A decade of Dirty Furniture
Every month, we host an informal Zoom conversation with the people who made the last magazine we delivered to our subscribers. We invite our current subscribers and the members of our Discord server, and it’s become a lovely way of digging deeper into the stories behind the stories, and giving a greater insight into the whole magazine-making process.
At the end of February we welcomed Elizabeth Glickfeld, one of the editors of Dirty Furniture, the magazine we delivered in January 2024. It was an unusual club night for several reasons: first of all, we met a bit later than usual, to accommodate the fact that Elizabeth is in Australia, and she was getting up extremely early to speak with us. (I slightly messed up the Zoom / Eventbrite timings, so some people struggled to get into the meeting. Sorry if you were affected by that, but I think we got everyone there in the end.)
Also, Elizabeth’s co-editor Anna Bates was unable to make it on the night, so Elizabeth was speaking on behalf of both of them. But the biggest difference to our normal club nights is the fact that this issue of Dirty Furniture is the last one, and so as well as speaking about the issue we delivered to subscribers, the conversation became a much broader overview of the entire project, from its beginnings in 2013, through to today.
I loved hearing Elizabeth’s thoughts on the project as a whole, including the sheer amount of effort involved (“Triple the work and double the fun”); their early experiment with Kickstarter; and how they started Dirty Furniture as recent graduates from the RCA’s first Critical Writing in Art and Design class, and how the magazine has evolved over the years in line with their own evolving interests and changing lives.
It’s a rare opportunity to get this sort of perspective on the experience of making an independent magazine, so I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elizabeth in the video below.
