An analogue escape in Pencil Magazine
Sasha Wizansky realised long ago that pencils play an important part in her creative process. Any time she needs to come up with new ideas, she says, she leaves her screen behind, and turns instead to a notebook and pencil. But how far can you push the creative potential of a pencil and paper?
From 2007 to 2009 she was the editor and publisher of Meatpaper, the magazine that considered meat in culture and art. It was while working on that project that she began a thought experiment with her husband: Could you make a magazine using only pencils? The question lurked in the back of her head until 2019, when she started working on it in earnest, only to be interrupted by the pandemic. But in 2024 she picked it up again, and issue zero of Pencil Magazine launched at the end of that year.
Everything in the magazine is created using graphite on paper, and it has struck a chord with readers looking for an alternative to their screens. All the text is written by hand, which tends to be harder to read than type, so readers are forced to slow down even more than they would on a normal magazine page. But as Sasha says, “That’s a feature, not a problem… It really gets you to slow down, to engage with the writing, and to engage with the person who wrote that text.”
The contributions, too, often focus on the freedom afforded by working in pencil, and the experience of using a pencil to create the finished product.
We delivered issue three of Pencil Magazine to our subscribers in June this year, and I’m finally getting around to sharing our Magazine Club evening video with Sasha. (The summer has been busy!) If you received this magazine from us I hope you’ll enjoy her thoughts on the project, and if you haven’t seen Pencil Magazine in the flesh, you can buy a copy from our online shop. Or even better, sign up to our subscription and we’ll deliver a different magazine to you every month. You never know what you’ll get next, but you do know it will be a beautiful, intelligent independent, and once you’ve read your copy, you’ll be able to join us for a Magazine Club conversation with the people who made it.
