Worms Literary Supplement in Novembre Magazine
The Worms Psychoanalysis Season is coming to a close. Since September, we’ve sent out eight brainy dispatches packed with interviews, poems, essays, and fiction by some of the most innovative writers exploring all things psychoanalysis. When we first conceptualised a theme around psychoanalysis, we couldn’t have imagined such a wide and diverse response from an incredible array of thinkers.
We began with an interview with Maggie Nelson, a poem by Misha Honcharenko, and fiction by Ted Simonds among others. From there, we showcased an interview with Danielle Chelosky, contributions from Dennis Cooper, fiction by Alastair Wong, and a poem by Caitlin Hall. To round off the season, we featured Juliana Huxtable, an essay by Jemima Skala and an exchange between Hannah Levene and Aimee Balinger. It was definitely a marathon—not a sprint—but what a marathon it turned out to be! You can find the entire online Psychoanalysis Season here.
This marked our first foray into an online edition of Worms Magazine. Along the way, we also teamed up with the sleek folks at Novembre to bring some of our psychoanalytic material into their pages.
Without further ado, here is The Worms Literary Supplement in Novembre Magazine. Scroll down for a taste of the extra sweet, brainy content inside—and grab your own copy HERE.
WORMS took to the pages of the newest Novembre to sprinkle some special features of our The Psychoanalysis Issue. At WORMS, we seek out writing that sits outside form and genre, is personal, political, challenges us, confuses us, gets us excited, turns us on, riles us up, and makes us think. And our collaboration with Novembre is all about celebrating that.
It appears that psychoanalysis is having a bit of a ‘moment’ in the literary spotlight. Arguably, it's always been there, but it does make sense that the impulse to dissect our inner workings would emerge in times of crisis, and these are times of irrefutable and unrelenting crises. While writing there is sometimes the sense that we are tapping into something deep within ourselves; latent drives or unconscious yearnings. We have wormed our way into the recesses of the mind and have returned with more than we bargained for.
The WORMS takeover of Novembre as part of The Psychoanalysis Season features writer and theorist McKenzie Wark, legendary poet CAConrad, artist and writer Sophia Giovannitti, a powerful poem by Fariha Róisín and an essay by Oluwatobiloba Ajayi on poet and writer Dionne Brand.
MCKENZIE WARK:
“We’re just bodies. Humans are not fallen angels, we’re just monkeys with stupid ambitions.”
“Lacan is super fascinating, but it’s Scientology for smart people.”
“You can actually take charge of your own becoming and become something else, rather than study how it progresses in the literary space alone,”
SOPHIA GIOVANNITTI:
“A lot of my work then is an attempt to transmute things I’m haunted by into things I want to see in the world.”
“For me, the conditions are always part of the work.”
“...making work out of the conditions is also an attempt at a transmutation.”
CACONRAD:
“I worked with rats, squirrels, pigeons, and other creatures, each given a part of my body to activate: knees, arms, nipples; I wanted to feel them in some way to write.”
“I knew I needed a new relationship with time and created what I call (Soma)tic poetry rituals. These rituals anchor me in the present, unorthodox procedures that make me focus on what is in front of me, wherever I am, no matter what is going on.”
“That said, the rituals can bend language as much as they do experience.”
WORMS took Paris by storm too at the Novembre magazine launch. We brought an atmosphere rich with vulnerability, intimacy, and power. Held in a city known for its own cultural layering, Fariha Róisín, with her characteristic tenderness and incisive prose, shared with us her poem How To Make a Terrorist that contends with questions of survival, crisis, resistance, with history and memory; Jess Cole’s reading complemented this tenderly.
From the layered ambiance of Paris to London, we also celebrated WORMS 9 at Biblioteka with a series of readings and performances that brought together voices that encapsulated the nuances of our times, voices that refuse simplification; from Oluwatobiloba Ajayi, Caitlin Hall, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Phoenix Yemi, and Arcadia Molinas.
There was a palpable sense of community, a shared recognition of how words can bridge and bind. Both evenings underscored the role of literature as a means of both personal reflection and collective consciousness, a fitting tribute to both Novembre and Biblioteka’s own ethos.
Credits:
WORMS is a female-run magazine and publisher that celebrates and platforms experimental and underrepresented writer culture. At WORMS, we champion creatives impacted by the intersectionality of factors within our industry, including: class, cultural ethnicity and race, disability and gender issues. Subsequently, this is the audience we attract, and our efforts over the years have most recently affirmed our platform as one of London's leading indie presses as featured in AnOther, and Dazed, Service95, and more. @w0rms.w0rld
Biblioteka is a reference library with a variety of rare and special collections of books, zines and other printed materials within the fields of art, architecture and design. It functions as a platform through which to experiment with new forms of knowledge production, collaboration and curation. Biblioteka is open to the public by appointment at the Architectural Association, 1 Montague Street, London WC1B 5BP. @biblioteka_kyiv
Worm your way into Novembre Magazine Issue 16!
Beneath the glossy veneer, this issue of Novembre sheds its silk for soil, burrowing deep into the underbelly of the literary with a special supplement from Worms.
Nestled within, this bold edition features a very special Worms #9: Psychoanalysis segment, with unmissable insights from visionaries like McKenzie Wark, CAConrad, Fariha Roisin, Sophia Giovannitti, and Oluwatobiloba Ajayi.
There is sometimes the sense that while writing we are tapping into something deep within ourselves; latent drives and yearnings often emerge on the page. We mine our lives, memories, traumas, impulses. We dig deep and bare all. Psychoanalysis, the practice of analysing thoughts, dreams and memories for what they reveal about are unconscious drives and desires, posits human behaviour as steered by what lurks in the shadowy refuges of the psyche. It can at times be dizzying, intricate and paradoxical. But it is perhaps this labyrinthine quality that makes its theoretical frameworks so tantalising for so many of the writers that we love. The winding maze of libidinal drives, signifiers, objects and fixations are ripe for experimentation, subversion and transgression. The writer and the analyst share in common the pursuit to extract and build narrative, to challenge perspectives and to make connections. They each favour multiplicity, long for meaning yet relish in the slippery ambiguity that meaning inherently produces.
Capturing the pulse of contemporary life, Novembre features special collaborations with over 175 trailblazing creatives including: Worms, Petra Collins, Simon Denny, Diamond Stingily, Stephen O’Malley, and many more. Get your hands on a special copy, this issue has a range of 7 different covers.
We have a very limited amount of copies, be sure to secure one now before they are gone.
Publication date: January 2025
Published by Novembre Global
Magazine | Softback
295 × 215 mm | 514 pages
