It’s hard to name a magazine. In all the early weeks of plotting, dreaming and decision-making, choosing a name for mine and Rob’s joint endeavour – for all the ambition and passion that was being poured into it – was probably the toughest part.

Naming anything new is a challenging task – a combination of guesswork, imagination and predetermination. The process, I thought, might not be too dissimilar to the naming of a child. You have your ideas, preferences, but also a keen awareness of what other people will think. Names are for life, and might represent a person before anything else is known about them. You know that this decision you make will, in some small part, shape that person, too. And you have to make it right there at the beginning, before you know who they really are. It’s a lot of pressure.

Of course it’s also nothing at all like naming a newborn. For one, this magazine was still hypothetical at the time – we were speaking it into existence, feeling around for a name that would do justice to our vision for it, persuade panels to fund it and, most importantly, tempt readers into one day picking it up and opening its pages. We had to conjure up all the possibilities – everything we thought it could be and do – and then find a name that would feel right for all of them. We also, crucially, had to like it.

Inevitably, Rob and I went through a few different names before we found Folding Rock. Our first application actually had an entirely different title – one that we had chosen out of necessity, but hoped we could replace as soon as we landed on a better idea. We assumed we would know when we found ‘the one’. For a while, however, it seemed like there might be no such a thing.

We looked at the greats that had gone before us, and wondered how they had been chosen. Gutter, Granta, The Stinging Fly. I became convinced that the trick was to just pick something and run with it. For years, writers and readers venerated an online journal christened The White Pube. Clearly, I said, it’s about having confidence. If you introduce it as a fully formed thing, nobody will question the name. They might be curious about it – in fact, that’s ideal – but they probably won’t ask what else was on your shortlist.

The trouble is, this wasn’t a fully formed thing – not yet. And every idea had a ‘but’.

It’s good, but it sounds like this other magazine.

I like it, but I’m not sure anyone will get the reference.

It’s cool… but it sounds more like a science journal…

The ‘cool factor’ was important, and so was the explanation behind what we chose. It had to be trendy-sounding but not arbitrary. Likewise, we didn’t want too much meaning. A good name’s appeal can’t rely on a story that takes more than three floors in an elevator to tell.

And of course, in a carefully balanced, tasteful way, it needed to nod to where we come from. Our roots: Wales.

You know the rest, of course. After weeks of thinking, brainstorming, one desperate (and futile) turn to ChatGPT and many WhatsApp messages, we fell upon the name Folding Rock. Actually, we originally chose Folded Rock, but a good friend quickly made the point that this is not a past-tense project. This is just the beginning of something ever-evolving and progressing.

As we had already established by that point, it is very easy to find fault with a name for something theoretical. We also soon discovered that names are something everyone has an opinion on (a reality that I’m sure many expectant parents can relate to). All the more reason for our chosen name to be something we could really stand behind.

Folding Rock was inspired by the geological bed of Wales: rippled layers of Ordovician rock, scrunched and folded through the ensuing periods of tectonic movement. Wales’s geology is fascinating and complex – a patchwork of different materials and timescales, shaping the country physically and, eventually, economically and socially. Wales’s history is also complex, as is its cultural journey and literary identity.

You can see evidence of this impressive process at the coast: cross-sections of deep time, fossilised into the cliff face. If you were to take a snapshot of certain sections (in our case, one particular section known as Cemaes Head in Pembrokeshire) and, say, transfer the pattern into the neat square of a logo, it might remind you of the spine-pinched pages of an open book. Folding Rock has layers – of meaning and of interpretation – but it also makes for some beautiful branding. And that’s pretty important too.

Being a nature writer, all this and more was what drew me to this name. But in his editorial for our very first issue, Rob talks about one more aspect of this choice in name that hadn’t occurred to me:

I must confess my mind immediately leapt to the oxymoronic unfeasibility – even futility – evoked by the phrase. Scarcely known for being the most malleable of substances, to attempt to actually fold a rock – or, say, run a literary magazine in the fiscally troubled, artistically crowded twenty-first century – would at first appear to be a fool’s errand. However, you only have to glimpse once more at the page-like creases and layers in the epochs-old stone to be reminded that what at first seemed unthinkable perhaps is possible with time – and maybe just a little pressure – after all.

Wales has some of the oldest, most striking rock in the world. Its land is something so many of us are proud of – the stuff beneath our feet, holding us up and rooting us down. That pull we can’t always explain – at least not in a single elevator ride.

Folding Rock is a magazine that doesn’t try to answer questions, or search for definitions of what it is to be ‘Welsh’. What we are is inspired, determined, and in it for the long haul – gathering up everything we’ve learnt so far and growing something worthwhile, we hope, out of the fertile soil of all that’s gone before.

Our name is just our name, of course. There’s much more beneath the surface. But now that we’re here – now it’s out in the world – the questions about this choice have been the kind I welcome: delivered with curiosity, and a smile.

So, why ‘Folding Rock’?

Folding Rock Issue 001 will be published on March 6th. Pre-order here.