Foggybottom Press

title: In-Between

creator: Aijung Kim

date: October 2011

pages: 36

web: sprouthead.etsy.com

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You know those long travel journeys where you’re sitting by yourself but don’t want to talk to anyone? And you just hope no one sits down next to you and makes dreadful small talk for the rest of the 6-hour journey. This kind of starts out like that. Except she changes her mind halfway through the trip and initiates a conversation with a stranger that leads to an unexpected level of connection.

It’s hard to quantify into words what it is that happens within the pages of In-Between. Simply put, it’s just a conversation. But it is by chance and through a combination of setting, timing, personal mood, and the innate transience of their meeting that their conversation happens.The haphazard intricacies and emotional results of a transitory encounter.

Between the pages of continuous text, intermittent insets of elegant brushed ink illustrations framed in the shape of train windows appear as occasional breaks. Through them, a kind of synesthesia results, as the changing outside landscapes effect a sensation of being in transit as the conversation chugs along while the time of day outside progresses in the paintings.

Although the majority of the zine is about this train ride, this stranger, this chat; it’s also about reflection. About being “in-between” in your life and in yourself. Aijung does a lot self-reflecting on this in both the prologue and the epilogue, where a simple happenstance of space and time was deep, ephemeral, and cathartic for her at a time when she felt a little bit on the outside.

sipping:  iced tea
nibbling:  spaghettoni