On emboldening others to take risks

You are the founding editor of Elastic, a print magazine dedicated to psychedelic art and literature. With your background as an editor, at Guernica and The Guardian and Bold Type Books, was there a way of working or collaborating with writers and artists that you wanted to do differently with Elastic?

Elastic was conceived as a playground for writers and visual artists, a space of freedom and experimentation and innovation. We publish work that feels psychedelic in that it can’t be contained: not by inherited narrative forms, not by genre labels, not by linear time, not by the boundary between waking and dreaming life.

What this means, in practice, is that our contributors aren’t beholden to anyone or thing but their own creative impulse. And I can edit in the way that I’ve always wanted and tried to edit, without restraints. At other publications and publishing houses, I’ve sometimes had restrictions handed down to me. Things like, “You need to ask the writer to explain themself to the reader here.” And of course, in publishing, that reader is most often imagined as a white middle-class reader. There’s also this expectation that a piece take a particular form, and get edited in a particular way, depending on whether it’s being called a poem or a short story or a personal essay. That’s how literature is packaged and sold.

Now that I’ve started my own project, I can do away with all of that. We don’t classify anything that appears in the magazine by genre. Nothing is labeled “fiction” or “nonfiction.” That simple fact gives writers a lot more room to stretch out. I’m able to say, “You go and I’ll follow.” I’m able to advance work that’s elusive and disorienting and that, I think, really vitally reflects our mystifying, unhinged present, without asking it to over-explain itself. Elastic is an artist-led magazine. Our contributors determine the shape of these pages and the criteria for psychedelic art. And the art and writing they send in is more formally ambitious and stranger than anything I could have thought up myself or imposed. It’s incredible to witness what someone can do with language and structure when they’re encouraged to expand past the slim creative containers that are constantly being foisted on us.

The truth is that I collaborate with writers in a lot of the same ways that I always have, only now we can break whatever we want to.

You’ve said in a few interviews that to you, psychedelia goes beyond experiences with hallucinogens; that childbirth, transition, chronic pain, and grief, are psychedelic in that they alter one’s perception of reality. Seeing as the pieces you publish develop their own internal logic, their own rules, I wonder how you approach editing?

My goal, as an editor, has always been to try and divine the shape a piece wants to take through discussions with the writer and by reading closely. Then we can better determine if things need to be moved around, what needs to go, what needs to grow.

What’s remarkable about editing Elastic is that much of the time the pieces want to take shapes I’ve never conceived of or seen before. The footnotes overtake the primary text. Syntax collapses as a way of mirroring how we experience things in the body. The piece takes the form of a ritual or a land acknowledgement or a numbered list and some part of the way through collapses on itself. In every case, my job stays the same: How to bring this work closer to the form it’s reaching for? Occasionally I’ll feel the need to remind a contributor that they can get as weird as they’d like, that they can keep pushing the limits, because the work is clearly calling for it, which for me is a special joy. And I need to be reminded, too. There’s a writer in our brand-new second issue who, after several editorial rounds, was like, “Why assume that the things happening in this piece are things happening in the world? Maybe they’re just happening in the characters’ minds.” And I was like, “Holy shit.” And then I promptly chucked that limitation that I’d inflicted on the story out the window.

All of this is very time-consuming, and one of the things I really love about this project is that I can give the editorial process all the time it needs. Sometimes I’ll go back and forth with a writer for five months. Sometimes it takes that long to muddle through it together.

I’m also trying to divine the shape the issue as a whole wants to take, which is an interesting process. Usually, I approach writers I admire and whom I see as working in a psychedelic register, invite them to submit, and then consider how the pieces I’ve received speak to one another. I’m pretty regularly astounded by the resonances and echoes that crop up between the works, and I think those resonances are at the heart of this magazine. They make every issue feel like a collective dream or hallucination. I spend a lot of time thinking about sequencing, trying to accentuate that strange déjà-vu feeling and enhance the psychedelic experience that is reading this thing.

What would you say in the case of a piece you’re editing for five months, for example, leads you to have faith in it?

When I accept something for the magazine, it’s because it’s clear to me that it has a place in our pages. I’ll decide to publish a piece that’s utterly mysterious to me or half-formed if it makes me feel something or transports me somewhere, or I’m bowled over by its language or the formal risks it takes, or it appears to be in dialogue with the rest of the issue, or it somehow captures the sublimity and the tragedy and the absurdity of being alive right now. There are a million reasons why we choose the art and writing we choose.

The point is that once I’ve decided to publish something, I already have faith in it. And more importantly, I already have faith in the writer to bring it with me to wherever it wants to go, because I’m familiar with their work or because of the preliminary discussions we’ve had or both. The writer-editor relationship runs on trust. One of the things I can do to build that trust is put in the hours. Pieces come in in various states of completion and some require more back-and-forth than others. That doesn’t bother me. On the contrary, it’s usually wildly rewarding to do the rounds, over many months, with a writer whose work I love. What’s imperative is that we have confidence in each other and in our shared goal, which is for the text to become the best and most impactful version of itself.

It takes time to figure out what’s serving a piece and what isn’t. It takes time to figure out how to fine-tune a narrative structure that I’ve never seen before and that the writer has never used before. And also to brainstorm solutions, like, “Maybe this piece needs two different typefaces to operate in the way it would like to.” We’re experimenting together. If the piece has a hold on me, and the writer is open and willing, I will gladly show up for however long it takes.

What impact do you hope Elastic has on readers and writers?

Instead of imagining a response to the magazine, I’ll tell you about the response I like best. It’s when people approach me after having read it to say, “Elastic made me realize that my art practice is psychedelic.” Some people tell us that they’d never considered the psychedelic undertones of their work before coming to the mag. Others tell us that they always felt that their work was psychedelic in nature but never dared to call it that, because of the narrow, cheesy, cartoonish way that psychedelia shows up in the popular imagination. Either way, it’s thrilling. The goal of the magazine is to testify to the tremendous breadth and vitality of psychedelia. Every issue features a hugely vast body of psychedelic work and puts fifty-plus contributors into dialogue with each other. People reading this magazine and seeing themselves as part of that conversation is proof of how expansive the category is and can be.

I’m convinced that there’s a psychedelic art movement that’s already in motion. We’re certainly not inventing anything. The work exists. The people creating it exist. What’s missing is a shared framework: spaces where makers of dreamy, strange, form-bending things can meet, and where this creative register can be explicitly named and explored.

Most of what we print is contemporary, but we publish overlooked work from the first psychedelic era, too, much of which was made by artists and thinkers of color. There’s an entire archive of psychedelic art that’s been tragically underrecognized by historians and arts institutions. In the first issue of Elastic, we featured a portfolio from Keiichi Tanaami, a Japanese artist who died in 2024 and only had his first dedicated US museum show a year after that, even though he was hugely influential and prolific. He was and still is something of a psychedelic daddy for a ton of art makers. And including him in our pages made a lot of readers realize that the contemporary art they’re creating or consuming is actually part of a kind of psychedelic lineage. I love that.

I also and mostly want for Elastic to inspire readers and writers to do away with arbitrary boundaries that aren’t serving them. Like, why should anyone have to call the piece they’re writing “fiction” or “nonfiction”? And why should a reader be oriented by those markers? What a garbage distinction. We don’t compartmentalize our lives like that. Our dreams, our fantasies, the inexplicable ways that experiences like grief and childbirth scramble our perspective—all of that is part of us. Loss, for instance, messes with everything, with our notions of time and space and scale. So it makes sense that a piece wanting to capture the texture of loss might mess with time and space and scale. Is it really necessary that we describe that piece as fictional, when its strangest and most fantastical elements access the deepest kind of realism?

I’ve been teaching a psychedelic writing class where we’ve been looking at some of the work in Elastic and at the various ways authors have chosen to write ineffable states and feelings. And right at the start I announce that we’ll be steering clear of genre labels. The way that participants react to that permission is amazing. So many writers have been boxed in by standards that don’t have anything to do with how we write or live.

I am obsessed with those moments, when readers look at this magazine and say to themselves, “Oh, shit, I didn’t know I was allowed to do that.”

Some people say you can’t edit poetry, and although editing is such a cool collaborative experience, I often think about this.

It’s truly wonderful to be able to help usher a piece of writing toward its final, or final-for-now, form. But a lot of editing is knowing when to get the hell out of the way.