Printed Matters: Fare

Photo: POST

By Sara Bellini

Sometime during the first lockdown, I found myself longingly holding a copy of a beautifully designed magazine called Fare that I had picked up because of the word ‘Glasgow’ in all caps on the cover. It was already clear to me at that time that my trips to the UK were cancelled for the immediate future and possibly indefinitely - so I started exploring momentarily inaccessible places through literature.

Reading Fare turned out to be an immersive experience where I would go back and forth from the page to my memory. The texture and complexity of the city were there: the sounds and smells as well as the visuals, and most importantly the taste. Glasgow is not an obvious place where to look for outstanding culinary experiences, and yet if you’re open to serendipity, you’ll find plenty of them.

Fare is a travel magazine focusing largely on food, one city at a time. It was founded three years ago by Ben Mervis - food writer and contributor to Netflix Chef’s Table - combining his degree in medieval history, his experience working at noma and his passion for writing. It would be more precise to state that the magazine is about the cultural scene of a specific place, as it doesn’t feature only tasty treats. But culture is an abstract and general term, while Fare looks at the particular with a meticulous and gentle eye.  

Beside Glasgow, Fare has been to Istanbul, Helsinki, Charleston (SC), Seoul and Tbilisi and the latest issue on Antwerp is just out now. The choice of location as well as the themes of the articles set the magazine apart from more mainstream publications, which tend to stick to big names and offer a polished and homogeneous image of a city. Rather than featuring well-known Michelin-star chefs, Fare looks for stories of ordinary people that have managed to create - inside or outside their kitchens - something valuable for the community around them. The way these stories are captured in full colour - through words, photography or illustrations - makes sure they can be enjoyed by readers that have never been to or will never visit the place they’re reading about.

Food is a vessel to pass on traditions and link generations across time and sometimes across space, like in the case of Punjabi immigrants in 2019 Scotland. It’s also the glue of community, especially in multi-ethnic and economically diverse cities. Food brings people together to share something that goes beyond your five-a-day and is rooted into collective memory. Food is about people and the relationships between them, as well as their relationship with the place(s) they call home. That’s why it’s important to tell these stories and we hope Fare will keep doing so for a long time.

Here is our chat with Ben Mervis:

Photo: POST

What have you learnt from Fare in the past three years?

I've learned so much: about Fare itself (what it is and isn't), and about creating a magazine. Most indie publishers like myself have little or no prior experience with magazine publishing before getting started. As a magazine, we've really found confidence in our voice and design in the last couple of issues. In some ways, I regret Fare not being a quarterly magazine, because each issue is a chance to improve on the last, to tweak things that went wrong and try out new ideas! I'd love to have more opportunities for doing that.

Could you talk a bit about the connection between food, history, community and culture at the heart of the magazine?

Yeah! So my background is in history--medieval history--however, I fell into the food world when I moved to Copenhagen several years ago. Traveling around the world with my then-boss, René Redzepi, I began to understand new cultures through their food: meeting cooks and craftsmen and hearing local histories tied to food production or technique or ingredients. It was incredibly fascinating. When I started Fare it was a very natural convergence of all of those things.

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format? 

To be honest I chose print before I knew or had decided anything about the magazine itself! This came as a love of print.

How do you pick a city and which aspects of its culinary scene to highlight?

City selection is about creating a balance within the 'series' and choosing cities that are different enough to make each issue feel wholly unique and its own.

What are the literary inspirations behind Fare?

One was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I love the idea that the same city could be described in a thousand different ways.

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them? 

For the time being, Covid restricts our travel, so we're changing the structure of our magazine slightly to bring on a guest curator. They're an individual who intimately knows the featured city, and we collaborate with them on finding the right voices and themes for the issue. That's something you'll see for Issue 8 and Issue 9.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share with our readers?

One thing we're really buoyed by is the fact that, in times like this, a desire to travel has not faded--even if the opportunities to do so have. We're really encouraged by the fact that so many people have written to us to say how Fare has helped them 'travel' in this time when armchair travel may be the closest they get to the real thing! 

Pick up a copy of Fare at Rosa Wolf in Berlin or at one of their many distributors across the UK and Europe. And if going into a shop is not a possibility, you can order it online.

Printed Matters: Flaneur

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

By Sara Bellini

To relaunch our series on physical magazines, we started from the city where, for very obvious reasons, we have spent almost the entirety of the past few months. At the same time we wanted to reach out to the world, to emphasise what has become particularly evident since the beginning of the pandemic: How local and global are connected. Flaneur is a Berlin-based publication that aims at exploring this connection by centering each issue on a single street in all its details, and on how the details that build the individuality of a place also fit in a universal framework. 

Flaneur has a multidisciplinary and collective approach to its subject. This translates into physically exploring a place while collaborating with local creatives and stretching the artistic possibilities across different fields and beyond a predefinite structure. The launch of the Taipei issue in summer 2019 was a twenty-hour festival at HKW in Berlin, merging performance, exhibition, readings and music, to transcend the medium of the magazine and highlight the social fabric at the base of the publication.

While Covid has delayed their production process, we caught up with Flaneur publisher Ricarda Messner and editors in chief Fabian Saul and Grashina Gabelmann.

What are the goals and motivations behind your publication and why did you choose the physical magazine as a form?

Ricarda: The idea for the concept to go with “one street per issue“ was a personal tool to reconnect with known territory. I was born in Berlin and spent most of my life here. There was an urge for me to find my own place within the city without being too overwhelmed, so I started with something that was familiar to me, not knowing what would come out of it. Grashina and Fabian came up with the brilliant editorial framework around this very concrete concept, translating it into an unpredictable but still conceptual approach. So I guess, looking back, it wasn’t so much about the idea of making a magazine but more about establishing this “inner journey“ in an artistic, collaborative way that people can associate themselves with.

You define your creative process as “collaborative, impulsive and unconventional” - what do you mean by that?

Grashina: Since we often arrive at a place without knowing the city, its inhabitants or the street we will choose, having no flat-plan, editorial plan, or financial structure, we consider our method to be quite impulsive and unconventional. I think any magazine is collaborative but we emphasise this point as the content isn't written by us about artists but is made by artists specifically for the magazine and its concept.

How do you pick a place and what makes a place?

Grashina: We arrive in the chosen city oftentimes without knowing it at all. We might have one or two contacts but we basically start from the position of knowing nothing and no one and just walk. We mostly walk alone, sometimes with locals who we meet somehow and listen to their stories. Mostly though we let our intuition guide us and the street choice is based on a certain feeling, a sense of curiosity we feel or something disturbing or something for us unusual. Once we decide on the street - and this can take two days or two weeks - we spend almost every day there [for a couple of months].

Fabian: In collaboration with our contributors, we immerse ourselves into the place beyond what meets the eye and beyond the narratives of positivity that travel magazines perpetuate. We allow multi-voiced pieces that not always form one solid perspective but rather create a fragmented image that does not confirm [standard] exciting narratives but allows for contradiction. It is a very psychogeographic approach. The flaneur is concerned with things that may soon vanish and thus he walks the line between being a melancholic nostalgic but also being able to project into the future and beyond the realm of the visible, an avantgarde figure. Flaneuring is about seeing the plurality of truths in the urban fabric that surrounds us. It is those dark sides flaneuring can lead us to and the plurality of truths that form the literary realm we see the magazine in.

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

What’s your relationship with the creative scene of the cities you feature?

Grashina: Our contributors are chosen once we get to know the place and meet people. We like to call it a domino-effect where meeting one person will lead us to meeting three more etc. In Brazil we met 120 people during our time there but of course not everyone became a contributor - that crystalizes sometimes immediately and sometimes after weeks, through an organic process based on spending time with people, trusting our intuition and having great dialogues/walks.

You are about to launch a podcast - what are your plans for it and what’s its relationship with the magazine?

Grashina: Each season will feature a street we have already worked with. Season 1 will revisit Kantstrasse [in Berlin]. The podcast - though it's almost more like an audio play - does not simply regurgitate the content that one can find in the magazine, but approaches those themes in new ways. The audio format allows us to experiment with storytelling in a different way than the magazine does. What stays the same is that the content of the podcast, like the magazine, is fragmented, literary, subjective and experimental. We performed a sneak preview of Episode 1 on the rooftop of HKW this summer. We wanted to experiment with what a live collective listening session could be. There were four performers and three musicians performing and two voices that had been pre-recorded. We intend to keep experimenting with bringing the podcast into different spaces for audiences. 

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them?

Grashina: We were meant to start production in Paris for Issue 09 this Spring but Covid obviously delayed this. We are now back to speaking with the Goethe Institut in Paris, establishing new timelines and funding opportunities and plan to continue production this fall. Six months after lock-down began in Berlin, we feel a bit more able to assess the situation and will see this as an opportunity to challenge our own approach and come up with new methodologies.

Find out where you can purchase Flaneur in your city or order it online. Support independent bookshops and publishers!

Five Questions for... Vanessa Berry

Interview by Sara Bellini:

We love zines, maps, psychogeography and archives, which is why we really wanted to speak to Vanessa Berry. She started making zines in the 1990s and is the creator of the long-running Disposable Camera, the last issue of which was published a few days ago. Besides making zines Vanessa writes a psychogeography blog Mirror Sydney, exploring “the marginal places and details of the city of Sydney” and in 2017 she also published a collection of essays and hand-drawn maps with the omonimous title.

Vanessa’s work is equally autobiographical and historical, exploring her personal relationship with place and memory as well as the stories that belong to a specific place. In the case of Australia where the pre-colonial memory of the island has been highly disregarded, Vanessa always writes “with acknowledgement of the Aboriginal lands”, reminding us that we should always be respectful of spaces that we share with others and that many others before us have respectfully preserved.

Vanessa’s newest project is a book of essays on place, memory and relationships with animals and the 20th anniversary issue of her other zine I am a Camera.

What does home mean to you?

My connection to the physical environment is strong and deeply-felt and always has been. I attribute this to being a quiet and introspective person, an observer who has always felt a kinship with the environment around me - its objects, creatures, details, changes, daily rhythms - as much as with other people. I do a lot of work at home, in a small and cluttered room amid piles of books and papers, and this is probably where I feel most at home. Although writing is also a kind of home for me, if you see me with a notebook open and I'm writing in it, know that this is when I feel most connected with the world. Perhaps that's what home means to me: feeling connected to where I am, wherever that be.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

My mental map of Sydney is made up of many such places I feel a special connection to. Generally they fall under the categories of anomalies, places of respite and places of solace. In the latter category there's a particular headland overlooking the Pacific Ocean that I go to at times of significance or difficulty. The city's eastern edge is a long stretch of coastline, scalloped into bays and beaches between sandstone cliffs. The approach to this particular headland is a stretch of parkland which rises up to a rocky outcrop. I sit on the grass and watch the magpies which patrol it. A group of them live here, and whenever I am there I see them moving across the lawn, heads cocked, listening for insects under the soil. One time, when I was sitting on the rocks, they assembled in front of me and all started singing, which felt like a gift from them and from this place, which never fails to make my spirit feel lighter.

What is beyond your front door?

Having lived in the same house for almost a decade, this scene is now permanently established in my mind's eye and I could describe it to the utmost detail, however I will keep it brief: a low brick fence with a crooked front gate made of wrought iron shaped into hearts and curls. Beyond this, lining the street, is a row of native fig trees. Directly across from the house is an olive-green metal box a few metres long which I like to imagine holds the street's secrets, but is actually an electricity substation. At the corner of the yard is a hibiscus tree which is often in flower. People like to pick them as they walk past and I don't have the heart to tell them that once you do, the flowers close up very quickly.

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I am writing this answer on a plane which is flying over a scene below where the land meets the sea in an outline of bays and rivers, and the sun has dispersed to an orange glow on the horizon. I'm listening to the new Gwenno album, Le Kov. Tucked into the seat pocket in front of me is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee and an issue of Elementum. My watching, for now, is all out the oval frame of the plane window, thinking about the ocean below, the atmosphere above, and how it feels to be suspended in between.

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And we're back... with a call for submissions!

Did you miss us? It has taken a little longer than we would have liked but the good ship Elsewhere is sailing once more. Starting this week, we will be bringing more writing, visual arts, music, events, interviews and other place-related literature and art to the Elsewhere: A Journal of Place website as well as a revamped newsletter detailing everything we are up to that we plan to send out twice a month. You can sign up for the newsletter here. To get us started though, the big news is that we have finalised our plans for the next print issue of the journal, and we want your submissions.

ELSEWHERE NO.06: TO THE MOUNTAINS!

The sixth issue of our print journal will be published in Autumn 2019 in a limited edition print run and we have opened a submissions window that will run until the 30 June.

We are doing something different with this sixth edition of our print journal and invite submissions of prose, poetry, illustration, photography or other visual arts that are related to our theme of place and that have the name of an individual mountain as the title.

GUIDELINES FOR PRINT SUBMISSIONS

Beyond the limitations set by the title, for prose (fiction or nonfiction) there is an upper word limit of 5000 words and we would like to read completed pieces. For visual arts we are happy to consider a proposal but it would be great to see some examples of your work. Please send all submissions for Elsewhere No.06 to paul@elsewhere-journal.com.

Please note that, unfortunately, we do not pay contributors to Elsewhere. We have long had this as our aim, but the project as it is right now cannot sustain it. As a literary journal with a small print-run and sales, with no advertising or any external support, we have very little room for manoeuvre. In the four years since we have launched, neither Paul, Julia or any of the team have been paid for their work on the journal.

Remember: The deadline for all submissions is 30 June 2019

WRITING FOR THE BLOG

We are always open to submissions for the blog where there is no theme other than place. We are especially interested in work that would benefit from being published online, such as film and music, and when it comes to prose we rarely accept work for online publication that is more than 1000 words. To submit your writing, photography, artwork, music, illustration or film on the subject of place for the blog the address is paul@elsewhere-journal.com.

EVENTS & EXHIBITIONS

We would also like to use the blog to showcase any place-related events, readings and exhibitions, anywhere in the world. If you have something that you think would be of interest to our readers, please let us know.

PRE-ORDERS FOR ELSEWHERE NO.06

The financial situation at a literary journal such as ours is always precarious, and so we will be hoping to sell as many copies of Elsewhere No.06 in advance as possible. Unlike with previous issues, No.06 will be only available through our website. We will be making the issue available for pre-order in the summer so please sign up for our newsletter to keep track of where we are up to. In the meantime, if you would like to support the journal, please consider buying one of our back issues or a double set via our online shop.

We are really pleased to be moving with Elsewhere once more, and we can’t wait to see what we get, both for the print issue and also for here on the blog. Thanks to everything who has supported the project up to now, and for your patience since Christmas.

Paul & Julia

Printed Matters: The Line Between Two Towns

We are really excited about this place-related project from our friend and Elsewhere contributor Laura Harker. The Line Between Two Towns is a new zine that explored the Esk Valley line between Middlesborough and Whitby in northern England, bringing together writers, poets, artists and photographers who have all been inspired by the different destinations on the line between the two towns. Here is Laura's introduction to the zine, and you can order your copy online here.

The idea behind this zine came from wanting to explore the differences between Whitby and Middlesbrough, and all the unique nuances and cultures that set them apart from one another. Though there are such stark differences between the two towns, there is still one thing that brings them together: the Esk Valley Railway.

It clocks in at only 36 miles long, but the Middlesbrough and Whitby line was once part of a larger network of railways that covered the area until many lines were closed after Dr. Beeching’s cuts. Thankfully, the line remained open due to its popularity. Originally intended to serve the mines and quarries across the region, the Esk Valley line quickly became a hit with Teessiders who realised that it placed the North Yorkshire seaside just over an hour away.

Over the past few decades, the area’s industry has disappeared, Brits have set their sights on sunny European beaches, and the line is now rarely busy except for Bank Holiday weekends. But it continues to be an important lifeline for many in the villages it passes through, connecting them to Middlesbrough and Whitby.

I was born in Middlesbrough but we moved to Glaisdale, just outside Whitby, when I was 11. Carefully picked up from my urban childhood, I was transplanted to the countryside where most other kids were members of the Young Farmers and thought my Boro accent came from Ireland. Even though my childhood so far had been spent less than 30 miles from Whitby, I realised there was a large gulf between these two locations – industrially, culturally and aesthetically.

This isn’t something that bothered me that much until I moved to Berlin and I was constantly asked the same question: Where are you from? When Germans and other non-Brits asked, the answer was easy – I went with North Yorkshire. But when Brits asked, expecting a more specific pinpoint for their mental map, I couldn’t bring myself to give just one answer.

I couldn’t just say Whitby and ignore Middlesbrough or that would be turning my back on my first decade, family ties, and roots as a Teessider. But I couldn’t simply say Middlesbrough, as I’d spent 15 years on the moors by this point. My Boro accent is long gone and my Middlesbrough geography gets hazy whenever I step off Linthorpe Road in the centre of town – I can’t quite stomach saying I’m a true Teessider. And so I thought about writing a personal essay on this identity crisis and the towns that sparked it, using the Esk Valley Railway to bind it all together. When I realised there was just too much for me to say, I decided to make this zine and open it up to submissions to try and create something of a printed tapestry of the area.

The zine includes works from local writers, poets, artists and photographers, all of which have been inspired by stops along the line. Threading together their work along the context of the Esk Valley Line, I wanted the zine to explore the cultural and landscape shifts that can be found taking this particular train journey, from starting in Middlesbrough surrounded by tired factories and ending in Whitby just steps from the beach. And it might actually help me figure out what to say whenever someone asks me where I’m from.