Taking the EXIT

EXIT Press is dead; long live EXIT Press.

Our journey as EXIT Press has come to an end. We have a lot to say in this post, but we wanted to get the basics out of the way: effective as of this post, EXIT Press is no more. We will not be publishing any further works, including LOST FUTURES. We were working on a few single authored publications, but we have already been in contact with these authors ahead of this post. At the end of this post, there will be some details on how to get your hands on the remaining copies of LOST FUTURES for postage costs.

The EXIT story

We started EXIT Press in November 2020 with this tweet.

At the time, I (kieran) was doing The Artist’s Way, I guess as a way to get through serial lockdowns. 2020 was a weird year, as I’m sure you all remember. I’d spent the time since March hitting a kind of internal reset—noticing the ways I was enjoying not being forced to interact in public every single day (the first sign of a later-to-be-identified-neurodivergence), not having to commute, being able to get into closer contact with my emotions. I was able to return to my past in a way that I had wanted to for ages but still been unable to do. Most importantly, I was able to take my writing seriously.

The Artist’s Way talks a good game about just doing it. I was out for my government-mandated-one-hour-of-walk one day (don’t tell anyone, but I actually walked for around three hours a day back then), and the idea came to me, clear as day: I should make an anthology zine about lost futures. Earlier that year, I’d had an idea for a design research project called the Museum of Lost Futures, where people would make objects from futures that never manifested from them and we would exhibit them. That never manifested in that form, because of the pandemic, but I was really taken with the idea.  (The museum did eventually happen in some form, though, as The Museum of Lost Futures // Archive of Found Histories). What would it be like to create that museum in zine form?

I turned to one of my closest friends, Christian Kitson, and said “hey, I’m making a zine and I think it’s exactly what you should be writing right now”. A bunch of people submitted to volume 1, and I started putting the whole thing together. It was one of my favourite things I’d ever done, at that point. We’d had a particularly foggy winter in the North East, and that had blessed me with all manner of atmospheric background shots. Then, in December, I went to my hometown and found all manner of lost futures that eventually graced our pages. I’d been struggling to find a cover shot, but then finally managed to one foggy day when the pier where I’d sort-of-forcibly-proposed-to-my-girlfriend-at-thirteen (really, you should read LOST FUTURES vol 1) was shrouded in fog, and I knew that was it. LOST FUTURES vol 1: in search of lost time was born.

Christian and I set to work on a volume 2 pretty quickly. We were quickly overwhelmed with submissions whilst we fully sold out of our first volume. LOST FUTURES captured a very particular pandemic moment, and it was pretty difficult to retain that when the world tried to go back to a former version of itself. Vol 2: still life came out, and it helped us gather more of an audience; vol 3: meanwhile… launched alongside the Beyond Life and Death: Twin Peaks at 30 conference; vol 4: thresholds trialled an entirely new visual style that broke ground for us as a zine and really helped to showcase the work we published.

LOST FUTURES captured the feeling of being stuck in the limbo that was the lockdown years, in my opinion. It was the right place for a certain kind of yearning. But as we started to move out of that phase of time, both Christian and I recognised that we wanted to produce more than just LOST FUTURES, ideally; that was just one of our interests. That’s where EXIT Press came in. I remember a long call one night where we ran through potential names ad nauseam, before settling on EXIT. It captured what we were interested in at that moment—finding another side, a way out of the things so many of us have been trapped in, a new way of living. It was also yet another vague reference to Mark Fisher’s work, in its vaguely L/Acc-y sentiment. As EXIT, we also published We can collect the keys by the wonderful Clive Judd and Patrick Wray, and This Time of Life is Meant for Savages by the incomparable Leonie Rowland. We love both works fiercely.

We brought our friend Eve Michell into the mix somewhere along the way too, as her keen eye for editing, her brilliant work ethic, her beautiful writing, and her excellent communication skills were all things we were sorely lacking. Christian, Eve and I had all been friends at school and in some ways this was a reunion that we all needed, a reason to deliberately reconnect and spend time in relationship with each other.

It was also very fucking hard.

Why are we closing?

See above: it was very fucking hard.

We became a small press through nothing other than our will to become a press. That is not a very effective way of doing it. None of us have ever taken a salary from EXIT, because it was deliberately a labour of love, politics, and artistic action. As EXIT, we wanted to do as much as we could to get people published who hadn’t been published before, to build people’s confidence, and to get experimental work out there. We definitely did all of that.

But doing something as significant as running a press, no matter how small you are, takes time, and that is something we all found ourselves with decreasing amounts of. Anyone who has worked with us over the years can attest to the fact that at times we have been slow, sloppy, and unprofessional. Inconsistent, certainly. It took us forever to get volume 4 of LOST FUTURES out; We can collect the keys only did so well because Clive Judd and Patrick Wray believed so much in their own work; This Time of Life is Meant for Savages was a success because Leonie Rowland made something wonderful and was a brilliant advocate for her work.

We are great editors, writers, and designers. We definitely have an eye for emerging work and how to help it to grow to a different place. We are poor salespeople and marketers. With the collapse of Twitter, our central market disappeared basically overnight. The end of lockdowns changed the dynamics in that space anyway. We saw the change coming, tried to steel ourselves by moving over to Substack where we sort of had control over our audience, but the port was very partial. Unfortunately, we know all the things we’d need to do to make our sales and marketing operation better, but we have no time to do it in. We all have full-time jobs, and lives, and loves, and hobbies other than publishing zines and books.

We were all getting increasingly burned out by the labour of continuing to do this. We took a hiatus, as most people do, because we thought an extended break was the right way to reset and come back fresh to the work. What it actually did was expose the fundamental truth at the heart of our work: that we just can’t devote enough time to it to do justice to the work we’re trying to publish. And if we believe in that work, which we do, it’s irresponsible to continue to do so.

So we reached the incredibly hard decision of closing EXIT Press. It’s been such a wonderful few years, and we have loved the people we’ve met and the work we’ve published along the way. This isn’t the first time that we’ve almost closed EXIT: back in late 2022, we strongly considered bowing out with a final issue of LOST FUTURES entitled “the funeral”, but our friends convinced us that we played too vital a role to just disappear. Whilst we may have played that role, we also need to find the time for the other things in life.

Remaining copies of zines

The remaining copies of Keys and Savages are being distributed to their respective authors. Get in contact with them if you’d like to buy a copy. As for LOST FUTURES—we have some leftover copies of volumes 2, 3, and 4. If you’d like a copy, please head over to our Big Cartel site where we are selling the remaining copies for free+postage. We want this work to be in the world and circulating!

Memories of EXIT

We’d love to hear from any of you—either on this post, or via email (editors[at]exits[dot]org[dot]uk)—your memories of EXIT and LOST FUTURES. We have loved getting to know you all over the past four years. It’s been truly magical, and I think we’ve made some lifelong friends. We were so honoured to be some people’s first publication venue, we loved the Keys launches we did with Clive and Patrick, we enjoyed every single zine or publisher’s fair that we went to and we are proud to have our final publication be some of the most captivating and tender horror we have ever read.

If you have any memories of EXIT or what role we have played in your life, we’d love to hear. Let’s celebrate this ending. Let’s be glad we took the EXIT.

If you want to keep up with Kieran, you can follow their Substack, follow them on Instagram or Twitter, or get in contact via hello[at]kierancutting[dot]co[dot]uk.

If you want to keep up with Christian, you can get in contact via @chr_kitson on Twitter.

If you want to keep up with Eve, you can follow her on Instagram at @evemichelley, on Twitter at @evelloyd_ or add her on LinkedIn.