One of our new author's Maggie Blake-Reece wanted to share the following:

The Walrus and the Carpenter, a poem by Lewis Carroll that has been interpreted by many people in many different ways.

To John Lennon in his 1967 The Beatles song "I Am the Walrus", it was a story about the dangers of capitalism with him joking that he should have instead sang "I am the Carpenter".

A popular interpretation is that of religion, the Oysters in the poem being the followers blindly walking into the trap laid out by organised religion with the Carpenter representing Jesus or by extension the abrahamic monotheistic faiths and the Walrus representative of other dualistic faiths, his tusks bringing to mind those of Ganesh or perhaps even the horned one. This theory was popularised in the classic 1999 film Dogma, when the former Angel of Death presents the poem as an indictment of organized religion in order to test the faith of a Catholic nun.

The British essayist J. B. Priestley argued that the figures were political, with others agreeing that the Walrus and Carpenter both represent opposing right and left wing ideologies with the outcome being the same for the poor Oysters. Perhaps all these evaluations are correct, perhaps they are all wrong.

What strikes me about this poem is that the Oysters themselves never seem to be the focus of attention or debate. They are seen as us. As the every man or woman shepherded along by coercion to a fate they don't deserve. Blinded by naivety, they walk towards their doom and thus they must be a representative of us.

But what if we choose not to follow? What happens when the Oysters decide not to be carried along by the currents expected of them?

We live in a time where the media we consume is directed by what corporations and businesses want us to have access to. A world where everything would appear to be instantaneous in its availability to us, from takeaway food through Amazon delivery, even social media, with its apparently never-ending supply of "new" information and experiences.

But is this the case? Or by us seemingly being offered everything, are we actually being deprived of the important things?

What happened to the free forms of expression and creativity and ideas that have been pushed to the margins while we follow the Carpenter and Walrus as instructed?

Carroll could not have meant this analogy, he could not have foreseen a time when art and literature and thought itself was filtered to a level that the poor Oysters didn't realise it was gone, yet here we are walking onto the plate.

LGP is a bohemian grassroot publisher doing something different. They are putting the artists back into art and the magic back into the esoteric market, refusing to back down in the face of never-ending trends and fashion.

They stand for the Oysters within the crowd who refuse to follow the Walrus, the ones who look at the Carpenter and say "no more".