The Conversation: Glasgow Zine Library, Good Press, SPAM Press & Hedera Felix

October, 2021. Four members of Glasgow’s zine and independent small press community join a video call with Gutter. Chris Yeoh is the deputy director of the Glasgow Zine Library. Based in Glasgow’s Southside, it houses a reference collection of around a thousand zines contributed by makers from all over the world. Maria Sledmere is editor in chief of SPAM Press, a self-described post-Internet poetry endeavour based between Glasgow, London, Leeds, and Berlin. SPAM Press comprises ten issues of a print magazine, an online magazine, a podcast, a pamphlet press, and an online journal of essays and experimental writing called SPAM Plaza. Richard Taylor is co-director of Hedera Felix, a community interest company and independent publisher of Mycelia Magazine, which focuses on weird and eerie themed experimental fiction, visual art and poetry. Jess Higgins joins on behalf of Good Press, a collective-run bookshop, project space and occasional publication print service based in Glasgow’s city centre, with a focus on self- and independently-published books, zines, and visual arts.

GUTTER: Let’s start with Good Press, because isn’t October your 10-year anniversary?

JESS HIGGINS: It’s tomorrow!

G: You’re kidding! I didn’t realise! Happy birthday! Have you been able to do anything for it?

JH: Oh, no, we’ve been too busy. It’s been an agenda point brought up at meetings, we keep saying we’ll think of something later, and now it’s tomorrow. There’s only a team of four of us at the moment, we’ve been back with our families after all of COVID, and we also had a big leak in the shop. So time has gone by! I suppose the big development this year for our 10th birthday is that we’ve formalized the organisation. We started in 2011 at Mono [the Trongate-adjacent vegan bar & restaurant which also houses Monorail Records], with the intention that we would just be there for a few months while we saved some money to get our own space. And things were like that for about four years, until we got our space down on St. Margaret Place. That was really exciting, because it meant that we could have more space and a bit more autonomy. Then we moved to our unit on St. Andrews Street in 2019, partly because we needed more room, because we acquired the old Clydeside Press’ risograph machine, to be able to print and produce publications, as a way to bolster the activities that we were doing. Obviously that’s been closed during COVID, but we’re about to open it back up. So we’ve always endeavoured to do good collective decision-making, being as non-hierarchical as possible, and now we’ve organized ourselves into a workers co-op. We’ve become official, formal, incorporated. We’ve been able to make a constitution, and really put into writing everything that Good Press operates within, what it wants to do, such that it could carry on even without the people that are involved, with our values in mind. Which is good future-proofing for the project.

G: I see everyone else in the chat is nodding sagely—did you all spend the last year and a half organising?

MARIA SLEDMERE: Yeah, this resonates a lot. I joined SPAM in 2017, but originally it was Denise Bonetti and Maebh Harper [who founded the zine]. We’ve always seen SPAM Press as a family, and a lot of the decision-making has been ad-hoc, the way we’ve organised horizontally gives us a little slack, we’re always in touch with each other, all good friends. I mean, we had a meeting the other day on the phone and I was just caught in a rainstorm in a forest, which is just how SPAM’s business is done. But we just kept producing so much, and not really thinking, what are we actually doing? Then during lockdown Denise had some time to think about it while working from home, and decided we should incorporate—actually, we talked quite a lot to Matt Walkerdine from Good Press about their thoughts around models. We ended up incorporating as a community interest company. Which is great, because we like to play around with this idea of ‘the business model’, where we’re called SPAM, and we rip-off a fake corporate aesthetic—but actually it’s very much conversational, and comes out of friendship, and everyone does it as a labour of love.

CHRIS YEOH: Yeah. Glasgow Zine Library is a SCIO [Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation] and I think it’s interesting, because I’ve had conversations with LD, the director who set up the library, about how when you’ve made it to loads of meetings and you’re doing so many project monitoring reports, it can sometimes feel not very punk rock, not very DIY, wistfully wishing we had a warehouse where people could come and do a bunch of spray painting or something, whatever the hell they want. But we’ve built this platform that can open the doors for people who want to express themselves in a more free way, and I think we came to the conclusion it’s important for that side of things to be fairly formalised. Otherwise there’s the risk that it’s a loosely disjointed group of people that can fall apart if there’s no safety rails. Um, which, maybe that’s not very cool? But I don’t care!

RICHARD TAYLOR: As soon as the word constitution is mentioned, I think of Transmission Gallery, more the visual arts side of things, as something where you’re co-operatively occupying space. If you’ve got a unit that you’re using to print and make things, it makes sense to formalise.

G: On the printing and making of things—Jess, have you noticed much of a change in how folk are making things, in the 10 years that Good Press has been running?

JH: It’s quite hard to quantify. There’s the gradient shift of more people knowing Good Press is there, that’s why we see more books and zines coming in—or it could be that there is genuinely more work out there. But certainly, it seems like there’s a lot more people organizing themselves together in both formal and informal ways, or doing stuff on their own.

G: At one of this year’s Glasgow Free Pride events, Esraa Husain said they believed people were getting more involved in DIY making as a response to social media. That the smaller scale of something you do by yourself, or with a smaller number of people, can be an escape from the panopticon feeling of the Internet.

CY: There’s a bunch of interviews out there where I’ve gone off on a huge rant about how zines combat social media. At the library we talk a lot about challenging expectations about excellence in society, where something’s reach is seen as equivalent to its validity. And a zine is a perfect answer to that, because maybe only one person—or zero people!—might ever see this thing you’ve made. So then you have to work out what the value of it is, you have to work out how you value it.

RT: Hedera Felix has a weird relationship with social media—we only use it when we’re not doing other stuff, so it looks as though we’ve gone really quiet. I attended an event last week about machine learning, and marketing for publishing, talking about algorithms and how data is used to target certain people. And I quickly realized it was way beyond anything Hedera Felix was ever going to achieve. The algorithms really do crack down on what it is you’re trying to promote or put out there. So for independent publishers and community interest companies, there’s only really so much we can do with social media. Also with everything needing to be virtual over the last few years, two of our launch events ended up having to be online. Although virtual events have their advantages, you don’t really get the same immediate sense of feedback as to how everyone feels and how involved they are.

G: Hedera Felix’s events for Mycelia do showcase elements which, as you say, are not designed to be experienced digitally—incorporating experimental multimedia, art exhibitions, performances. Could you talk a little bit about how Hedera Felix pushes the boundaries of what a DIY publication launch can look like?

RT: Well, first of all, we laugh at ourselves because we call the events ‘launch events’, but quite often they happen so far after we’ve actually published the magazine that they shouldn’t really be called launch events. It’s just, I think it’s fun to be able to play around with what people expect. The visual side of it, for me, comes from having more of a visual arts background before getting involved with publishing, and I think having lived in Scotland over the last decade, there’s so much good crossover here between the two. I think that you’ve got to have things visual just as much as they are textual—sometimes it’s just better to have other stuff going off, rather than people reading from a page with limited engagement with the audience. We put a lot of work into putting the magazines together and getting them printed and published, but I would say that we put an equal amount of energy and time into doing the events because they exist on par.

G: On the subject of the difference between digital and print media, between online and in-person events, Maria: when you were introducing SPAM, you mentioned something about a post-Internet ethos. I was wondering if you could explain what post-Internet is, and perhaps the others can respond to that?

MS: This is a term that I think was originally coined by conceptual artist Marisa Olson, at least 10 years ago, maybe more, around when myself and Denise and Maebh and Max Parnell, who were the original SPAM team, found our entrance into poetry through an anthology edited by Harry Burke, called I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best (2014), published by Test Centre, a London-based small press. They have very beautiful, visual work. And so one of our editors, Mau Baiocco, wrote a review of Dom Hale’s poem, ‘The Noughties’, where they said, at some point in our lives, the Internet moved from a place you went to, to the infrastructure by which our whole lives are shaped. There is no ‘away from the Internet’ now. To say that we’re post-Internet is not to say that we’re in some utopian beyond-the-Internet. It’s a state of aesthetic and metaphysical, ontological, existential being in which everything we do in some way is shaped by the Internet.

So to call SPAM post-Internet, we’re playing with what would happen if we started a zine that was not a modernist boys’ club, but referenced a lot of these high theoretical ideas from conceptual art, and put it in the realm of the DIY. We wanted to see what would happen if we put the Internet on a black and white photocopied page. And that was initially such a disarming experience, because I’d never seen a YouTube comment photocopied before? We were playing around with value and questions of, what is poetry? Kirsty [Dunlop], one of our editors, is very hot on hypertext literature, but then also for me, it’s more about what happens when we consider the lyric, or the aesthetics of poetry with this in mind, but also how we run our organisation. So if we’re doing a call for submissions, we want to feel like we’re bombarding people—it wouldn’t be just us saying, here’s a theme, instead we have these big blocks of prompts, like 35 different prompts. We have a very cheesy manifesto that we wrote in 2016, that we considered revising, but then we wanted to keep it as a temporal marker of where our thinking was then, and how everything you write about the Internet is always already obsolete.

And everything we’ve done has had that wide access as part of it, partly because we are digital natives and that’s how we experience poetry: on e-readers, on phones. So our zines would include poetry submissions, but they would also include found text. And I guess that has a lineage in concrete poetry, but I think, this question of post-digital scarcity, and the idea of how we crave the material, especially now with Zoomland... ‘Post-Internet’ is a provocation. It’s not a watertight term.

But I’m very curious as to how everyone else has confronted that. Especially because in the 10 years since, for example, Good Press started, what the Internet is has changed in so many different ways.

JH: Oh my God—I remember exactly when we got an Instagram, because at that point it was just me, Matt and Nick Lynch, and I think Nick had a smartphone, but I didn’t have a smartphone, I was afraid of them. In the early days when we would do interviews, the big thing people kept asking, was whether or not print was dead, you know? And it doesn’t seem like print is dead. Print made it out alive! The two things co-exist. So I’m really interested in how despite the Internet becoming just part of how you do things, people are hanging on to the material world, the feel and the actual object, the labour that people have put in.

MS: And I think working on that scale is still possible. I mean, I used to write as a music journalist for GoldFlakePaint, who started in Bristol and Glasgow, and they had a blog for something like eight years that grew in popularity and had a U.S. audience as well, but the algorithm changed, overnight essentially, where one Facebook post that previously got 5,000 engagements would only get a hundred unless you paid for advertising. They were like, fuck it, why are we doing this? And so they went to print, they put in a lot of effort and fundraising, and they’re still going. They’ve done something like six or seven issues, and they’re really beautiful, and have international distribution. It really is a story to tell about how you can flip it the other way around sometimes, and it works.

CY: I want to say thank you, Maria, for explaining post-Internet. The library has issues of SPAM in the collection, I actually used a few for a zine workshop the other day, because I think SPAM is a really good example of something I try to demonstrate even though I’ve never really known what the term is. And I think Glasgow Zine Library is post-Internet in the sense that, yeah, I mean, my understanding of why zines are important is in response to an Internet that we live in now. People craving for something material is, I think, craving for meaning? The idea that someone’s blog or business can go down because of an algorithm makes me feel that you’re never going to get the meaning you want out of the thing that’s been produced on a privately-invested, corporate platform. So it’s up to you to find that meaning, or make it.

G: The Glasgow Zine Library brings a lot of these concerns into really sharp focus, because the library itself is a very physical thing: you have to go to that specific location to access the materials. So in the post-Internet age, where everything seems to be accessible, why choose to be a library?

CY: It felt like the right words to use for a collection of printed, published material. We could have called the reference format a ‘space’ or a ‘collective’, but library feels like an easily understood word. Originally, it was an opportunity to expand beyond what the Glasgow Zine Festival had been doing since 2013. This is a little bit before my time, because I came on when the library started to come into existence, but with the festival doing so much and reaching so many people, we figured it could be a year-round thing. And now having a physical base in the community has given us the chance to provide opportunities to people, be they the artists we employ for the program, or the general public. The collection is in theory accessible to everyone, but during the pandemic that’s an ongoing project, in terms of how we get people to come and engage with the collection. And it also reflects LD’s DIY background; public libraries in her experience have always taken on other community roles. Glasgow Zine Library wants to reflect that a little bit: skill sharing, information sharing, exhibitions. And, we’ve recently started talking about preservation of legacies, of voices, of people, through the zine collection. And we’ve recently started expanding into dedicated programs, for people who are often left out of organising, to help them feel empowered. And maybe that’s anything from making a zine to running an event to maybe even opening their own space.

G: Something I’ve always been struck by when I’m in Good Press and Glasgow Zine Library is the sheer quantity of DIY material that’s out there. Because as we’ve been discussing, these are physical things, they take up space, whereas, you know, you can throw endless stuff into the Internet and it will never get full. How do each of you approach that the task of curation?

CY: We don’t curate, that’s the main thing. It’s not really in our vocabulary. We catalog! We’ve actually had three-hundred or so submissions since the pandemic began. We’ll highlight stuff based on trends or current events, but the library is reflective more of what we are given and what people donate to us. But, we basically don’t draw a line in terms of what we’ll accept. I was asked by LD though to say that there are some things that don’t make it onto the library floor. We’ll take everything, provided it’s not harmful. Zines of unsolicited dick-pics, things like that.

G: Now that is post-Internet!

JH: We also don’t curate, we also take everything so long as it’s not discriminatory or harmful—we’ve always run Good Press as open submission, the shop is made by the things that come to us, and the people who use the space. As long as it’s within the realm of independent publishing, we’ll take it! In terms of how we manage it, we constantly have this stress that there’s no room. We get a stack of stuff for the week and we’re like, oh my god, where am I going to put it all? We’ve found really innovative ways of stacking books! But we have drawn formal lines around big magazines that have tons of adverts and, you know, stuff that you would get at a Waterstones.

G: This sort of leads me into a question for Maria and Richard on the relationship between DIY organisations and the wider Scottish literary scene. Small presses are often thought of in terms of progression—as writers, we’re expected to cut our teeth on DIY zines and projects, then move on to bigger publications. But, as the people who are actually running these smaller organisations, do you see yourselves as stepping stones? Is it possible for any DIY project to exist outside of that relationship of progression?

RT: We have noticed there’s a stepping-stone pattern, but we also see return submissions from people who publish elsewhere—many have published their own novels, their own poetry collections, and they always seem to be interested in coming back to us. I’m not saying that we’ll publish someone’s submission because they’re established and we’re going to benefit from them, it’s just something we’ve noticed: we tend to get more interest from different audiences if there’s authors who have published in more mainstream places with other mainstream publishers. And the fact that we’ve worked with some quite established authors means that we can learn from them as well. It’s sharing of knowledge and it’s also sharing of networks.

G: Is that what inspired Hedera Felix’s editorial mentorship program?

RT: We get so many great submissions from all over the world that we tend to look for things that are already quite polished—it reduces the amount of time that we have to spend on the editorial process to begin with, which is an important factor because, you know, if you’re spending your spare time on it, and you’ve only got a limited amount of spare time, you’re always thinking about the energy that you’re putting into the project. But I would also say it has a lot to do with confidence—a lot of authors, writers, people who are trying something different, I don’t think they have confidence in themselves, and they certainly don’t have the confidence to expect to be accepted into these sorts of projects. So my hope for the mentorship program was that, if we do get submissions that are really interesting, but maybe need to be a bit more developed, well, if we choose just two people we know we want to put in the magazine, we can dedicate more time to mentoring them. So for issue four, I worked closely with Conor Baird, who’s based here in Glasgow. We’d meet up in Queen’s Park, go for walks, talk about his text, you know, talk about what he wanted from it, what he was trying to do. We were able to go quite in-depth, and he was really grateful for that time that we could spend on it. Simone spent some really good virtual time with our other mentee, Ema Pina too. And to go back to what Maria said before about the idea of a family—we do see Mycelia as a global family, and we want that family to be as diverse as possible. Not just people who are already publishing and doing stuff. And so that’s the idea behind it as well—to grow that family.

G: I tend to think of SPAM Press as something that sits outside mainstream ideas of what a publishing house should be—the work you publish tends to be sort of antagonistic to that progression machine of stepping stones. Would that be fair?

MS: I really like that. There’s questions of, I suppose, duration and longevity, where a lot of pamphlet presses are not supposed to last more than a couple of years. But for a lot of us on the team, SPAM is one of the most fulfilling things we do. I think part of it is the decision to explicitly be not-for-profit. That has actually given us a freedom in which we don’t necessarily have to meet certain expectations or quotas around output. You know, if you have funding from certain kinds of arts councils, they expect you to do certain things, and without that sort of funding, we’ve basically been able to adapt SPAM to whatever happens in the lives of the editors. We’re very symbiotic in that way. Having said that, we’d love to get funding and pay people! I think the stepping stones thing, similarly to what Richard was saying about known writers trusting you with the platform, it’s always surprising and lovely to us when someone established wants to publish a book with us. I think it’s important that you don’t just accept a big name and let them do what they want. It’s more, how can we have a conversation around this text? A lot of writers crave that sort of engagement. Especially during the pandemic. I mean, some bigger publications don’t have much of an online presence because they’ve always relied on having access to big physical spaces and traditional distribution. Whereas for us, we said, okay, how can we just make a party out of a Zoom meeting? There’s a creative endurance to it. But I think, does it have to be that way? How can you maintain the antagonism to ‘the machine,’ the expectations around hierarchy and progression? It’s about building different ecosystems as a commitment to the local, and a commitment to reaching out to people doing it differently elsewhere.

G: What advice then would you all give someone who wanted to get involved in the scene, whether it’s making, or curating, or even following in your footsteps?

CY: In terms of getting involved with an organization or starting your own space: community organizing is hard. It takes a lot of work. Definitely try to figure out who that community is, and put them first. Listen, be accessible, and think about whose voices you’re platforming. In terms of just getting involved with DIY zine making, though, I would say: consider what you think a successful project is. Don’t measure it based on standards that you maybe would see online. This answer is verging dangerously into ‘just be yourself’ territory, but you should make stuff for yourself! That should be the main thrust of it.

MS: I think I would add to that, don’t be afraid to approach people. Slide into DMs, email them, write to them. People are flattered to be approached, and not everyone expects to be paid to contribute to something that you’re doing. I always think back to when Peter Manson ran Object Permanence in the early nineties, he would just send typewritten letters or maybe even faxes to people in the States, which then created this transatlantic magazine. And, I mean, that’s so much easier now, so don’t be afraid to think about the kinds of people that will shape your project, who you want to amplify and platform. And, uh, get good at spreadsheets.

JH: I don’t think I could really add much more to anything that’s been said, apart from: team up. Find people you enjoy working with. Find people that compliment different ways of doing things. Maybe one person should be skilled with spreadsheets, but not everybody needs to be skilled with spreadsheets!

RT: And from a personal point of view, I’d say, manage your expectations. Don’t expect too much of yourself, and don’t expect too much from everyone else, because otherwise you’ll just get really knackered and burn out. It’s so easy to do.

G: And on the flip-side of burnout, what you all find exciting about the DIY publishing scene at the moment, how do you hope it’s going to develop, here in Scotland?

RT: I can’t wait until there’s more physical stuff going on, book fairs and events like that, where people are getting together for new conversations, making friends and realizing how you can collaborate. Is that really answering your question? I suppose that’s more wishing that the pandemic had never happened.

JH: I’d just like for it to keep going. I don’t expect any development, any success—I don’t know what to expect. It’s up to people, what they want to do, how they want to organize themselves. But not necessarily everyone has to keep going. The scene will develop, but not with the same people as now, because they’ll get tired and not want to do it any more, but I anticipate that different people will keep doing the same types of things, but in different ways, and new people will try new things in new ways. I want more of the same!

G: That’s an interesting take on the idea of constant progression: maybe it doesn’t need to be, what’s next? Maybe it just needs to be an issue of longevity, and for people to keep supporting each other.

CY: Like I said, we got a bunch of submissions over the last year, and a lot of those are from people who just made their first zine. There’s been a spike of interest in people saying, how do I turn what I’m doing into a zine, I’m thinking about running this event, how do we zine-ify it? And I’m so happy, because new zine makers are great—every time someone learns how to do it, it’s like a magic trick, it really gives people a completely different outlet to express the thing they were going to express. And I also love it when people make a zine, but don’t consider themselves necessarily as a ‘maker’, they just see it as one other tool they can use, to get what they want to say out there, or preserve something important. So I’d like to see more new first-time zine makers. Cataloguing it all is going to be a pain, but whatever!

MS: I agree with all of this so much. I have this fantasy of a small press distribution network, where some magical person comes in with funding to have a kind of warehouse and operating system where we can improve our distribution. And that could have within it a syndicate of makers, it’d be its own social network: putting on book fairs together, putting on publishing parties together, putting on workshops together, and using those collaborations to get funding and support because sometimes we’re stronger together. I think people around the world should get to read great Scottish independent zines and small press publications, and it’d be great to not have to go through the usual channels of distribution. And then finally, I mean, talking from SPAM’s point of view, I would love to improve outreach generally. I would love to reach more rural poets in Scotland, beyond the centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh, which I think is something that I found easier to do in the art world maybe? But I would love to find out what’s happening in the Highlands and Islands and the Borders.

RT: I think because of the pandemic, everything has become a lot more local than it ever was. People have shrunk back into their local parts of the world.

CY: I don’t know—for us, we’ve done a lot of online events that have reached people we couldn’t have imagined being able to reach beforehand, and who couldn’t have imagined being able to reach us. That’s one of the reasons we’re going to keep doing online stuff when this is all over. People might be in another country, but also they might be down the road but can’t travel. So yeah, weirdly we’ve had a much more international time of it.

RT: But one interesting thing about online stuff, just as you’ve said, Chris, in terms of programming others, is the ability for it to be more international. There’s this whole new side of it where you have to look up everyone’s time zones—and then you might get an email from a someone in Mexico City who’ll be performing, and they’re like, ‘I’ll be on my lunch break.’ I think that’s just brilliant.

MS: I think similarly we had that expansion of the time of time and place, but then when we did our first Glasgow in-person event for a long time a few weeks ago, I realised, we have to record this and make it available. It made me think a lot about the politics of who gets to be in the room in terms of accessibility, and then it also in terms of geography, and how arbitrary that is, but then also having a real heart in Glasgow that I don’t want to lose. And the question of how to then move forward with that expanded network, while still supporting the local? So it’s made me feel very galaxy brain.

RT: I think it could also be about just accepting that they may be two separate things.

MS: And wanting to do both!