Picturing empathy in Profiles magazine
We delivered Profiles to Stack subscribers in December last year, and at the end of January I joined editors Clare Healy and Sarah Sturzel for a Stack Magazine Club evening speaking about the making of the magazine. A journal dedicated to portraiture in prose and visual art, it uses that tight focus as a license to range far and wide in its subject matter, presenting powerful and affecting writing alongside funny and light-hearted storytelling.
Take a look at the video below to see them speaking about their publishing process, which starts with a deluge of anonymous submissions (they received 840 stories for issue three, which were whittled down to just six published pieces). I was interested in Clare’s thoughts on the importance of empathy in the magazine – as she said, “If it’s character-driven, it’s not caricature…” That sense of genuinely engaging with characters and representing them on the page is evident in everything they do, whether the pieces are written or visual, and whether they’re played for laughs or totally straight.
Submissions for issue four are open now (closing on March 18th), so if you’re looking for a place to publish a piece of writing or visual art, I hope our conversation gives a good steer on what they’re looking for.
