DUMMY is a new magazine dedicated to experimental writing. Before you head to the hills, let us say we at Magalleria also approach any publication tagged ‘experimental’ with caution, misgivings even, because we think it will be a hard sell. But the problem is really only with that adjective. Our most satisfying magazines are nearly always difficult because true meaning can be difficult to parse and the received knowledge and our gratitude for it is often delayed.
As it happens, DUMMY – dedicated to the obscure, difficult or overlooked – is highly accessible, very fresh and rather fabulous. Its essays, say the editors, take different approaches to addressing ‘the consequences of what it means to designate something as difficult, experimental, or above us in some way. To presuppose a person’s preferred reading material is to presuppose many things besides – reinforcing constraints that are neither neutral nor necessary’.
They aim to foreground the work of small presses, to commission writers working outside those established enclaves that too often define what is seen, reviewed, or valued, and to carve out space for books deemed ‘difficult’, especially those shaped by thinking through class and queerness, and by the material conditions that inform both those things.
The contributors to the first issue, guest-curated by Rachael Allen and Josie Mitchell. Are Fatema Abdoolcarim, Batool Abu Akleen, Sarah Bernstein, Remi Graves, Jennifer Hodgson, Stewart Home, Mira Mattar, Taylor Le Melle, Huw Lemmey, Rey Conquer, P. Eldridge, Lucy Mercer, and Zsófia Paulikovics. DUMMY Is designed by Rose Nordin.
