Introducing The Mortar magazine

I started Stack in 2008, which means that 2026 marks 18 years of searching out great independent magazines and delivering them to readers around the world. But it’s also going to be a year of new beginnings, as we launch a new project called The Mortar, which massively expands on what we’ve done with Stack so far.

In large part, The Mortar is born of frustration. There’s an incredible wealth of great independent publishing out there at the moment, but there are only 12 months in a year, so we can only send 12 magazines to Stack subscribers. Of course we’ll keep on doing that, but The Mortar will allow us to share stories by many more small publishers around the world, greatly increasing our reach.

Each week we’ll select two stories and send them to readers via email, one on a Tuesday and one on a Friday. I’ll include a short introduction to give a bit of information about the publisher and the reason why I chose each story, providing an easy way to spend a few minutes with a great piece of writing. Each email will contain just one story to read and enjoy – we’re not going to start sending out endless reading lists, and we won’t bombard you with links! The story might come from a publisher you’ve never heard of before, or it might come from one you’re already familiar with – either way, I hope it will be valuable to have one piece of writing selected and presented on its own.

We’ve had a fantastic response from the publishers we’ve approached so far, and we have some incredible stories lined up for the coming weeks and months. Please do sign up to join our mailing list so we can start sending our biweekly selections to your inbox.

The majority of the publishers we’re working with at the start are small print magazines, because they’re the ones we know best. But one of my reasons for wanting to start The Mortar is because there’s so much great stuff being published online too. I’m really inspired by the worker-owned journalism cooperatives coming out of the USA, like Defector, Flaming Hydra, and Hearing Things, and I want The Mortar to share work from them and other online-only publications. (Flaming Hydra and Hearing Things are already on board, so watch out for stories coming from them at some point soon.)

More than words

Every story we share on The Mortar will be accompanied by an original illustration, art directed by Holly Catford from Esterson Associates. Holly and her boss, Simon Esterson, have been incredibly supportive since I first shared my idea for a publication that brings independents together in one place, and The Mortar would not exist as it does today without them.

The illustrations were Holly’s idea – she works with lots of young illustrators, and she’s seen first-hand that budgets are shrinking and opportunities for editorial commissions are disappearing. She suggested the illustrations as a way of giving The Mortar its own distinct identity, and as a way of working with illustrators who may still be in education or early on in their careers. I would never have been able to do that bit myself, and I’m hugely grateful to her for the time and expertise she has brought to the project.

At this point we need to talk about money. All the writers involved with The Mortar have donated their work for free becasue they like the idea and they want to help bring it to life. And all the illustrators are working for a token fee – we’re paying them just £20 per piece. I really appreciate all of them being involved in the project, but I’m also clear that working for free like this is not viable in the long term. I want to start paying writers, and I want to pay illustrators more, so we’re asking readers to pay £5 per month for The Mortar.

We may end up tweaking the offer as we go, but our plan at the start is for one story per week to be free in full, and for one story per week to sit behind the paywall. A full archive of all the stories we’ve published will remain on the site, and that will also be available for paying members only. The point of The Mortar is to share as many great stories as possible, so it feels slightly uncomfortable to ask for payments from the start, but the project will only continue if it can make enough money to pay everybody a fair rate, so I’ve come to believe that the paywall is an essential component.

In the beginning

As I write this, there are three stories on The Mortar: A Landscape, Simplified, from Solomiya; Exit Strategy from Nobody; and Oh, She’s Startin’, from Not Here to Make Friends. They’re all stories that we sent to Stack subscribers when we delivered the magazines over the last year and a bit, and they all stayed in my mind for different reasons.

Once we start sending stories via email, though, we won’t share anything that has already been delivered by Stack, so if you’re a Stack subscriber, you know you’re not going to receive something you’ve already read via us. That seems to make the most sense at this point, but as with the whole project, we’re going to be learning as we go, and we’ll adapt things as needed. (Maybe our print magazine subscribers would appreciate a service that occasionally points out one story that’s worth reading more closely?)

The first email from The Mortar will be sent on Tuesday 6th January, and it will contain a story from one of London’s most popular independent magazines. Choosing this first one proved to be an agonising process, because of course it’s just one story, but I couldn’t help building it up to represent so much of what we’re trying to do with The Mortar. In the end I think it’s a perfect fit: It tackles a big, complex story that’s very much in the news across the West, but it does so with a lovely sense of humour and compassion that brings an optimistic energy to a subject that is often used to sow division.

Working on The Mortar over the last few months has felt like slowly shuffling towards a precipice, knowing that once we get there we’re going to throw ourselves over the edge. Honestly I don’t know what stories we’re going to be sharing in a few months’ time, because they probably haven’t been written yet. And obviously we have no idea how this new thing is going to be received.

But I can’t wait to put The Mortar out into the world, to start learning from it, and hopefully building it into a proper, sustainable business that helps to share great stories from the world’s independent publishers. If you think this sounds interesting, please sign up to join the mailing list, and if you can afford it, choose to pay £5 per month and help us get this new venture off on the right foot.

Join The Mortar to receive two great stories per week, and support independent publishers around the world