Stack Magazines

"Things are going to be weird for the rest of our lives..." Peter McCain is the creative director and editor-in-chief of Batshit Times, the New York-based satire and arts magazine that released its first issue in April last year. That first issue was themed ‘Quarantine’, and when I read it I assumed the whole project was conceived in response to the pandemic, but as he explains in this conversation, there are lots of other things he’s much more worried about.

"We just wanted to know – what do people care about now?" Lea Kloepel is editor of Synchron, the magazine she launched earlier this year with her boyfriend and art director Johannes Farfsing, and which stands out as one of the strangest and most striking magazine launches I’ve seen for a long time. It's dedicated to exploring contemporary visual art and fiction, but it does so in a way that is brilliantly inventive and entirely its own – Lea's explanation of the origins of their weirdly organic typography is one of my all-time favourite examples of geeky magazine design obsession!

"Juggling is just playing – it should talk to everyone..." Florence Huet is the founder and editor of Yana, an extraordinary magazine about juggling that is on a mission to combat the stereotypes and assumptions about what it means to juggle. It's packed full of geeky references that Florence explains in this conversation, helping to open up even further a magazine that had already totally caught my imagination.

"We all wear clothes – we all have something to say about them..." Abigail Buzbee and Ryan Hunt are editor and art director of Novella, an experimental fashion magazine that takes a handmade, literary approach to its subject. In this conversation they explain why they were so excited to play with the conventions of the fashion magazine, and how at the start of the project they actually didn’t intend to make a magazine at all.

"You go mad if you don't do anything here..." Agnese Zile is creative director and editor-in-chief of Nork, the magazine she started as "an ode to the north", but which has evolved over the years to become a broader exploration of the world, though still with a distinctly dark perspective evocative of her adopted home in Tromsø. In this episode she talks about her reasons for changing the magazine, the challenges of independent publishing, and the strange lure that keeps pulling her back to publishing this labour of love.

"I can't just put this on a hard drive – I have to do something about it..." Mari Oshaug is editor-in-chief and publisher of Bikevibe, the magazine that sets off for a different city each issue and reports on the cycling culture it finds there. Mari started the magazine in 2014 by accident – she was on holiday in Tokyo and found herself taking hundreds of photos of the bikes she saw on the streets, and realised that she wanted to actually do something with the pictures rather than just store them away and never look at them again. In this episode she talks about building her team and what they look for in the cities they cover, as well as the obvious problems that coronavirus has thrown in their path.

Marketa Kinterova is editor-in-chief of Fotograf, the long-running Czech magazine of photography and contemporary art. We delivered their ‘New Utopias’ issue to Stack subscribers in August this year, and in this conversation we get into some of the things that I really love about this brilliantly provocative and avant-garde magazine.

"You can't wait for other people to change things for you..." Afsaneh Rafii is founder and editor-in-chief of Icarus Complex, the magazine that takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding climate change. In this episode we go right back to the start to speak about her initial impulse to make a magazine, through the process of publishing a first issue and her realisation that while she’d been working on that, several other groups of independent publishers had also been creating the launch issues of their own magazines about climate change.

"The future is always contested..." Casper Skovgaard Petersen is editorial manager of Scenario, the quarterly magazine produced by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. As you’d expect, he has a lot to say about the various possible futures we might have waiting for us, and in this episode he speaks about the different techniques they use at the institute, challenging dominant narratives to look beyond what seems to be obvious or self-evident, and how they use those same techniques editorially in producing the magazine.

"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.