To shine a spotlight on local literary magazines, Kill Your Darlings is showcasing the work of exciting publishers across the country. In this first instalment, meet Aniko Press, an independent publication based in Sydney. We chat to founder Emily Riches, who shares an essay from the magazine’s latest print edition, Double.
Why did you start Aniko Press?
I’m a long-time reader and lover of literary mags (with a prized stack of Canary Press back issues). Having always wanted to work with words, I decided to start my own at the beginning of the pandemic as something to focus on other than impending doom, and as a way to connect with writers and follow a passion.
Could you describe the magazine in five words?
Exciting, playful, unexpected, eye-catching and experimental.
What kind of writing do you publish?
In our print mag, you can find poetry, short stories, creative nonfiction and, most recently, comics. We look for unique, exciting and challenging work by new and emerging writers.
Any exciting projects that writers should know about?
We will be running a Flash Fiction Competition from 21 August to 10 September (but if you miss this one we have four competitions a year over winter and summer). We are open to rolling submissions of paid guest book reviews for the budding critics out there.
Where can writers and readers find you?
The magazine can be found in indie bookstores across the country—there’s a list of stockists on our website—and is available online. You can find our Instagram at @anikopress.
Can you tell us a bit about the piece you’re sharing today?
Emma Yearwood is an emerging writer from Naarm, and ‘We see through a crack’ is a creative nonfiction piece published in Issue 4: Double. It’s a piece with quiet charge and intensity, which carefully builds up the textures of daily life both on and offline in short, luminous fragments. It’s also very funny! Emma’s use of specific, intimate details and playful observations make this piece unique, and it resonated perfectly with the theme of ‘double’ in both form and content.
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‘We see through a crack’ by Emma Yearwood
I religiously check to see if a man I have a crush on has watched my Instagram story. He does about eighty percent of the time.
Cristina Rivera Garza: I remember the passage of the light. The word: ‘filter’. The word: ‘wedge’. Above all, I remember that everything we see, we see through a crack. I remember, right now, how it saves us.
I think about how I do not deeply understand how any of the technology I obsessively use every day works. How there is no hope of me taking it all apart and putting it back together again.
I think about how the private versus public dichotomy is a product of modernity, at least in the West. How in medieval England everyone shared beds, even strangers. How the separation between work and home did not exist.
I am obsessed with English writer Olivia Laing’s garden and lounge room, which feature heavily on her Instagram account.
How it has all saved me from the loneliest of times.
At work a woman with bright red cracking lipstick tells me how she has written fifty thousand words of ‘they call it autofiction’ about her double life in the 80s. Her corporate life and her life with the dancers and choreographers. The affairs.
Double lives stay on my mind. The double selves of online/offline, work/home, Instagram/Twitter, family/friends, alone/social. Binaries that inform each other but exist at a breach, a seep.
A friend publicly swears off the dating app Hinge for a full month. It has become the first thing she looks at when she wakes. It is the first thing I look at when I wake. Instead the friend will go to a bookstore every day for a month and post about it on Instagram.
Kate Zambreno: I scattered myself in fragments online.
I have begun to feel that Junior, Eddy, Bea and Zari—characters on Duolingo—are my friends. I spend ten productive minutes with them every morning.
I re-download Twitter. The first thing I do is DM a picture of ‘Kale Marx’ to my ex-boyfriend. He doesn’t respond.
Patricia Lockwood: Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?
My psychologist texts me photos of places he has been bushwalking, even though I can’t go bushwalking anymore due to chronic illness. He takes over a week to answer my emails asking for appointments.
I meet a man from a dating app and he talks on and on, debating with himself, about whether or not he would eat a slug, the different iterations and possibilities in which he might eat a slug, when he definitely would not eat a slug. I can’t un-see the slug sliming its way in and out of his mouth.
A man comes into work to photocopy images, mostly nudes, from art books for his scrapbooks. He tells me he has rooms full of them at home.
A colleague tells me she read in a Brené Brown book (actually it was probably a podcast), that if you buy one really beautiful, expensive, tasteful, fabulous thing, then everything else you own will seem drab, unmatched and ultimately that one beautiful object will make you feel like a failure.
Sarah Sentilles: Write ‘I might be wrong.’
I take slow strolls in suburban alleyways for the photo opportunities. I peek through gaps in people’s fences. If there are none, I jump to get a good look.
On a video call I tell my mother about the slug man. She says the slug is his penis and we leave it at that.
My colleague catches a man watching porn on one of the public computers. She looks up and sees ‘a giant vagina’.
Valeria Luiselli: I once read somewhere that a personality is a continuous sequence of successful gestures.
At a bar in Footscray, my friend finds a shard of glass in her drink. We all immediately get sore throats.
In my notebook I have written, ‘I am interested in the eroticism of the ordinary.’
I try to take pictures of flowers to post online but the camera does not capture the vividness of the petals’ colours. I worry that my phone is getting old.
A man calls my colleague a cunt in a dispute over which public computer he has booked. He wants one that faces away, so we can’t see what he’s looking at.
Out of the blue, my ex-boyfriend texts me to say that he has parasocial relationships with the presenters on the podcasts he listens to. Do I know what that means?
I find my attention drawn to the play of light on walls. To the periods of day where light is low and strange, and when photographed with a smartphone, objects, people, landscapes take on a dark intensity.
Me and eighteen other Twitter users retweet a post from a Thomas Bernhard bot: What we think is secondhand, what we experience is chaotic, what we are is unclear.
The dusk light has had such ambient pink and red hues lately. The Tongan eruption apparently, scattering particles into the atmosphere.
Kate Zambreno: I wonder, writing this, if what I’m after in art is a series of moods or textures.
I think of moods as fragments, selves as fractured. Each crack of self becoming a wedge inserted somewhere else to cleave and double us again—like a biological cell, a reflection, an echo, like a vague desire.
Find out more at Aniko Press.
