In Conversation with the EICs

When I meet with Editors-in-Chief Finn Currie and Gruffydd Price to discuss the MT25 issue of The Isis, they arrive in accidentally matching outfits. The pair, who began with opposite visions—Finn, a self-declared maximalist from the fiction team; Gruff, a minimalist with an eye for negative space—have settled in a happy middle ground, now finishing each other’s sentences as they tell me about how the issue came together. After debating which one of them is the Cynthia to the other’s Ariana, they walk me through the Juvenilia Edition—the mood board, 90s inspirations, and photoshoot—before thinking about the legacy of The Isis, the possibilities of the magazine, Labubus, and what it means to be radical in print today—all offered up in matching stripes, the magazine’s unofficial EiC uniform.

CJ: You have chosen to make The Isis MT25 the ‘Juvenilia Edition’—what inspired this?

FC: This was me. Gruff was anti-theme, and I was pro-theme, so we settled on an ‘issue’ for the term—kind of like i-D Magazine or magazines like that that have a through line, but not a dominating theme, but just something to organise submissions. I guess I was feeling very nostalgic in the last year. My childhood best friend died last year, and it made me think a lot about my childhood and growing up—funerals and eulogies. I thought if I did the magazine, it should be about childhood and remembering. A lot of the time, people are obsessed with trying to do journalism in a way that we are basically like adults. I think it would recognise or sidestep the awkwardness of producing a student magazine, whilst also making something we are proud of.

CJ: Can you me about the mood board for this edition?

GP: I was very into 1990s issues of Dazed and Confused and i–D, because they all have themed issues. I also wanted to bring the fun back to The Isis, but in an edgy way. The thing with a mood board, though, is that a lot of people just copy something they’ve seen on Pinterest. I was keen not to do that. You can take the sentiment of something without reproducing it. Although we had those magazines on the mood board, I was keen that the final magazine didn’t feel like an obvious homage. I wanted a distinct image.

FC: Yeah, we had a handful of publications we liked, but didn’t want to attach ourselves to any single one. It was about taking a bit from a lot of different things and then trying to produce something new.

CJ: You chose to do a photo shoot for this edition—what inspired it?

GP: Juvenilia, really—and fun. We wanted to encapsulate the many variations on the theme: ideas of self-reflection, experimentation, and avoiding prowess. We had a lot of fun. It was me and my lovely friend Lilian, photographing Amelie in the park, telling her to play in the mud and the leaves. We also wanted a visual cohesiveness for the magazine—we have used all the colours from the shoot in the magazine.

CJ: How do you think text and image interact in the magazine?

FC: We’ve tried to create a meritocracy of form—to let the image influence the text and the text influence the image, without one explaining the other.

GP: Yeah, I think you also get a stronger appreciation for the artwork this way—because then it’s not just an accompaniment, it’s a thing in its own right.

CJ: Is there a single piece of art or literature that inspired you whilst making the magazine?

FC: This sounds really pretentious. I’ve been doing a medieval course for the last three months andloads of it was on the way that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were organised in sequence—how one thing leads onto another. Obviously, our issue isn’t Chaucerian in any way, but I wanted things to flow. You will see it in the magazine: the blue pages flow together and then there is a break, and then all the next set flow together. I really wanted to have pieces next to each other that made sense—it’s nice to have some kind of storytelling and continuity in your organisation.

GP: I guess I also approached the magazine with a gallery curating mindset—what things went well together visually, and also thematically.

FC: I think you also had the gallerist eye for negative space—that was a key word last term. Gruff was obsessed with including negative space. I think it lets the art speak for itself.

GP: I’m like, hard-core minimalist. My original pitch was no colour, all white, one font the entire way through—the minimalist issue. There’s an artist—Dan Graham—he did this piece called ‘Homes for America’—it’s a collection of photographs of suburban houses, laid out in a magazine format, and meant to be published in a magazine. He was very conscious of how things change in print—how things are circulated, what it means for something to be an original. I would have liked to see something submitted to the magazine that played with the ideas of print and distribution and formatting.

CJ: How have your personal tastes changed whilst making the magazine?

FC: I was much more maximalist before I started. Now I would say I am more of a minimalist because of Gruff’s eye. Fiction often lends itself to bright visual images—it’s very childish and something you should avoid, but I think people like trying to draw out the secret code of why a specific artwork is attached to a specific piece, like, ‘ah they mentioned fish in this, so we’ve got a fish painting.’ I think that often doesn’t do justice to the piece because you read it as literal. So, I guess I have more appreciation for leaving things plain.

GP: I study art. I have a very strong sense of what I like, but I think I have more of an appreciation for the kind of ‘low-brow’ things. There are a lot of fun things in the magazine. I’ve learned not to take my vision so seriously. I think the magazine is fun. It can be serious and fun at the same time.

CJ: Can you talk to me about the magazine as a space—how do you see it as a distinct form?

FC: The magazine lets you do a lot of things. Nowadays there is a very discrete sense of what something is meant to be, or who it’s for. Readers go to a collection of prose to read prose, and a poetry anthology to read poetry. I think a magazine gives you the flexibility to include all of these possibly contrary things.

FC: There is often difficulty about fiction vs non-fiction, and how granular you make these categories. I find it very frustrating. I think its arbitrary whether something is a prose poem, a verse poem, a short story, or a personal essay. That kind of specificity encourages a literalist mindset. I like when someone doesn’t know if something is true or untrue—I don’t think it makes it less valuable; it challenges the reader. We have included a fiction/non-fiction distinction because it’s helpful, but nothing more specific.

GP: Yeah, it’s cumulative, and so many things can go on at once. It’s also accessible. Whereas in an art gallery only certain people can get in, and only some people can understand, you can read a magazine anywhere—you can flick through and read what you want to read. At least one thing will pertain to you.

FC: The magazine is for pleasure. It’s meant to be something that you enjoy—something that entertains you or moves you or makes you feel. So, I think whilst other forms of media may try and have some sort of end in themselves, the magazine mostly is trying to be a moving or enjoyable work of art.

GP: Well, I think specifically ours, or other arts magazines.

CJ: What do you think the value of student journalism is?

GP: Young people get written off quite easy as being unaware of the world. Student journalism is a chance to share your opinion and say ‘no, I have stakes in this world. This is how I think we should change it’.

FC: I think art is a net-positive in the world. It’s just good to make art. It’s good for you, it’s fun, and it gives young people a platform.

CJ: Who was your imagined reader?

FC: Me, I think. To be honest, me. I love The Isis—I really love having old editions around the house, showing my parents; giving it to my friends. I really wanted to have something I was proud of, and that everyone involved was proud of.

CJ: If you could describe the era of the magazine in a single sentence, what would it be?

FC: I think, starting something new? Having The Isis be an issue magazine. It’s nice to be the first to do something.

GP: Yeah, and not just for the sake of being different. I think it made sense to do an issue—it was a very thought through approach, especially in terms of what it means to put a magazine together right now.

FC: I think one of the roles of EiC is trying to uphold a certain continuity. A magazine can fall apart very quickly if there is a sudden idiosyncratic vision which says ‘this is what the magazine is going to be; you are going to have to continue this’. I think leaving breathing room for the next editors to adapt is valuable—not just in relation to our issue, but also how the magazine will continue its sense of identity.

CJ: How did you experience the legacy of The Isis—or the weight of Oxford more generally—as Editors-in-Chief?

GP: Towards the beginning I definitely thought, ‘what if we mess up? This is the magazine. What is it? The longest-running independent student magazine in the UK?’ Every issue is of a certain time—this is the MT25 issue. We have pieces on generative AI, and films like One Battle After Another, which just came out. But thematically, I think the message behind all these pieces will last.

FC: I think the trick is to try to say something that people will find valuable and interesting in the future, but that also relates to where you are now.

GP: In 25 years, if people read a piece about a Labubu, they would think, ‘what the fuck is that?’ I think we chose to address some very important things in the current cultural climate.

FC: Yeah, we didn’t want to oversaturate the magazine with these very fleeting images. We want people will look back and think ‘this is what people thought was important’—and it wasn’t Labubu.

CJ: The Isis has historically been considered a radical magazine. How has its relationship with radicality changed?

GP: If you pride yourself on being radical, and that is your USP, you are probably not. I think we are radical in the sense that we incorporate a lot of really interesting thinkers, and we try to look really deeply into what it means to be a magazine.

FC: Whilst the politics haven’t necessarily come through as ultra-radical, I do think in a lot of ways the magazine does resist convention. It’s a magazine made not-for-profit, and I think it gives people who otherwise wouldn’t have the option the chance to write or have their art printed for the first time.

GP: Yeah, it’s important to see the value in art, and by platforming that we are doing something important and eye-opening.

 

Words by Carolina Julius. Image by Carolina Julius.