Karly

A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through a magazine website and realised that almost everything I was reading was tied, in one way or another, to something that was currently being sold. There were articles about books that had just been released, television adaptations that were about to air, products that had recently launched, and authors who happened to be promoting a new project. None of this struck me as unusual. In fact, it was probably exactly what I would have expected to find. What surprised me was how long it took me to notice the pattern.

The internet has become so thoroughly organised around novelty that it’s easy to forget how much of our media ecosystem revolves around whatever happens to be new, trending, or commercially relevant at a given moment. Open almost any publication and you’ll find recommendations, previews, rankings, gift guides, anticipated releases, and coverage timed to coincide with a launch date. Even when a piece is thoughtful, well-written, and genuinely useful, there is often an invisible clock ticking away somewhere in the background. This isn’t a criticism, at least not entirely.

Publishing has always existed within economic realities, and journalists, editors, and writers deserve to be paid for their work. If a publication relies on advertising, subscriptions, sponsorships, affiliate links, or partnerships to survive, that’s hardly shocking. Most readers understand this, and I certainly do. I’d be the last person to pretend that money somehow contaminates culture by merely existing in its vicinity. Running a small publication has given me a healthy appreciation for the fact that domains, software, equipment, travel, and all manner of unglamorous necessities tend to cost rather more than one would like.

In fact, I regularly dream about the day Nonsense & Lit receives some sort of glamorous literary brand deal. If a publisher would like to whisk me away to a beautiful bookshop, send me an alarming number of books, or sponsor my increasingly niche interests, I can assure you that I’m not philosophically opposed to the idea. And yet, the more time I spend working on the publication, the more I’ve come to appreciate how unusual our own habits can seem when placed alongside much of the media landscape.

Nobody has ever sat down and decided that Nonsense & Lit should be the way it is. There was no meeting, no mission statement, and certainly no carefully researched content strategy. The publication simply evolved around whatever happened to capture our attention. Sometimes that’s a newly released book, but more often than not it’s something we’ve encountered by accident, long after its cultural moment has supposedly passed. A surprising amount of our archive can probably be explained by somebody falling down a rabbit hole and deciding to take the rest of us with them.

Looking back, we’ve spent time discussing poetry anthologies, linguistics, Taylor Swift, Shakespeare, folklore, literary adaptations, and books that have been sitting patiently on shelves for years waiting for somebody to pick them up. Most of these topics didn’t appear because they were trending; they appeared because we found them interesting. Perhaps that’s what I’ve come to value most about independent publishing. Curiosity is allowed to exist without having to justify itself.

When I think about the works that have stayed with me throughout my life, very few arrived at precisely the moment they were supposed to. I didn’t discover all my favourite books the year they were published, nor did I encounter every poem, film, or writer during the brief period when everyone else happened to be talking about them. Most entered my life unexpectedly, often years later, when they were no longer being reviewed, promoted, shortlisted, marketed, or discussed.

That experience feels increasingly rare online, where cultural conversations can sometimes resemble a conveyor belt moving ever forward, carrying our attention towards the next release before we’ve fully finished thinking about the previous one.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself drawn to writing that lingers. Not because it rejects contemporary culture, but because it isn’t entirely governed by it. There is something reassuring about stumbling across an essay written out of genuine fascination rather than urgency, and something equally reassuring about knowing that a piece of art doesn’t cease to matter once the publicity campaign has ended and the internet has moved on.

The closest thing we do to commerce-driven journalism at Nonsense & Lit is asking interviewees whether they’d like to plug a project before we wrap up our conversation. Beyond that, most of our editorial decisions are guided by little more than enthusiasm, curiosity, and the occasional inability to stop thinking about something. I suspect this would horrify certain corners of the publishing world. On the other hand, it does mean that whenever we become obsessed with a poem, a novel, a linguistic phenomenon, or a piece of literary trivia that absolutely nobody asked us to investigate, we can simply go ahead and write about it, and honestly, that’s one of my favourite things about the internet.