Postscript Magazine is a bi-lingual online literary magazine publishing all forms of art, including a wide variety of writing, visual art, media, etc. They publish themed issues monthly and respond quickly, within five days of the deadline. The current theme is “excel.” See my interview with Co-Founder/Editor-in-Chief Vamika Sinha and her generous, in-depth responses with a link to submission guidelines below.

HOPKINSON: Tell me a little bit about Postscript Magazine.

SINHA: Postscript is an online magazine that publishes social and cultural narratives which are usually allocated to the footnotes. We push readers to leave their comfort zones, to go beyond what they know, to be culturally curious and compassionate. We accept all forms of writing, visual art, and digital media that expand our own understanding of intersectional and cosmopolitan discourse.

You go to a footnote to find a specific detail, a more complex story. That is why we are Postscript: we are interested in giving space to non-mainstream perspectives that would otherwise be an afterthought. We hope to establish a community of emerging writers and artists who create work that is destabilizing, restless, and nuanced.

Postscript’s ethos involves putting artworks and texts, and various other mediums, in conversation with each other to spark new dialogues. Each text is paired with either an artwork by another contributor or an illustration made by our team, invoking a sense of browsing through a gallery space or exhibition where works are placed in dialogue with each other. Our editors and curators choose pieces that can stand alone, but also interact with other pieces in the issue to foster new perspectives upon the issue theme.

Postscript was established in Paris in March 2018 and is currently based in the UAE. We work with contributors from around the world.

New issues are published on the first Monday of each month.

HOPKINSON: How/why was Postscript Magazine originally started?

SINHA: We started our literary magazine in ratty pajamas in a Parisian dorm.

We were literature majors from NYU Abu Dhabi, but prior to arriving in Paris for our semester away, we had never interacted much. In the city of lights, we found ourselves living along the same hallway. Shopping for cooking utensils at IKEA turned into midnight conversations about Moby-Dick, of all things. None of us were taking literature classes at NYU Paris. We missed it. We missed our seminars, discussions with professors and the piles of free books on our bedside tables, just waiting to be devoured. It was this new absence in our lives that led us to engage with literature outside of the classroom, more than ever before.

It started in a cafe, when one of us challenged the others to write a poem on their napkins. A Facebook Messenger group was born, where we had to share at least one poem we’d written every single day. It began casually. Funny haikus about dirty metros and the absolute magic of a Nutella crepe. But as the weeks passed, the poetry became a kind of teacher to us — teaching us about ourselves, about each other, about our relation to the city. We felt we needed to collect these works and display them somewhere. Meanwhile, the beauty of the city we were in was starting to come into question.

During a trip to a Paris flea market, two of us spoke to a vendor who asked where we were from. When we told him we were students from Abu Dhabi, he said he was planning to move to Dubai. He felt hated in Paris, because of his beard, his skin color, his religion. He gripped his beard as he said it, tugging at it with one fist. He said he would never be part of the city no matter how hard he worked. Moments later, we were chased through the market by a man growling into our ears, threatening us because we were unaccompanied women. This was the Paris we were horrified by; it was the one we needed to write about, so we could ever comprehend what it even was.

Paris taught us a lot about life outside of an academic environment. We had all been dazzled by the magic of the city when we first arrived. Even the dirtiness somehow seemed pristine, like fairy dust. But it also became a place where we grappled with loneliness, with feelings of otherness and outsider-ness and the realities of race and gender outside of the safety of a softer, more empathetic campus. The city’s facades began to crumble and peel around us. We wondered where to go, to voice our frustration. A Facebook status seemed trivial, an Instagram caption too fleeting. Who would publish some student’s thoughts about their identity or the false showmanship of Paris? Where could we go to be ugly? And who cares about poetry anyway?

We decided to carve that space for ourselves.

The name Postscript came from flipping through a battered copy of Moby-Dick, a title for one of its chapters. We decided to adopt it because a postscript — or footnote — is a place you look to find a more specific detail. In a way, it’s a marginalized idea or piece of information that helps to create or fill in a more complex story. We wanted to create a space where the complicated story is valued. We wanted to peel back the layers in popular and elite discourse, in high and low culture, deconstruct them, mix them, build them again in various ways for various new purposes, just like we had been doing with our narratives of Paris we shared between ourselves.

As a magazine, Postscript seeks to champion good and meaningful art and writing — because these forms matter. Our humanities majors are often questioned, but the impulse to create narratives, to make and share stories, has been inherent to humanity since the beginning of time. Art and writing are instrumental in the ordering and reordering of narratives that make up our world, our societies and ourselves.

Thus, Postscript encourages work that pushes the status quo. Work that is culturally curious, restless and nuanced. Work that is intersectional, that destabilizes, decentralizes and challenges hegemony. Work that can be both creative and critical, personal and political, and that deeply engages with the internal and external. We want to give a platform to the marginalized, dismissed, unvoiced seeds of ideas and expand on them.

Since our launch in March 2018, we have grown from four students in Paris on a group chat, to a global team of contributors, submitting work from almost every continent, and a 20-person team of artists, editors, writers, and creators, with our base in Abu Dhabi, UAE. All forms are welcome, from poetry to fiction to essays, reviews, visual art and academic arguments. We also run two columns: “invisible cities” and “milk & vodka”. The former is a city writing series, while the latter satirizes the often superficial nature of pop-poetry like Rupi Kaur’s, by producing poems that engage with similar topics in a more bold, innovative and nuanced manner.

By virtue of being students of world literature at NYUAD, we got to have unique experiences of diversity and intercultural encounters both on campus and abroad, in the classroom and out in the city. This filters into a set of equally unique perspectives that we feel must be highlighted and integrated into our work. Of course, we recognize that our experiences come with a high degree of privilege, which we do not take for granted. Instead, we hope to color our work with that awareness and shed light on the systems that allow such privilege to manifest where it does.

HOPKINSON: Who is your target reader audience?

SINHA: Anyone and everyone who is interested in art and literature or simply, more nuanced discourse. People who CARE about creativity and their community.

HOPKINSON: What type of work are you looking for?

SINHA: We just want work that pushes boundaries, borders, footnotes, lines etc etc. But this is not a limitation. In truth, we are just looking for interesting and imaginative work.

HOPKINSON: What do you wish you’d see submitted, but rarely comes in?

SINHA: ARTWORK. More experimental poetry, that play and display craft. Video and film. Longform essays and memoirs.

HOPKINSON: What are some of your favorite lit mags/journals?

SINHA: LitHub, Aeon, New Yorker, Granta, AAWW, gal-dem, SAAG Anthology, LARB

HOPKINSON: What is your favorite part of being on staff with Postscript Magazine?

SINHA: The sense of community, and that collective surge we feel when we successfully put out a new issue!

HOPKINSON: Where can we send submissions?

SINHA: Submissions are sent to the relevant desk email address, all found here: https://postscriptmagazine.org/submit

HOPKINSON: If someone has a question, how can they contact you?

SINHA: Email us at contact@postscriptmagazine.org

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 25, 2021 

THEME: Excel

SUBMISSION FEE: None

FORMS: We accept all forms of art, such as the following:

• Writing: criticism, fiction, op-ed, social/political commentary, poetry
• Visual art: photography, painting, sculpture, graphic design, digital illustration
• Digital forms: short films, video art, audio art, music

FORMAT: Online

ISSUE FREQUENCY: Monthly themed issues

AVERAGE RESPONSE TIME: 5 days max after submission deadline

SUBMISSION METHOD: Email

SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS: Yes

PAYMENT: “No, we do not have the funds to pay our own team yet as we are just in the startup stage. Paying our contributors is a long term goal we are working towards.”

SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

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