Working-class arts in Grass magazine
I pride myself on staying fairly up to date on independent magazine publishing, but every now and then I come across an interesting magazine for the first time and realise that it’s actually been publishing for years. That’s what happened when I found Grass magazine recently – I assumed it was a new launch, but then saw that this was issue five, and it had started way back in 2020.
There’s a lot to love in this magazine – editor Tommy Sissons is a novelist, poet and playwright, and the writing is intelligent and insightful, providing a platform for the people he admires. (He made a point of only including a couple of his own poems in this latest issue.) There’s a clear class consciousness that runs through the magazine, though as he says in our podcast interview above, there’s no hard and fast rule that everything in Grass needs to carry a working-class message.
In fact one of the themes that emerged from our conversation was the difficulty of defining what it means to be working class, as well as the practical challenges it presents. In the introduction to the new issue, Tommy writes, “Naturally, one of the biggest challenges of launching a project led by working-class people was funding – everyone was skint.” He’s proud to tell the story of how they raised a small amount from crowd funding to start the project, and how everything they’ve done since then has been funded by selling the magazine itself, evolving from issue to issue to get bigger and more ‘magazine-y’.
In fact it’s probably not a coincidence that it was this issue that I finally came across, standing tall on the shelf and holding its own against the magazines around it. I loved hearing Tommy’s story of Grass magazine so far, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too. Or, if you’d rather watch instead, check out the video embedded below, but either way, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts and we’ll be able to deliver our new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
