Inspired by: Clem Macleod

Miista

Tue Apr 09 2024

Miista's Inspired By series celebrates the people who make us think and take risks.

At MIISTA we are only the sum of all the micro cultures that exist around us. We have never been quiet about it, and you have heard us before saying we are ‘Inspired By’ – insert: the opposite thing.

This month we took a trip down the literature path and caught up with Writer, Editor and Publisher Clem Macleod.

Print over screen, if we were asked to choose. We faced down the contradictions of “making it” in literature when we walked into Clem Macleod's studio in East London: books over walls too. Since 2019, she founded a literary-style magazine called Worms, focusing on the exploration of feminist theory through the work of artists exclusively supported by underground publishing (not by choice). With Worms, she was trying to fight back against the perpetuation of an archaic world of bookmaking, creating a space that is the opposite of highbrow and scary, an alternative way to understand intellectual. As a writer, she openly discloses that she writes “about reading and writing”. It's a natural evolution she also acts as an editor to give the experimental a chance, and it seems to be appreciated by institutions like Tate, with her work for Rhea Dillon’s exhibition: An Alterable Terrain. For that reason, last year, she was ready to evolve Worms into an open-access writing program, called Compost Library, welcoming all the metaphors inspired by its name. Under this program, she runs workshops and events that go against the grain of the publishing industry by giving a voice to writers who haven’t followed the traditional route.

We headed down to Clem's London home to go through her book collection inspiring her work before moving on to her studio in Hoxton to see where Worms Magazine and her Compost Library programme come to life everyday. Here's what went down.

Miista: Can you tell us about your book collection? Was building a personal archive intentional? Or was it all accidental?

Clem: It's difficult because I moved country when I was 18 and I obviously wanted to bring loads of my books with me! Over the years because I brought so many books with me in boxes from Australia, I've had to get rid of a few of them and I have to now be very picky about the books that I buy because otherwise I would literally have to have like 20 of these bookshelves!

At the beginning it would have been like “this is how it's going to look, it's going to be very specific” and then over the years by lending books to people, as well as changing interests and physically not having enough space while moving countries, everything's had to change a little bit. So I do feel like the books that I have now are the ones that I do really care about.

M: What are some books you’d like to add to your personal collection and why?

A: My dream is to fill my drawers to with load of different folders of archived old feminist scenes and different magazines. I would also like some more art books.

M: Take us back to when you started your daily ritual of the morning pages, how does this practice influence your creative headspace for the day?

C: I started doing my morning pages after I did ‘The Artists Way’ by Julia Cameron and I did it like 5 times! It's basically a 12-step course in uncovering your creativity and my mum did it and then I did it. Her whole thing is that you have to write 3 pages long hand every single morning. I will admit it took a few goes to get into the habit of doing it every day and for a while I was doing 1 page and I was just like, oh, it's just a chore.

Now when I wake up in the morning, I cannot get out of bed without doing my morning pages. It gives me so much clarity, if I wake up and I'm feeling a bit confused or a bit negative about the day or if I have an issue or if I've had a dream about something and I do them, I feel like they’ve revealed something. You just start writing and something happens in your brain. There is actual science behind writing out things and ideas or answers come to you...they're there on the page for you. I have solved some of my most complex problems or friendship disputes by just writing them out in the morning.

With the morning pages you have the freedom to write without worrying about having to change your ideas because no ones ever going to read them. Hopefully...unless you have a nasty friend that wants to go into your journal.

M: How did Worms Magazine come to be? What was the original mission behind it and how has that transformed? What made you want to champion other people’s stories, not just your own?

C: Worms was my final project at uni. I studied fashion journalism, and we were meant to make a fashion magazine. I decided that I was kind of over writing about fashion by that point. That sounds really pretentious that I was like “I'm over it”, but I did kind of tie it in with fashion.

I ended up writing about writers and their style and literary communities, as well as their dress.

It was only meant to be my final project and then I ended up doing another issue because I met the amazing author Tilly Lawless. She was like, "oh you have this magazine” and I didn’t exactly lie but I said “yeah, I would love for you to be in it”. Then she wrote an article and I was like, okay well, I guess I'm going to have to do another issue now...that was issue 2 and then we just kept going!

M: Your mission with this work is to give a voice to underrepresented writers in publishing and media. What does this look like to you? What are the highs and lows of this approach?

C: The challenges, especially in the beginning, have mainly been related to trying to prove ourselves and communicate what we're trying to do here, because it's quite different to what people expect from a literary magazine.

Part of our ethos is to publish up-and-coming writers alongside more established names. The people we want to represent are people that have come into literature via an untraditional route. They might not be educated in a certain kind of literature, or they haven't studied, or they haven't had access to the resources that some of the big authors have. We try and mix it up so that there's the names on the cover of the magazine that will make people buy the magazine, and then there's also the kind of younger more experimental writers. I think that the biggest challenge with this is that it kind of confuses buyers, readers and stockists because it's hard to put us into a box and categorise the work that we're doing studio because it does cross so many genres.

Having a diverse group of people, with more stories and more human experiences is really important to me.

M: We’re in your studio now, can you tell us about who makes up the creative space?

C: I've been here for 2 and a bit years and I share it with 4 other fabulous humans, they're all artists or designers. Roydon and Jack run Waste Store, Ed is a Filmmaker that has a Fan Zine called Poison Lasagna about Arsenal, and Dolly who sits at the end is a Fashion Designer. We've had a few different people come through and the only constant person that's been here the whole time is Dolly.

M: How does writing in the studio compare to writing with others at workshops?

C:I think it's hard because at the workshops, we're kind of trying to encourage people to be vulnerable and open and really personal, so I would like to think that there's not too much of a difference between what we're trying to kind of create in the workshops and the space you get in by yourself.

M: And now tell us what you do at Compost Library with your co-founder Pierce? It’s an interesting name, where did it come from?

C: We started the Compost Library because we had both used reading and writing for our mental health and we wanted to share that knowledge for people. It's called The Compost Library because of the idea of compost and fertilising, but also using knowledge to create a stronger foundation and grow. The seeds of knowledge!

Basically what we do is teach people how to write for their well-being. We're about to go into our third course tomorrow, and that is all about writing with your intuition.

M: How do you help people write what’s right for themselves? I can imagine that’s quite healing?

C: The way that we get people to write is by encouraging them to believe in themselves and their voice, as well as letting people know that their story is worthy and that their experience might really help someone else. Sharing that experience via writing could be like really beneficial for someone's life.

Then the other side of it comes from a really personal point of view from Pierce and I, we both have used writing and journaling for a really long time to assist with our Mental Health. We've spent a lot of time sending each other journal entries and just coming to terms with things but in the written word.

"It's called The Compost Library because of the idea of compost and fertilising, but also using knowledge to create a stronger foundation to grow. The seeds of knowledge!"

M: What was the last new author that really caught your attention? What were they doing that was the that’s different from what you usually see?

C: I actually started reading a book last week because I went to a literary awards ceremony and there was this author called Noreen Masud who’s written this book called ‘A Flat Place’. It's so interesting because it's about complex PTSD but it's a perspective of PTSD I’ve never heard before and she uses this very beautiful narrative prose to talk about her experience. It's mental health, tied in with history, tied in with these stories of her life and it's just so beautiful. It's also kind of nature writing, which is one of my favourite genres.

M: As a publisher, what ‘opposite things’ are you putting into practice, compared to traditional publishing houses?

C: As a publisher, I would say that the thing that we're doing differently is just publishing books that are somewhat slightly genre-less or have multiple genres. I think it's quite confusing sometimes for our stockists to know where to put the books on the shelf and we get questions about our readership because, for example, our latest book is for a young adult audience, but it's quite explicit about mental health and sex work. People get confused because they can't really put us in a box. That's how we're disrupting the system.

M: What is your relationship with your style, how you dress to work. Is it important to you?

C: I have thought about it in the past where I've been like maybe I'll just run this magazine and have a publishing business but only wear tracksuits and people will be like “What's the deal? Is she not professional?” And I would just be like “No, why do I have to look a certain way to be a certain person?”.

I think that that's something that we do with Worms, we're not trying to do what people expect of us, which you can do with clothes as well. You can dress really fancy and you can be really vulgar or be quite intellectual and dress in a tracksuit. I like messing with people in that way.

I guess my relationship with style is not something that I think about too much... but then again I'm also a young woman existing in the world, so I think about it a little bit. I would say that I use my clothes to express myself in a different way to my writing, a little bit more abstract, perhaps.