Editor's letter
by Heidi Kewin
Certain kinds of reading and aesthetic experiences are materially different in print. Many people would agree with that, and would prefer a handwritten love letter over a text on iMessage. We remain and exist online, but print is the most complete way to encounter a magazine.
The early days of Zimmer Magazine saw the biggest aim being to make something intentional; something you might live with and return to later. We care(d) about sequencing, typography, pacing, paper stock, image placement, the behind the scenes and movings of an issue as a complete object rather than a stream of isolated pieces. It started as a creative space, gradually becoming a community of readers, artists, photographers, and people who believe print is king. That community is the very reason why this space continues to exist at all. But it is also a business, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. We would love to describe Zimmer Magazine as solely a creative space, but we always emphasise that it is not a free one. On one occasion, we received a message from a reader who was frustrated at having to pay for access to our publication, despite considering it a cultural project. It is a sentiment we understand in principle — culture often feels as though it should be freely available. But the reality is that writing, editing, design, photography, printing, and distribution all require labour, time, and material resources. Fact-checking, printing, photography, shipping, and commissioning contributors are all elements that we have to consider when running such a publication; none of this is accidental nor is it free. The reality is that independent magazines and publishing houses survive only if readers decide they are worth sustaining – that is up to you.
Like many publications, we once believed digital was the unquestionable future. Speed, visibility, constant output, and infinite laps of accessibility were signs of progress and we believed that everything should become frictionless, immediate, endlessly shareable and recyclable. For a time, we followed that logic, and it dominated the initial questions of our business. What will the website look like? What are the aesthetics of the Instagram feed? But oh! what a miserable way to experience culture that was. The faster everything becomes, the more forgettable it feels. Writing then becomes content, and articles become fragments detached from context and intention. Attention spans shorten, aesthetics flatten, and publishing slowly begins to optimise itself around algorithms rather than the beauty of our human curiosity. The internet is mesmerising in that it has given us extraordinary access to information, but it also trained us to consume thought at the pace of a passing headline. Over time, we have realised that the most important relationship was never between publication and algorithm, publication and advertiser or even publication and visibility. It was and has always been between publication and reader. You are reading this article online, and the digital space is one we cannot escape. Digital access matters, but not as much as the human touch. Print remains the centre of the project for us. A physical magazine creates a different relationship with reading – we spend a lot of our day time immersed in pixels, but a printed gift is something slower, more focused, and more lasting. Arts, writing, and beliefs deserve that space. Maybe it’ll be the only thing keeping us sane if this ‘intelligence’ becomes intelligent at all.
I became Editor-in-Chief while studying a Bachelor in English Literature. I began to feel this contradiction everywhere around me. Literature itself is rooted in physicality; you feel the weight of a text – someone’s work – in your hands. Yet almost every aspect of academic life is detached from that experience: our essays were submitted digitally, which felt miserable when it came to the dissertation – so much work for it to be submitted electronically, over in seconds; required reading also appeared in PDFs and finding the physical copy in the library would be a rarity; meetings with supervisors took place on Google Meet rather than in offices. Entire conversations about art, philosophy, words, all unfolded through screens, tabs, hyperlinks, notifications; every possible way for something to be increasingly disembodied. Students are supposed to go on to become thinkers, writers, artists, and intellectual life – the future. But, what are we if we slowly lose the ability to sit with our own minds? What happens when reading becomes skimming, conversations become messaging or emailing, and critical thoughts themselves are reshaped by speed, and whether something is convenient.
The human hand leaves traces, and so does the mind. Artificial intelligence can generate endless quantities of text in seconds. It is quick, efficient, commendable, but it is not good. It is all recycled – words someone has already used before. The human perspective is valuable, and what cannot be replicated so easily is the accumulated taste, memory, emotion, curiosity and lived experience behind each sentence written by an actual person. If anything, the rise of this ridiculous technology has only clarified what matters to us. We are interested in publishing work shaped by judgement and creative risk and believe readers can still feel, and appreciate, the difference.
Milan Kundera was an extraordinary writer and wrote that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. I think about this quotation often, as much of contemporary digital life encourages us to forget. Our magazines are not designed to expire in such a way, but to be stored, collected, revisited, and passed between friends and families. We are less interested in reacting instantly to events than in publishing work that retains meaning long after the moment which it was made. Media should not be conceived as something disposable, but an object with permanence—we would love to hope that your magazine purchase ends up on your bookshelf, beside table or in an archive; anything but being buried beneath tomorrow’s algorithmic debris.
Zimmer Magazine is supported by subscribers, and we are truly grateful that we have found our type of people. But this subscription was not created to create exclusivity for its own sake, but to preserve independence and sustain a way of publishing that is increasingly rare: careful, deliberate, materially conscious, and accountable first to readers rather than algorithms or advertising metrics. Sometimes, you may make a purchase and see your money swim off in a sea of other purchases, not quite entirely sure if they appreciate you giving them your money, or if they know you at all. Here, a subscriber to our magazine is loved, known individually, and that is incredibly important to us. A subscription to Zimmer supports writers, artists, editors, photographers, printers, and the continued existence of the magazine itself.
Many ask us what the goal is with Zimmer, and usually I hate being asked questions about where I see myself in five years – often avoiding telling people how old I am (though you may guess). Behind every issue are people who have devoted years to developing their craft. Good writers do not appear accidentally, and it was incredibly hard for us to find some of these wizardic thinkers. Designing, photographing, researching, translating, illustrating (yes, even though we could use AI) are all skilled forms of labour that we appreciate require patience, years of education and therefore student debt, discipline and often enormous personal sacrifice. Publishing is hard. Getting a job in publishing is even harder. To then sustain yourself within this is only what can be described as a living nightmare, especially for those who have historically been excluded from elite cultural spaces. Part of Zimmer Magazine’s purpose is to create a publication where talented people grow, but more importantly, are taken seriously, treated carefully and given room to think and create as they deserve.
Too many creative industries romanticise exhaustion, instability, and underpayment. We do not. As (or maybe, if) we grow, we hope to create an office – not to flaunt our expansion, but to collaborate efficiently in a physical space. It will be a place where our editors, writers and designers can work together in person, escaping a dreadful life of remote work. We yearn for a time when the people behind our magazine are not abstracted away from each other. We only exist because of the beautiful specimens who have helped to make it, and we want the conditions of that work to reflect that. What they have given Zimmer already exceeds what can easily be named. Our responsibility is to meet that with something beautiful in return.
If you have read this far, you are already the kind of reader we make Zimmer for. Why not subscribe?