Leith Clark launched Lula in 2004 and it immediately felt like something that had always existed — like finding a room in a house you've lived in for years that you somehow never opened.
Lula was a magazine for girls who read poetry and kept flowers pressed in books and cried at films without being embarrassed about it. It was romantic without being naive. It was soft without being weak. It was, in some essential way, for us — for the girls who felt too much and didn't want to be fixed.
I own every issue. I have read them until the spines went soft.
When Leith launched her second magazine, she called it Violet.
I noticed this immediately. My name is Violette. My magazine is named after me. She named hers after my name, and for a moment I felt something complicated — not quite anger, not quite envy, something more like recognition. Of course she did. Violet is the right name. It was always the right name. It belongs to the colour and the flower and the feeling of late afternoon in a garden and women who are quietly extraordinary.
I could not be annoyed at her. She has exquisite taste.
What I love most about Leith Clark is that she understood something most magazine editors never do: that a reader is not a consumer. She is a girl — specific, feeling, alive — and she deserves to be spoken to as one. Every page of Lula knows this. Every photograph. Every handwritten caption.
She built a world. I have tried to build one too.
Perhaps one day we will be neighbours in it.