Eora’s small-run, small-scale, print publication world is blossoming, starring zines (RAG, Diptych) and magazines (Fling, Booker, PUSH, River Theory, Soft Stir, Killdeers, Hag, Wanderer). The revived use of this tactile medium begs our understanding – why are we returning to the analogue?
This trend is redolent of obvious zeitgeist shifts; nostalgia, and a desire to combat fast-paced data and technological isolation. But causal reasoning doesn’t suffice. It ignores the importance of process. Such publications revel in their temporality; they are born over dinner parties, inveigle themselves out of on-shift conversations, are laboured over by friends, and brought into the world at launch parties adorned by art and music. These discursive negotiations become physical in the glossy, small-print-run, photo-worthy magazines. While some are plagued by short-termism or morph into production houses, these magazines don’t subscribe to consumerist logics, their importance lies within their physicality and relationality.
Journals of Love and Literature joins this burgeoning scene, explicitly with the goal of connection. Established by University of Sydney student Melanie McDacy, Love and Literature promises to platform new art and literary voices. Unlike the aforementioned periodicals comprising chapbooks or librettos, this magazine is closer to a tome, reaching almost 200 pages in length. Informed by quirky magazines and English university studies, Love and Literature acts as a subversive literary and artistic anthology. Honi Soit sat down with litterateur-in-chief McDacy to understand all things love and literature.
It was within the tertiary clime wherein McDacy first conceived of her own magazine. Initially studying fashion design, McDacy realised she was not connected to the subject matter but industry-adjacent publications. Through her studies at USyd in English and Sociology, McDacy developed experience and writing skills. But it was last year when the project grew from insuperable to achievable — a shift only attributable to an inspirational community, passion and skillset. And hence, Journals of Love and Literature grew out of a combined goal: to encourage community and platform creatives around her, and bypass print media’s strict rules of engagement.
McDacy frames the project as analgesic to three issues; general, technological-induced alienation, the inaccessibility of traditional print media, and its inability to serve young people. This alienation is particularly prevalent in creative worlds. Oxygenating concerns about the ‘scene’, McDacy regards the cliques as ironically detrimental to local creatives. Love and Literature will be an interlocutor between artist/writer and audience.
The theme ‘connection’ confronts these issues. McDacy speaks of her experience with a kind of unspoken but all-consuming loneliness, and the related idealisation of hyper-independence, “humans just aren’t built like that”. The theme ‘Connection’ remained flexible and broad, but surfaces in the magazine through the repeated ‘Project 1’. ‘Project 01’ – “a project wherein I wrote a piece of poetry to be used as a prompt” – begins, punctuates and ends the publication. This acts as a kind of circular colophon, connecting “different mediums, translating the language of art for different readers”. The almost 200 pages of Love and Literature are interspersed by photography, poetry, art and prose.
While for the first edition McDacy reached out to her existing circles, she is now expanding accessibility with a public callout. Throughout the interview, McDacy underscored the collective, relational process of magazine-making. McDacy attributes Sascha Zenari as “another director/senior editor”, and notes other editors “Caleb ‘Drayco’ Forson, Lili Ramunda, Hanna Arain, and Oscar Melder”. These friends emerged from “various walks of life”, including drudgerous retail work. As McDacy astutely acknowledges, “you can’t really do these things alone”.
But why print form? McDacy proselytises the beauty of print’s physicality: “it’s a solid, formal and sophisticated record of emotion, stacked with scribbles and stories from all different minds.” Moreso, the physical medium develops its own life, its patina recording all its readers, note-takers and admirers. McDacy compares this palimpsest-like act to life cycles, “physical books have their own soul and life cycle, much like us”. Printed material is also just more romantic, “something you can touch and hold whether you’re by candlelight on a rainy night in a blackout, or by the beach phone-free sipping martinis”.
The appellation – Journals of Love and Literature – embodies its status as “a quirky take on a traditional literary journal”. “Love” is centred, to announce McDacy’s aim to “foster a positive, clear space and create a platform for other like-minded spirits” unlike the commercial industries that tend to be “contaminated with greed and ego”. The plurality “journals”, emphasises its status as a non-authoritarian, extra-institutional publication.
Through visual design, Love and Literature parses the interstices of the design magazine and literary journal. The front cover announces this playfulness; against an orange background, bold sans-serif text announces the title, alloyed with James Durran’s black and white drawing. Inside, curlicue headings join with sans-serif body text. In other pieces, art and text merge; Zenari’s ‘Commutes’ arranges drawings and a short story, to retell the classic snow queen fairytale. Elsewhere, Emma Ramsey’s photography sits aside Tessa Barbara’s mythological poetry.
In the midst of all these new publications, is this ‘scene’ homologous? What makes Love and Literature different, and necessary? I guess this criticism ignores the essence of these publications; they are not about ‘necessity’ and ‘difference’ but creativity, process and materiality. The collaborative process is a palliative to alienation, and the product is a panoply of young creators. Perhaps it is a truism, but any new publication that encourages new voices is a good thing. Tonight, Love and Literature becomes physical and joins the magazine melee, and in this, the magazine reminds us that communal creation and celebration are its raison d’être.
Journals of Love and Literature launches tonight (26 July) at Studio Killa, Marrickville at 7pm. Follow @loveandliterature__on Instagram to keep in touch for the latest updates and contributor callouts.
