscillates intermittently between rural north Essex and the coast of the Irish Sea in Cumbria, with visits to Sheffield, London and Glasgow. Via two interviews with renowned musicians we are also taken to California and Poland. The text gets lost in place, and loses its place, and sees the loss of centre as a positive force for both language and the personal – and writing as a process not of claiming but of giving away.

The book is also funny, with sharp asides that break the fourth wall, and many pop references ranging from Jean Luc Godard to John Cooper Clark and Italian cuisine to the wine section of the local Co-op.