When we called out for contributions to this issue, I’d wondered whether our theme would sound, as a friend put it, ‘a bit desp.’ The term ‘subscribe’ has taken on a manic edge in the attention economy, and in an arts landscape where income from other sources, like funding or meaningfully secure work, is scarce. The work we received for this issue has reminded me that the things we (do or don’t) subscribe to, or which seem subscribed to us, also spill over the edges of this most timely sense of the word. Happily, this makes our choice of theme seem less desperate, too.pla
Maddison Henriks’ cover makes a shrine to young people living and working in our attention/gig economy, tenderly encasing its figures as if to protect and uplift them. Beneath this cover, we begin with Niamh Schofield’s poem ‘A Good Life in the Pluriverse’, which I think prefigures many of the surprising threads that pass through and structure this issue: inheritance, family, and other things we can’t unsubscribe from, as well as the imagining of a new and different life. It also offers some sound advice.
In ‘Beach’, Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn’s protagonist experiences a shimmering series of events—including an environmental movement—which give ‘inner life’ a really literal meaning. Yazmin Bradley’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Substack’ is ruthless and audibly-snort-while-reading-at-your-day-job funny. It also has my favourite literary vision of an angel ever, sorry to the authors of the Bible. Speaking of which, Soph Fitzgerald gives us two bilingual poems, beginning with a mesmerising transplantation of Genesis 11. These short, potent pieces were described by one editor as ‘gentle’, and hold lovingly their vision of migrant experience in this country.
Saanjana Kapoor’s ‘Celluloid Dreams’ reminds me of the kinds of image-idols which precede subscription media, passed down through generations: in this poem, ‘the silver screen is our earliest memory and dying wish’, and we fall through ambivalent attachments to movie dreamboats, husbands of the waking world, and sons alike. Vilde Espenes’s comic also takes a long historical lens to the idea of subscription, with a well-tuned sense of the nonsense subscribers have spoken for centuries.
Victoria Manifold’s ‘The Afterparty’, illustrated by Amelia Saward, serves up a set of characters in a workplace with absolutely no redeeming features. What kind of assent, Manifold asks, could bind these people to each other across generational divides, and the space between the served and the servers? Sagar Nair’s story ‘Froggies’ plopped its way into our hearts when we read it, with its recognition that even things we know are bad for us can be difficult to hop away from.
Esther Ottaway’s poem presses ingeniously and delightfully on the idea of received identity, down to the level of the letter. And, to wrap us up, Dan Hogan offers a suite of three poems as playful as they are pitiless—come on in to the contemporary hellscape of our own making that they depict, and play ‘liminal duck duck goose’.
So, were we compelled to theme this issue of TSR ‘SUBSCRIBE’ by an urge to self-reflect, or by a more ordinary shamelessness? As usual with an either/or ultimatum, the answer is both, and neither—but I’m actually erring towards shamelessness. It’s a pleasure and a necessity to share creative work like this, and we take pride in it.