Worms #7 'Artists who Write and Writers who Art'

It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.

Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.

Cover art by Rufus Shakespeare

In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort. 

The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more. 

We hope that this issue can be a flame of hope, inspiration, or something that simply sustains in such turbulent times.

Featuring 
Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson 

Contributors
Stella Murphy , Ben Redhead, Phoenix Yemi, Sam Moore, Devils Claws, Pierce Eldridge, Manon Mikolaitis, Caitlin McLoughlin, Isabel MacCarthy, Elodie Saint-Louis , Nettle Grellier, Amelia Abraham, Ryan Pfluger, Rose Higham-Stainton , Emma Crabtree, Ignota, Lydia Luke, Chloe Sheppard , Clem MacLeod , Carolyne Loreé Teston , Emma Cohen, Olive Couri, Raheela Suleman , No Land , Jacqueline Ennis-Cole , Sufia Ikbal-Doucet, Rhett Hammerton, Zara Joan Miller , Kate Morgan , Bug Shepherd-Barron, Zoe Freilich , Slutty Cheff , Clemmie Bache , Violet Conroy , Sarah White , Jemima Skala , Stephanie Francis-Shanahan

Drama, careers, sabotage, compromises... The first issue of Suckcess Magazine begins with a selection of poems by the flamboyant Rene Ricard, edited with the help of Editions Lutanie, and continues with contributions from Miriam Laura Leonardi, Fabienne Audéoud, Camille Aleña, Gabi Losoncy, David Lieske, Sylvie Fanchon, Won Jin Choi, Estelle Hoy, and Bunny Rogers. Cartoons and tennis players are also on the program.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal

A collection of Philippa Snow's most celebrated writings, articulating with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art.
Snow Business marks Philippa Snow's emergence as one of the twenty-first century's greatest cultural critics. From the 2000s into the 2010s, reality television and "second-screen media," designed to play in the background while we look at phones, have proliferated, inaugurating the dumbient age. Celebrities have never been more ordinary; there have never been so many ordinary people who are celebrities.

A collection of her writing from the last half-decade, Snow Business articulates with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art. The memoirs of Pamela Anderson and the Kardashian sisters are just as worthy exemplars of "autofiction" as the writing of Olivia Laing and Annie Ernaux; Spring Breakers has succeeded in updating The Great Gatsby; and we are still afraid of Francis Bacon.

Snow has no interest in distinctions of high and low culture. If masterpieces of fiction, painting and cinema reflect back to us some vital and mysterious part of ourselves, mass-distributed popular culture does the same thing, and often with greater clarity and violence—if we are only brave enough to look. Fortunately, Snow does the looking for us.

Alongside her essays are also works of fiction, vignettes whose protagonists are actors, singers, child stars. These are strange, sometimes conspiratorial, and often nightmarish. Just as Snow Business can describe culture with stunning clarity, it can inhabit culture's moving parts, making it again something indescribable, a sensuous vision, a complete fever dream.

Philippa Snow is a writer whose work has redefined contemporary criticism through her analysis of popular culture, art, and media. Her work regularly appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, The New Republic, The Nation, The White Review, and the Financial Times. She is the author of Which As You Know Means Violence (Repeater, 2022), Trophy Lives (Mack, 2024), and It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me (Virago, 2025). Through her keen examination of reality television, celebrity culture, and high art, Snow illuminates the increasingly blurred boundaries between popular entertainment and artistic expression in the twenty-first century.

This thrid edition of mnemotope magazine features pieces from contributors that range from playlist, recipes to poetic essays to drawings to private messages to a screenplay and beyond.

Mnemotope is a community magazine, published by bog bodies press. Mnemotope magazine takes this as its inspiration-it acts as a place in which lots of stories from across timelines and borders can sit together, and cultural memories can interact. It exists to create and hold the expression and knowledge of its diverse community, because of this, the contents of the magazine are wonderfully varied; some confessional poetry, some hastily notated recipes, some fiction, some history, lots of other things, all submitted during an open call. The format put spreads together of contributions that seem to somehow be in dialogue with one another.

The name of the magazine comes from a term that's used in writings about archaeological finds - it's a little complex when we speak about it abstractly, so take, for example, a bog body. A bog body is an object, but when we look at one it takes on another function as an image. This image is the part beyond the physicality of the object-it's what makes us think about what the world must have been like when this person was walking on it, what they looked like, what they did, who found them, how much the area they were found in must have changed and so on and so on and so on. A mnemotope is something that compresses time, and allows you to be in the bog two thousand years ago and in the museum looking at the body and at home reading about it all at once.

Telling Invents Told is the first collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes.

It includes the influential essay Whose History? alongside texts from works such as Light Reading, Pictures on Pink Paper and A Cold Draft, together with new and previously unpublished materials. Since the 1970s, Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language. Her writing addresses urgent political issues – from the refugee crisis to workers’ rights, police brutality, racial discrimination and homelessness – as well as film history and theory, from a feminist perspective.

An important figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, Rhodes was also a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists.