Joining other local news outlets that are cropping up with young people at the helm, Jupiter Magazine launched last month as an online publication centered on the Black diasporic experience.
It incorporates the visions of co-founders Camille Bacon, a Chicagoan, and Daria Harper, both Black women whose lives were shaped and informed by the Black feminist tradition.
“All the work we produce is birthed from this lineage,” said Harper, who is based in New York. “Additionally, we offer space for a range of voices who are invested in and committed to the ongoing project of Black liberation and its intersections with global freedom struggles.”
The co-editors, working in the art and criticism space, will self-publish three digital issues featuring five writers’ works, culminating in an annual print issue that’s a “quasi-anthology,” Bacon said.
Jupiter Magazine is the result of the duo coming together in January 2023, after having spent time looking at each other’s work within their practices and navigating other professional arts spaces.
The pair found they shared the same frustrations in the publishing world: Writers and critics not being adequately paid, specifically within the visual arts space; feeling constricted by the breakneck pace at which publications expect writers to work; and feeling disheartened by the lack of encouragement or prioritization of experimenting formally on the page.
“Thinking about being able to branch into other forms of writing that might exist outside of traditional essays, traditional reviews, profiles, all of these prescribed ways of writing, which, of course, have their place and service … but with such interest in the radical, the experimental, we both wanted to understand what it could look like to contribute at a publication like that,” Harper said.
The goal was to figure out “what can they offer in an attempt at remedying what writers in the traditional publishing world were experiencing.” After many conversations, they drafted a mission statement to create something that would make a tangible impact in the lives of writers and create more viable lives for them.
“We realized that ultimately what we had in front of us needed to be a publication rather than just this one-off offering,” Harper said. “We thought this is something that has not just the potential to, but that both of us feel really deeply led and called to, expand into a larger platform, a larger atmosphere, an environment that could really change the lives of writers.”
We spoke with Bacon and Harper to learn more about their radical movement for writers and what it means to give them more agency. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What is the goal for Jupiter Magazine? Is part of its existence to expose the world to up-and-coming artists?
Bacon: Our goal is to shift industry standards. Capitalism swallows its own critiques, and we really are dedicated to waiting to scale. We have ambitions for Jupiter, not only to be a magazine, but we want to grow an institution that really is a home for writers, a home for thinkers and a home for artists, specifically between Chicago and New York. We want a Jupiter library, a Jupiter bookstore, Jupiter workshop space, all of that.
Harper: We’re thinking a lot about the ecosystem and the relationships between writers and artists. Writers are also moving through these different phases of career and really understanding the work that a writer does to continue crystallizing and breathing life into the work of a lot of artists, so thinking really seriously about this relationship and how that can be one that is informing of what is a lifelong relationship.
Q: How did you pitch the Jupiter Magazine idea to publishers?
Bacon: We are the independent publishers of this magazine. We didn’t pitch it to anyone. We raised the money and we’re doing all of this independently, which is very important to us. You’ll notice there are no advertisements in this; we did not want to end up in a scenario where we were beholden to some invisible third hand that would have some kind of jurisdiction around what we could say, how and when.
Q: With allowing more room for experimentation in language, form, etc., how does one edit something like this?
Bacon: We co-edit everything. A lot of it has to do with structure and form more so than content. It’s not so much “let’s restructure this entire piece,” but more where are the really salient moments and how can we make them sing, and how can we bring them into symphony with the rest of the salient moments throughout the piece?
For example, the Joshua Segun-Lean essay. He sent it to us in a more traditional essay form and we were like, this is so lyrical, let’s break it into a poem. We suggested line breaks, and then he went back in and made it even funkier and added a bunch of all these other things that I think really allow the words to stretch and bask in the expanse of the imagination of the reader in a way that would not have been possible had it just appeared on the page in these more traditional paragraphs. And the same was true for all the rest of the essays. We really focused on structure more than content.
Q: How do you get those uninterested in art on board with Jupiter Magazine?
Bacon: That’s an ongoing experiment that we’re trying to figure out. And that’s why we have planned such robust programming in Chicago around this first issue. We have this four-part film screening that will happen every Sunday in February. That’s an experiment in how cultural criticism is happening in public all the time; we’re just not calling it that. I would posit that if you have an opinion about a piece of art or culture and you share that opinion with another person, you’re now participating in criticism.
I don’t think that’s necessarily an opinion or a position that has been really popular because the way that Western epistemologies operate is by naming and dictating who has authority to have an opinion on what and who hasn’t an authority to articulate it to the public.
I think my art writing is powerful because it serves as this alternative entry point to whatever it is that you’re writing about. If you can’t get to the Art Institute regularly, if you can’t fly to L.A. to see Justen Leroy’s opera that Jenna Wortham wrote about for example, you can read about it and you can feel in and through what the thing in question is by way of this writing.
Q: What’s been the feedback from the other side, as far as writers saying, ‘I have never experienced this before?’
Harper: Camille and I are both fortunate that as soon as we did cement this idea, we did a bit of a brain dump of a list of dream writers that we would love to work with, that we would love to contribute to the publication — peers that we feel are absolutely brilliant and that we would be really excited to give an opportunity to spread more their ideas but also to strengthen and to experience a new process working with editors in a different way.
Ultimately, I think that there was a certain level of understanding within the conversation where you did really want to provide a kind of lessening or pulling back of some of these parameters or strictures that you might initially have set out. I think it became really empowering and creates this sense of being freed up for a lot of our writers, but I think it really asked that Camille and I remain at the disposal of our writers in a very particular way. And when it comes to thinking through the lives of these individuals, we really did our best to make room for this back and forth to happen.
Q: How will Jupiter Magazine engage with the existing community? Are you in conversation with other new journalism startups?
Bacon: Absolutely. We’re also in conversation with entities that are not publications; 52 Walker is a gallery in New York that has really revolutionized the pace at which commercial exhibitions happened. That’s an entity we’re in conversation with. Saint Heron, which is Solange Knowles’ creative agency, is another entity we’re in conversation with because we admire the range.
Last year, she launched a glass-blowing collection. This year, she did Part Two of a superrogue, supercool library initiative, and so on and so forth, in this sort of unwillingness to be pinned down.
We are absolutely also in conversation with other magazines globally, with other kinds of institutional efforts. Adrienne Brown at the University of Chicago runs the Chicago Critics Table, which is an initiative around this question of “where’s the writerly ecosystem and infrastructure for folks in Chicago?”
I would say it’s being in conversation with the other upstarts, but also more broadly, being in conversation with folks who have performed this kind of sprawling work that Jupiter wishes to do. It’s not only going to be a magazine in the next five years because writers need more than a place to put their work. They also need a place to think together, we need a place where resources can be gathered. We need an annual prize to gain more recognition. We’re looking to our left, looking to our right and definitely are adamant about being in community with other publications, and more broadly, as well.
For more information on Jupiter Magazine, email info@jupiter-mag.com. The magazine will be hosting two more free events for the public this month at the Blanc Gallery. Registration is required.
