that lead beneath brambles to the bodies and minds of others

The book jacket is designed by Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Her drawing for the front of the jacket is of trees and grasses, many black pen lines pulling and curling in vortical movement, little differentiation made between figure and ground.
Shelley Hirsch was in London for a short stop and we talked of stream-of-consciousness, her speech by way of illustration of the process and its importance to her singing suddenly branching into organic, unpredictable storylines that in their density came close to Vanessa Bell’s drawing. Shelley then talked about an essay she had come across at the beginning of her life as an improvising singer: Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting: a London adventure. Woolf sets out to buy a pencil, the excuse to immerse herself into human life, its grotesques, the passing snatches of its exchanges, its glimpsed scenes, overheard chatter, press and movement within the atmospheres of the…