Stack Magazines

"I think it's striving for... the America we hope we can be." Hannah Hirsh and Natasha Rao are two of the editors behind American Chordata, the literary and arts magazine that recently published its 10th issue, and which we sent to our subscribers in September. It’s always been operated by volunteers as a labour of love, with the team constantly changing, and Hannah and Natasha took over part of the way through the making of this latest issue. In this episode they speak about that process, what they have planned for the future, and what they see as the overall mission of American Chordata today.

"We have a sane business model... you don't spend more than you have coming in." Matt Bors is editor and founder of The Nib, the magazine that uses comics to tell stories about some of the big, serious issues facing the world. The magazine launched online first, as one of the sites that were part of Medium in its early days, and in this conversation he explains how that relationship came to an end, and how he ended up working with First Look Media, another company with lots of money to spend, and how that also came to an end as their priorities shifted. These days Matt is running the whole thing entirely independently on what he calls a “sane business model”, funded by his readers, and I was really interested to hear his thoughts on the experience of working with those big, wealthy partners, compared to the business he runs today.

"It really is like getting a tattoo; for better, for worse..." Asher Penn is the editor and founder of Sex Magazine, a title that publishes brilliantly personal Q&A interviews with artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creative people (and no sex). In this conversation Asher explains how the magazine has evolved over the years, and how he has developed his characteristic style, which draws upon his interviewees’ life experiences as a way to understand their creative output.

"I didn't want to only do one thing..." Bardia Koushan is editor and art director of Autodidact, the magazine that brings together work by a wide range of artists and creative people. The second issue came out a few weeks ago, themed around the idea of mistakes, and I really enjoyed speaking to him about the different types of mistakes they included, and particularly the mistakes he made while making the issue. I love it when magazine makers speak openly about the pitfalls of publishing, and as he says, “You can’t make an issue on mistakes and not embrace it yourself.”

"The bathing community is something special – if you know you know..." Ekin Balcioglu and Steve Weiner are the founding editors of Hamam, a new magazine that celebrates the art and culture of bathing. Inviting readers inside the world’s bath houses, saunas and hot springs, they're clearly having fun in their new role as bathing ambassadors, but there's something else going on here too. It’s hinted at in Hamam’s strapline, “The magazine of letting go”, and I was interested to hear how this magazine taps into their spiritual beliefs as well as a pursuit of freedom, openness and equality.

"It's so Fare to be going to the grandmother's kitchen..." Ben Mervis is editor-in-chief of Fare, the magazine that travels to a different city each issue to report on the food culture it finds there. For their latest issue they went off to Antwerp in Belgium, and as he explains, they completed their trips to the city by the start of March, just before coronavirus restrictions kicked in. But with COVID-19 severely limiting the travel and hospitality industries for the foreseeable future, they have made dramatic changes to the magazine to make sure they will be able to keep on publishing over the coming months.

"What happens when London prices out every artist?" Lucy Fowler is editor and art director of Mind the Gap, the magazine she made as part of her fashion journalism course at Central Saint Martin’s in London. Frustrated by the inequalities she found in Britain's creative industries, she wanted to showcase some of the unsung artists, designers, musicians and other creative people found outside the London bubble, and the result is a brilliantly fun and impassioned piece of independent publishing.

"We want writers to see us publishing work that might not be published elsewhere..." Jules Danskin and Heather Parry are the managing director and editorial director of Extra Teeth, a literary magazine that publishes great new writing from Scotland. They sent us copies of their first two issues recently and I was really impressed not just by the quality but also the range of the writing, and as you’ll hear during our conversation, part of their motivation in making the magazine is to challenge and redefine what Scottish writing really is – there’s a clear ambition to look beyond what they call the highlands and islands and Edinburgh noir, and find something else.

This year’s Indiecon festival took place in Hamburg from 5–6 September, bringing people together from all over Europe for a brilliantly defiant (but still socially distanced) celebration of print. This special episode of the podcast was recorded at Indiecon by Nina Prader from Lady Liberty Press, and features the people behind Alien magazine (Portugal), Club Sandwich (France), C/O Vienna (Austria) and Word (Germany).

"We get to be the seagulls following the trawler..." Rob Orchard is one of the editors behind Delayed Gratification, the quarterly news magazine that looks back at events once the dust has settled and takes a slow, considered approach to retelling stories with the benefit of hindsight. Their current issue covers the period from January to March this year, which of course was when coronavirus first emerged from Wuhan and started spreading around the world, and in this episode Rob talks about how he and the team brought a clear and fresh perspective to a story you might think you already know.

"We thought we'd make a printed exhibition in the format of a magazine..." Anja Dietmann and Max Predinger are two of the people behind Pfeil, the Hamburg-based art magazine that we delivered to Stack subscribers in June this year. This isn’t a magazine about art – the magazine itself is conceived as an artwork and they’re absolutely committed to each issue’s artistic concept, which leads them to do some slightly crazy things with it.

Bijan Berahimi is the founder and editor of Joon, which he describes as a sort of love letter to Portland. Bijan runs Fisk design studio and gallery in Portland and the magazine is a collaboration between Fisk and Brown Printing, one of the city’s main printing companies, and you can clearly see that they’re using the project to show off the stuff they can do. It’s an absolutely gorgeous piece of print, with lovely bright colours, loads of different paper types, glosses, foils and finishes, but it’s also a really readable magazine with a lovely warm feeling of community and some genuinely surprising storytelling.

"It's a grind. You have to get out there and do it..." Chris M Walsh is founder and editor of Fifty Grande, the travel magazine that goes deep to uncover the real USA. Chris is an experienced editor, having spent time at Billboard and Zagat, and now he’s drawing on the lessons he learned from those big, corporate publishers, while also improvising and getting his hands dirty with the scrappy business of small independent publishing.

Andrea Leung is one of the team behind Aww, the magazine that mixes animals and illustration to create a little bundle of happiness and creativity. Aww is published in Hong Kong, and I spoke to Andrea a few weeks ago, before the changes in the law and the increased Chinese government control, but in our conversation Andrea makes it clear that the magazine is intended as an escape from Hong Kong's politics, and from the many other difficulties people are currently facing around the world, and instead focuses on providing readers with some animal-based "illustration therapy".

"It has this ambiguous position of being geographically inside but ideologically outside..." Nina Vukelić and Rafaela Kaćunić are the founders and editors of This is Badland, the magazine that presents “The other Balkan”. The question of Balkan identity has been central to the entire project right from the start, but this fourth issue is themed “Are we home?” presented as a question that allows them to dive deep into ideas around nationalism, nostalgia, power and politics. But of course they do all that along with brilliantly bizarre photo shoots, playful, provocative stories and amazingly characterful and disruptive typography.

"We wear all the hats..." Feeeels is one of the most impressive new magazine launches I've seen so far this year. Made by a core team of four graphic designers who met on the graduate programme at Rhode Island School of Design, each issue is themed around a different tactile adjective, with contributors using the touchy, feely, human messiness of real stuff as inspiration for a fresh consideration of the world. In this episode Lauren Traugott-Campbell, Sarah Mohammadi, Angela Lorenzo and Drew Litowitz explain why they started by investigating the idea of 'fuzzy', what they learned from making that first issue, and why they've decided that issue two is going to be the 'slick' one.

"We keep going. We keep publishing. We keep speaking..." Maya Moumne and Hatem Imam are editors and creative directors of Safar, the visual culture magazine that’s based in Beirut, and which we delivered to Stack subscribers last month, May 2020. It’s a totally fascinating magazine, because while it begins from visual culture and design, it pushes out far beyond that to tackle big, difficult stories based in politics and social justice, with a particular focus on Lebanon and the wider Arab world. In this episode they speak about their motivations in making this magazine, and also about the particularly difficult conditions they’ve had to endure: the political upheaval that started with last year’s October Revolution, the economic disaster that has accompanied it, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to an extremely harsh lockdown across Lebanon.

"If you were running a successful magazine, why would you write about tripe or bins?" Eddy Rhead is one of the editors of The Modernist, the magazine we delivered to our subscribers last month, April 2020. Featuring a bin on the cover and including stories on bus shelters, concrete and the vagaries of 1950s planning permission, it makes for a decidedly strange read. But it's also beautiful and enlightening and unexpectedly idealistic: "There's a paucity of ambition in today's society," Eddy says. "There isn't that ambition to make the world a better place – modernism didn't always get it right, but that's what they were aiming for."

"At the moment it's more difficult to be daring..." Samira Ben Laloua is founder and publisher of Extra Extra, the erotic arts magazine that presents what it calls the “mundane and sensual city life”. The contemporary urban experience is right at the heart of this magazine, and coronavirus means that experience is more disrupted now than most people can remember, so I was interested to hear what they’re doing to adapt and cope with the restrictions.

"Journalism is in crisis and Europe is in crisis..." Kyrill Hartog is editor-in-chief of Are We Europe, the print magazine and digital platform that was launched in 2017 out of the chaos surrounding Brexit. It exists to tell stories about Europe in a non-divisive and constructive way, and since it’s a magazine that was born out of crisis, I wanted to speak with Kyrill to find out what they’re doing in the face of coronavirus, a new type of crisis that is affecting independent magazine makers around the world in totally new ways.