DUMMY is a new magazine of criticism dedicated to the obscure, difficult or overlooked. It will feature long-form writing on innovative, boundary-pushing work by artists and writers from historically underrepresented backgrounds and those supported by independent presses. Issue 1 is guest edited by Rachael Allen and Josie Mitchell.

In the essay that opens this first issue of DUMMY, Sarah Bernstein recalls teaching a course on the ‘politics of difficulty’, where she and her students learned to slow down and attend to the unsettled feelings a ‘difficult’ text can provoke – bewilderment, anger, disgust, fear – responses that can complicate, eclipse or enrich a reader’s sense of pleasure.

The essays gathered here all, in different ways, attend to the consequences of what it means to designate something as difficult, experimental, or above us in some way. To presuppose a person’s preferred reading material is to presuppose many things besides – reinforcing constraints that are neither neutral nor necessary.

Issue 1 contributors: Fatema Abdoolcarim, Batool Abu Akleen, Sarah Bernstein, June- Allison Gibbons, Remi Graves, Jennifer Hodgson, Stewart Home, Mira Mattar, Taylor Le Melle, Huw Lemmey, Rey Conquer, P. Eldridge, Lucy Mercer, and Zsófia Paulikovics. Designed by Rose Nordin.

From the outset, we wanted DUMMY to hold to a few core principles: to foreground the work of small presses; to commission writers working outside those established enclaves that too often define what is seen, reviewed, or valued; and – running through all of this like a powerful, life-giving river – to carve out space for books deemed ‘difficult’, especially those shaped by thinking through class and queerness, and by the material conditions that inform both.

To ask those who already shoulder the responsibility of activism and experimental writing to contribute to another communal and politicised project, can feel daunting. We wanted to ask writers who are already in conversation with these questions, and within this, to offer them space to write about these issues in whichever way they felt drawn to in this moment.

With DUMMY 1 we are not so much creating a community as offering another space to one that already exists – a space to sit, think, write, and live, in order to breach the attitudes within mainstream publishing that punch down and assume certain groups of people are capable of, or interested in, only one kind of language, story or book. And we hope, also, to celebrate the work of the dextrous, tenacious publishers who continue to back the demanding, the elusive, and the difficult. – Rachael Allen + Josie Mitchell

DUMMY has been generously supported with funds from Cockayne Foundation and through Arts Council Project Grants.