Caitlin McLoughlin, Worms
Worms is a female-led publishing platform presenting literary work by those marginalised within the literary world. As it publishes its tenth print edition, we spoke to Caitlin McLoughlin—previously art director and now also co-editor of the magazine—about its future.
What are you doing this morning?
This morning I got up and went for a walk in Victoria Park, then came home and made a coffee and sat down at my desk. I wish I could say I do this every morning, but I’m pretty terrible at sticking to a routine; three out five days I snooze my alarm for an hour before dragging myself out of bed to make a coffee.
Describe your work environment
We don’t have an official Worms studio, but Clem, our founder, has a studio that we sometimes all congregate at as a team. I share a make-shift studio with my two best friends in the storage shed bellow our flat. Typically it’s freezing in the winter, but in this London-summer heatwave its keeping lovely and cool. The view from my desk (that our carpenter-friend Dom Johnson built) is pretty chaotic right now as we’re in the process of sorting through years worth of work and debris we’ve hoarded in here.
We’re definitely in the ‘It Has To Get Worse Before It Gets Better’ phase—we’ve got piles of books, prints, sketches everywhere and there are inexplicably two unopened Heinekens that are three years out of date, as well as hundreds of tiny wallpaper samples (?). The shed actually has a lovely strip window, so we get to watch the clouds move above the fire-station next door and we’ve been listening to The Cure a lot this week (and Addison Rae’s new album too).
Which magazine do you first remember?
Either The Beano, which I used to get as a kid—but it’s a comic rather than a magazine, so I’m not sure if that counts. So it probably has to be a naughties tween mag like Sugar or Shout, with one of the ‘Twilight’ stars or a baby-faced just Justin Bieber on the cover. I came for the free lipgloss that they’d include, sparkling around plastically inside the cellophane, but stayed for the quizzes for that categorical sense of self-knowledge you couldn’t get anywhere else.
Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine/zine?
I can’t say I have a particular favourite, it changes all the time. One I always return to though is Anne Turyn’s Top Stories. It was a prose periodical that ran from 1978 to 1991 in New York and featured writers like Lynne Tillman, Cookie Mueller and Kathy Acker—all Worms’ favourites—as well as artists like Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar and Laurie Anderson. I really love that cross over between the art and literary worlds that it encapsulated, it feels a real document of a cultural scene. And the design is so good; confident, sparse and impactful.
What other piece of media would you recommend?
I’m really obsessed with this magazine and Substack at the moment called Everyone Is a Girl, that shares really great writing on femininity, identity and online culture. Their latest series release is called ‘Princess’ and I’ve been loving it so far.
Describe Worms in three words
Fertilise your mind!
Congratulations on your tenth issue! What’s been happening since issue eight?
Thanks so much – we’re so proud of this issue!
We took a break from doing a full print magazine after issue eight as Worms had grown as a project really quickly over the previous year or so; expanding to include a publishing arm and several new team members. We decided we needed to take some time to get a bit more organised behind the scenes and reflect on what was important to us professionally and creatively as team. We became a Community Interest Company with myself, Clem and P. Eldridge as co-directors and we thought a lot about how we wanted to move forward and how best to grow and support the community of experimental and marginalised literary voices that we aim to serve.
Last week’s launch of the tenth issue of Worms
Whilst we didn’t produce a full print issue last year, we kept ourselves busy by doing an online dispatch series for issue nine, which focussed on the theme of Psychoanalysis and had brilliant contributions from Maggie Nelson, Juliana Huxtable, Lara Sheehi and many more. We also collaborated with Novembre to do a literary supplement inside their 16th issue, which featured McKenzie Wark, Fariha Róisín and CA Conrad among others.
So last year wasn’t as quiet as we first anticipated, but it feels really good to be back in print with Worms 10: The Love Issue, which we launched last week at Acrylicize. This issue features the fabulous Shon Faye as our cover star alongside the likes of Torrey Peters, Precious Okoyomon, Sarah Aziza, Constance DeJong, Carmen Maria Machado, Constance Debré, Melissa Febos, Jackie Ess and Sophie K Rosa; and with some incredible written contributions from Aimeé Balinger, Gabrielle Sicam, MK McGrath, Sufjan Bile, Caitlin Hall, Devki Panchmatia and many more.
‘Love’ proved to be such an resonant theme and one that we explored—in true Worms fashion—in all it’s tender, sexy, messy and complicated guises. Shon Faye’s book ‘Love in Exile’ was part of the inspiration for this issue, which is a deeply personal and resonant exploration of what it means to love and be loved within a system that excludes you from what is presented as universal.
However it was on the same day of the cover shoot that the UK Supreme Court handed down its judgement defining ‘biological sex’—as if that were something stable, reliable, objective— as the ‘legal’ definition of ‘man’ or ‘woman’; a devastating and somber milestone in the dissolution of trans rights. Trans voices and writing formed much of the backbone of the issue as well as themes such as: the pervasiveness of heterosexual scripts, the contradictions of masculinity, the refuge and clarity found in spirituality, the enduring power of friendship; and, perhaps more surprisingly, words like rigour, discipline, integrity, truth. It’s a really special issue and we’ve been very excited to share it with the world.
As the new editor, what are your hopes for the magazine going forward?
What I love about Worms, and the magazine project generally, is that adaptability and constant evolution is built into it’s iterative nature. We always want to be responsive to literary and political discourse, to be a salve or a platform for what our community is experiencing, interested in, or concerned by. So in that sense our future is determined and engaged by external forces, which is the way it should be.
Our editorial voice is very much a collaborative effort between me, P., Clem and Arcadia Molinas and, put simply, we just want to keep publishing thoughtful, boundary-pushing, experimental literature and interviews with established and emerging writers we love.
We definitely want to stay in print as tactility, design and a self-publishing ethos is at the heart of the magazine and we missed the touch of a physical issue when we took our production break last year. For Worms 10, we produced our first editorial cover shoot with Shon Faye, shot by Minu and his incredible team. It was such a thrill to get so many talented people together to make these gorgeous images, from the concept to execution (we printed the cover-story section on a gloss stock and in colour, as opposed to our usual black and white, so the images could really shine), it felt really exciting, so we would love to do more of this for future issues.
How do you keep Worms’ message distinct and relevant in these chaotic times?
Yes, these are chaotic and objectively pretty terrible times. Each issue is thematic so we get to approach our political and literary values through a different lens every time. As I was saying above, we are always responding to what’s happening around us—I feel strongly that art and literature has a duty to reflect the times and we want to make sure that is always at the heart of everything that goes into the magazine.
Please show us one spread that gives a sense of what the reader can expect from the mag.
It’s too hard to pick one spread that sums up how the magazine works, so I went with one of my favourite spreads from this issue (above), which is from P.’s interview with Torrey Peters and features Torrey on a motorbike shot by the brilliant Sophie Williams.
What has publishing magazines taught you that may be helpful to anyone else planning to launch one?
From my experience, I can’t imagine doing it solo as I feel like publishing a magazine is similar to what I imagine having a child is like: it takes a village!! So I would say your team-mates and contributors are everything <3
What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
On Wednesday evening Arcadia and Summer, our online editor and podcast host, are doing a performance of ‘The Play’ by Maya Martinez at Somerset House, which is going to be epic, so I can’t wait for that!
Editors Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Clem MacLeod and Arcadia Molinas
Art direction Caitlin McLoughlin