Just over two years ago, the seed that would become EXIT Press was planted. After six weeks grappling with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I posted a call for submissions for a zine on my blog:
I always loved the film Sliding Doors when I was younger. The idea that if one tiny event happened differently, we would be in a different world entirely. At the same time, I've been working more and more with Mark Fisher's idea of hauntology – the shadows and contours of worlds that never quite made it into existence. Of worlds that could have been, and then weren't. We know these worlds exist at a large scale, but these worlds exist for all of us, too. The weekends you didn't spend with the person you wanted to. The tiny coincidences that make up the constellation of a human life.
And with that, LOST FUTURES was born. Through each successive lockdown, I’d been trying to go deeper and deeper inside of myself and let out some of the art that had been stewing there for decades. My friends went on that journey with me, and we’d have great conversations about trying to make art in a global crisis. I’d use my ‘hour of exercise’ to walk around a deserted Newcastle talking to my closest friends (Christian, Dean, Eve) about life and art. I think I was trying to find something to grow in the midst of what was so clearly such an awful time.
The idea of LOST FUTURES resonated with people, and we got a few submissions. In that first issue, I ended up working alongside Christian, as we padded the pages with our work and we cultivated an aesthetic together. In December 2020, as I was designing our first issue, in search of lost time, I returned to our hometown of Medway and found myself aimlessly walking the streets of my youth, turned ghost town by the impending Tier 4 restrictions. The weather dropped to freezing fog. One day, I came across a place that was once important to me, a badly-healed scar, and I knew that I’d found the feel of LOST FUTURES.
The rest, as they say, is history. We published more issues of the zine, constantly playing around with form and structure to try to find something that fit our voice. We published We can collect the keys, a psychogeographic drift narrative written by the brilliantly perceptive Clive Judd and illustrated by the talented hand of Patrick Wray. We hosted launch events and got to know so many of you – artists, writers, photographers, collagers, or just people interested in hauntology and weird shit. We slowly saw outside of the one zine, and saw ourselves as a small press – EXIT Press – and we brought on one of our closest friends, Eve Michell, who also knows the marshes and rust of our hometown.
That brings us to today, and the launch of our Substack. Like many of you, we’ve been worried by the implosion of Twitter and the fragmentation it’s going to create across the small press community. We want to make sure that no matter what happens, we keep in contact with all of the people who have helped to make EXIT what it is today. We want to let you know about our new work, sure, but we also want to preserve the relationships we’ve built over the past two years.
So we’d love for you to sign up to our Substack at the bottom of this post. We’re aiming to be in your inbox twice a week, bringing you:
the latest news on what we’re doing, what we’re working on, and our new releases,
a behind-the-scenes look at our zine production process,
the work in LOST FUTURES volume 1 published digitally for the first time,
interviews with the authors and artists we publish about their creative process and artistic fascinations,
new art – from us and others – published directly to Substack, and
calls for submission for our upcoming projects.
Substack is an interactive platform. Yes, you get our posts straight to your inbox, but you can also comment directly on our posts and link to your own. We see this as the next step in building the community around our small press, one that will help us in our mission of getting more first-time artists published and getting more weird, hauntological, nostalgic art into the world. That means if you subscribe to EXIT Signs (for free!), you can help to shape the future of what EXIT Press becomes.
It’s been a good two years. Here’s to many more.
kieran, christian and eve