Some of you may know me from the magazines I used to run. Leste was a risograph printed journal of new erotica, founded in 2015. I did twelve issues of it and then quit, largely due to suffocating debt but also because I was frightened by what it had become.
In 2018, I founded Doof, a glossy food magazine. Much like Leste, it both drove me into debt and got way too big, way too fast, attracting careerists and opportunists from every corner of the world—the worst of the worst.
My intent with both publications had been independent, ad-free media. I wanted to publish the unpublishable, the people who fell through the cracks, the writers who did not aspire to fame. I realize now that I was very naive to think that the careerist class wouldn’t come knocking, that clout chasers and the like wouldn’t immediately latch themselves onto either magazine.
Because they did.
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