🌱 chlorophyll is out now 🌱

Some thoughts on how our new literary magazine came together

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

For the last few months, I have been shouting hoarse at anyone who will hear me, about the launch of our¹ new literary magazine chlorophyll, albeit in titbits sprinkled on some of my posts. This is a long-form version of those sprinkles. I’m proud of this project and I think it deserves to be written about.

As I noted in the editors’ letter, chlorophyll has been a labour of love, since October 2023, when I sent an email to Anne Wallentine – a writer whose work I love and a person I adore (and I’m a real certified hater) – about starting a literary journal; ‘an idea that has been stewing (in my mind) for at least 10 years’ with details about possible names for the project, about the kind of publication I wanted to conceive, what it would publish, from merch to a possible print edition, to the core idea about this project being FUN!

It takes most babies 1.5 years on average to start walking and so it did for us too – 1.5 years after its inception, we published chlorophyll featuring fiction, essays, and poetry with illustrations by Anne and myself. I’m glad we made the decision to illustrate even if it got weird at times; our first iteration for illustrations was anthropomorphic, based on the murder mystery game Cluedo (Clue for my American readers) – specifically the weapons wielded by the different suspects. The list of spice suspects we had were black pepper mill, a fig with a knife, a jaggery block and a box grater, citrus and microplane grater, a garlic press, ginger and mortar-pestle, and a chilli with a rope. The illustrations got real weird (and a tiny bit cool I suppose): I sketched the fig, jaggery, black pepper, and the citrus, each ingredient held captive by their weapon but also transforming it into some kind of Disney super villain².

Some mock sketches from my notebook on the Cluedo spice illustrations

We abandoned this over the new year. Instead, the illustrations that populate the website now are quite literal: a jar of peppers hovering about for an essay about… peppers; three bags of candy for an essay about… candy and social control; a sexy hand holding a glass of Beaujolais for an essay about… service and wine… you get the gist. But we’d like to think of our illustrations as ironic. ‘Oh, a poem about me lopping off the top of a champagne bottle, let me just illustrate the same thing’. It was one of the most challenging pictures I’ve had to draw but equally, the process was rewarding. The reconfiguration of the fingers alone took me days (as well as the bends in the elbows) – the knuckles had to look weird because all knuckles are strange but functional. A metaphor for the publication itself.

The world needs more writing, it needs more projects that we’re all sitting on too confused, afraid, nonchalant, or doubtful enough to see it through. I was really doubtful about myself and my work before I decided to email Anne about it. Can I not shut up about it now that it’s out? No, (it’s part of) my life’s work – thinking about the perfect background for chlorophyll took me months until I chanced upon a beautiful botanical illustration of a chilli. It reminds me of a quilt that I had at home with block prints of flowers and plants, dyed orange and green and pink. The logo emerged out of another beautiful botanical illustration, of an abundant banana plant, which then formed the foundation for this journal itself. Our literal yet ironic illustrations filling in the missing pieces of this puzzle. The Dutch still life that Anne chose as the mock cover for our first issue. The colours, the fonts, the vibes.

This can end one way only – you should go and read the magazine (and donate to it if possible; we’re publishing this independently with money we have earned and saved). There is a piece of fiction by

Devin Kate Pope

, which is an except from her zine of Irish folk tales. Two pieces of memoir (by

Karmela Padavic Callaghan

and

Marzipan

) connected to spice that bring the warmth of nostalgia, and two essays (by

JAKE MIKE BOY

and Rachel Hendry) on service, sweetness and bitterness. The poems in this issue search for some balance among all the perceived sweetness, the faux saccharine in this world; sugar evoking memories but also sugar being questioned in its place in this world with spices carrying its own dark histories.

A note on finances: Our magazine is a scrappy production entirely funded by Anne and myself and so we cannot pay writers at the moment. But we are working to change that by applying for grants and saving up as much as we can so whatever money we have goes to the people writing for us and towards maintaining the site. Everyone deserves to be paid for their work, even if we’re all seemingly writing into the void. But with the way things are – writing on the internet becoming fragmented (and promoting it even more so) and undervalued, paying writers has (including me and my work here for eg) become so tenuous. Whose fault is this? Definitely not the individual writers; this is a systemic breakdown. So what is the way out? I simply don’t know. Our current goal is to set up a platform so readers can support the work we and our talented contributors do by paying as much as one can. I know that is a constant refrain one hears now but in a world of hyper-consumption, of mainstream media using language to sanitise and erase horrors, of commodified communities, of AI slop, and lifestyles as brands, supporting a few good eggs who deserve it means a lot. Aka donate to us, to other independent writers and publications if you can.

Some housekeeping stuff:

• I’m having trouble with Stripe and I’m working to resolve that. So if during this time (maybe a month), you are unable to make a payment towards this newsletter, please let me know. I might also consider pausing paid subscriptions till then.

• I also will have to eventually move from an India-based platform to one that’s based in the UK, whether that means moving to Substack itself or elsewhere. This is a decision that will take me a few months, but wherever I go I will let you know (you also don’t have to do much). The sad part is all the comments will disappear along with this publication.

• For this week’s paid subscriber newsletter, I might trial sending the shelf care series instead of it being free.

1. For future reference purposes, ‘our’ will refer to myself and my co-founder and co-editor Anne Wallentine, whose work you should check out.

2. I really think the pepper mill reminds me of a cartoon-y Maleficent.