Maybe it’s quite selfish and self-indulgent, but I definitely use each issue to learn about a subject that I’m really into but want to learn more about. It definitely won’t be as linear as this, but my thinking went like this: where are all the women? What are the physical implications of women walking in the city? Do women interpret the city differently? How are walking and creativity linked? In the end, I concluded that there must be a magazine’s worth of women’s writing about this. Like most of the art and literary movements that I draw from, there were so few women involved. I’ve always been quite into The Situationist International, which was a group of intellectuals and artists who were into that. It’s a term that was coined by Guy Debord, and it emphasises the effects of geographical environments on people’s emotions. Psychogeography is basically mapping out the city via walking and thought. This issue of Worms touches on psychogeography, but also the Situationist movement from a non-male perspective. We caught up with MacLeod about the contents of the magazine, the joys of reading and writing, and the importance of self-indulgence amongst it all. “I remember interviewing Fiona Duncan years back, and she said that she got a lot of the ideas for her book Exquisite Mariposa while she was on the move, putting them down on her phone or via voice notes.”īy following a similar path, this is how Worms #4 came together: on-the-fly and organically. MacLeod immersed herself in podcasts about psychogeography, a term that refers to the emotional impact a physical space can have on someone and one of the running themes throughout Worms #4. “I started to become obsessed with the idea of walking and what it does for your creativity, and things spiralled from there.” “Towards the end of putting together the previous issue, I was in a really good momentum and I specifically remember the walk to my studio every day being really good for clarity of mind,” MacLeod says. Now working part-time at cult East London bookshop Donlon Books, the Londoner is determined to keep literature as fun and accessible as possible. Over the last couple of years, MacLeod has lured fellow bookworms in with esoteric topics such as myth-making and “revolting women”, alongside contributions from writers on the fringes as well as the more established voices of Queer Intentions author Amelia Abraham, Maggie Nelson, Caroline Calloway and Lynne Tillman. Now, she feels more inspired than ever to provide London’s young literary nerds with a space they might not have had access to otherwise, an antidote to the gatekeeping and sneeriness often associated with academia.
Turns out plenty of people did – enough for MacLeod to release three more issues, including the brand new Worms #4. Rather it was a literary celebration of female and non-binary writers such as transgressive phenom Kathy Acker and I Love Dick author Chris Kraus.Īs an added bonus, it allowed MacLeod to turn her love for reading and writing about, well, reading and writing, into something tangible for others to enjoy. After all, Worms #1 wasn’t a traditional fashion title.
Studying fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins, the 26-year-old felt her publishing project was a bit of a rogue move. In 2019, when Clem MacLeod launched the inaugural issue of her literary magazine Worms as part of her university final project, she would never have guessed that, only two years later, it’d become a fully-fledged publication and community.
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