‘There is no tool to make noise, only a happenstance wrong wielding of an awkward implement. I hear noises but they are mainly alarming. Take me to a sound that grows bolts and leaves and lanterns. It must be this silence of his sleeping that houses something I have yet to hear.’

Guitar! describes the contours and conditions of writing – interrupted, in flashes, or in restless moments through the night. A narrator listens; as a child learns to speak there is a re-acquaintance with the strangeness of putting a feeling into words. There is a yearning for meeting, and an idea of love or companionship as a sense of being met. Reading is punctuated by a series of black and white images of buskers, photographed by Francis McKee in Glasgow. Cover artwork by Ciara Phillips.

Praise for Guitar!:

The book that meant most to me this year was Sarah Tripp’s GUITAR!. It begins with a writer making small illuminated notes in the dark, her record of living alongside a child learning to speak. She marvels at the way he names the world, managing somehow to catch all of it in the vast nets of his first two words: Guitar! and Ba! (What if these were all the words a person needed? the writer wonders). But then it turns, and becomes a different kind of offering: an effort to share a non-prescriptive method for opening yourself up to the energy and resistance and mystery of someone else. It is a quiet manifesto for wonderment, for generosity, for cultivating a responsiveness to whatever comes. It arrived at exactly the moment I needed it. – Kate Briggs author of  The Long Form

Complementing Guitar!, Sarah Tripp’s THE SELF-ILLUMINATING PEN, ISBN 978 0 9931424 6 8, is also new. With cover artwork by Ciara Phillips, it comprises five letters, five writing exercises and over 100 blank notebook pages. Published by Glasgow-based MAP Editions it is available free of charge. The texts can also be read alongside five specially commissioned films by Isobel Lutz-Smith on mapmagazine.co.uk. For further details contact alice@mapmagazine.co.uk

Sarah Tripp is an artist, writer and lecturer based in Glasgow. Previous Book Works publications include You are of vital importance, 2014, and ‘Aide-Mémoires: As if’, published in The Happy Hypocrite – What Am I?, issue 5, 2010, edited by Maria Fusco. Her writing can also be found in F.R. DAVID (Berlin), 2HB(Glasgow), and Space Poetry (Denmark).

Guitar! is generously supported by Creative Scotland and The Glasgow School of Art.