How does Verity La La get up and running?
The key to starting the journal was finding the drive to get back into working on it after my cancellation. I just didn’t have the desire or the energy for a while there, and was still licking my wounds after Verity La (the previous iteration of the journal) was ‘taken down’.
I also had to think through where I wanted to put my time and energy. There isn’t a lot of money — if any — in the arts, and that means Verity La La is currently a passion project. There was also the question of returning to support a community which — when the journal and I had come under attack — hadn’t really supported us. That was an emotional hurdle I had to get over.
How does that feeling shift?
To process my experience, I wrote some essays exploring what had happened with Verity La, and in doing so, I began to realise that we’d been caught up in a cultural moment far bigger than us. Rather than the cancellation being personal, it was a phenomenon that had impacted society in general, and the arts in particular, significantly over the last decade.
It became clear to me that this approach of cancelling people and publications was affecting the arts negatively, because artists were now self-censoring. They were either not voicing their views or creating the work they wished to for fear of reprisals, or were creating art that fit the proscribed acceptable narratives. And since I do care a lot about the arts, I felt a responsibility to jump back in and help foster a healthier literary ecosystem.
www.blackincbooks.com.au/authors/magan-magan
Do you set up this magazine by yourself?
I’m pleased to say that I’ve been helped by my new co-editor, poet and podcaster Magan Magan. We met when he read an article I’d written called ‘Griftivism’, which explores the problematic aspects of critical social justice ideology. He got in touch because he’d had his own experience with being sidelined in the arts’ community after coming out as gay man living in a strict Muslim family. He’d assumed he would be met with support from the literary community when writing about his life story, however, because he was discussing aspects of Islamic ideology which stifled his personal development, his experience was out of alignment with the ‘woke’ narrative that currently shapes the arts. Support of him as a black gay man quickly turned to expulsion from the literary ‘in-crowd’, and he found himself labelled an Islamophobe by ‘progressives’ who were not as openminded as he’d imagined.
Because of this, Magan’s previous publisher declined to publish his new poetry collection, Stop All the Clocks, since it critiqued Islam and was considered controversial. That seemed outrageous to me. So I committed to publishing his book through Verity La Press and later, Magan came onboard as my co-editor. Which was just what I needed because with another person by my side, I felt much braver and up to the challenge of restarting the journal.
Michelle Seminara
How do you then set up the magazine?
We had no money, but we had vision and passion, so we reached out behind the scenes to writers we knew and told them about the new direction we were moving in and asked if they had any work they could share with us. Nearly everyone responded positively, and we received the pieces that now comprise the first issue of Verity La La, ‘Iconoclast’.
How we move forward from here is another question. We have some new editors joining the journal and we aim to publish another issue of Verity La La later this year. Beyond that, I’ll take it step by step, as above all, I want to enjoy the ride!
