Offal’s literary leftovers
Editor Mark Blacklock joined our Magazine Club last month to speak about Offal, the experimental literary project that we delivered to Stack subscribers in March. As you’ll see in the video below, the idea was insigated a couple of years ago, when Mark and co-editor Roderick Stanley started talking about creating a bricolage project from unusual texts that hadn’t found a home elsewhere. They knew from the start that they wanted to make a print magazine, but when their friend Gavin Weale showed them an AI voice generator he’d been playing with, they realised a more immediate opportunity was at hand.
Using texts that had been earmarked for Offal, they started creating darkly funny, 10-minute audio episodes, voiced by AI and released via WhatsApp. But as the episodes built up their ambition for a print magazine remained, and earlier this year the first issue of Offal arrived, with the same distinctively dystopian tone as the audio project.
In the video below Mark explains the ideas that motivated them, including how they choose the stories they print; what they’re trying to say with the magazine; and why it ended up being designed in Microsoft Word. It was really interesting speaking with him, and I hope you’ll enjoy going behind the scenes on this new literary magazine. And of course if you’re not already subscribed to Stack, sign up so we can start sending our monthly selection to you, and then you can join in with our Magazine Club conversations.
