The Filth & the Purity: An interview with Sein und Werden's Rachel Kendall

"I like the grey concrete of metropolis, the stink of the opium den, the ravings in the lunatic asylum. There really is little difference between good and evil when you cut out the fluff in between."



Susan Tomaselli: When did you start Sein und Werden and why?

Rachel Kendall: I started Sein und Werden as a web zine in 2004 as a response to the wealth of excellent writing and artwork I kept coming across on xanga (where I had an online journal. There are so many talented folk out there, many of whom had never even considered sending their work out to publications. I wanted to bring them all together in an electronic format, initially as a one-off. But I was finding more and more stuff and I ended up scouting people, asking if I could publish them online. After a while unsolicited material started coming in. Then in 2006 Spyros Heniadis, a photographer and regular contributor to Sein, suggested we make a hard copy available. He offered to do all the hard work as I had neither the time nor the technical know-how when it came to DTP, and we decided to keep the content of each separate so I could continue working on the online version while he worked on the other.

ST: To the uninitiated, how would you describe S&W's style? Your aesthetic?

RK: I wanted Sein to be a rich, voluptuous marriage of a number of different genres and styles, incorporating contemporary and classical, magic realism, noir, surrealism, slipstream... I seek out material that touches on the baser human behaviours, stories that take a conventional situation and set it in an appropriately bizarre and random setting. I like the grey concrete of metropolis, the stink of the opium den, the ravings in the lunatic asylum. I prefer dystopias to utopias, lust to love, dysfunction to production, filth to purity, nightmares to dreams; yet I want material that shows how there really is little difference between right and wrong/good and evil, sadism and masochism... when you cut out the fluff in between.


[Nude Woman with Child, FW Ontiveros / Untitled, Jason Ellison / Something Missing, Selina Remillard Sunshine]

ST: Why a literary/art journal instead of one or the other?

RK: Fundamentally I think it is because I am a visual person. I love art and I love film and I love photography and I guess that comes through a lot. I love magazines too, and making collages and cutting up and sticking down and I just love arranging word and image. I get a lot of pleasure out of deciding which image to put with which text online. I also love artist's books and altered books. The trouble with Sein is that it is both and neither a literary journal and an art journal. Due to (lack of) finances, the print issue is a rough 'n' ready, raw, punk, DIY affair, photocopied, folded, stapled. The web version, on the other hand, can be much glossier, sleeker, sexier. Most of the art, therefore, goes online. But as I like prose and image to complement each other, I like to have some art in print too. Art that will translate well as a photocopied image, just as I like to have text online, but not enough that you end up with a splitting headache when you're only half way through reading it.

ST: S&W is a print journal, though it does have a strong web presence. Is this a deliberate decision? To keep S&W more print-orientated, rather than on-line?

RK: I don't think S&W is necessarily more print-orientated. It came about initially because there were a couple of people who wanted to submit, who didn't have access to the internet. And it kind of took off. But as much as I love books, the internet gives so much more opportunity to writers, and there is not really a limit on how much material I can accept. As long as I like it I can keep accepting it till the deadline is up. I just can't turn down a good piece of writing or art when I see it; I will always sqeeze it in somewhere. So I guess the web issue gives me a lot more editorial freedom in that respect.

ST: Tell me about ISMs Press. Why did you start that and what are future plans?

RK: ISMs pretty much came about the same way Sein itself did. I read something I was totally enamoured of, and wanted to publish it. I hope to do the same again in the future, but it will be by invite only. I do have my eye on a couple of things but I can't say anything until something more definite is on the cards. By the way, the name ISMs Press, which Spyos coined, is a tongue-in-cheek take on SurrealISM, ExpressionISM and ExistentialISM.


[Rose, Rachel Kendall / Untitled, Spyros Heniadis / Gate, John Brewer]

ST: How have your goals changed since S&W's inception? Do you have a vision for S&W and each of its three divisions—the web, the print, and ISMS press?

RK: Yeah, I guess my goals have changed although I'm still at the 'suck it and see' stage. And I will probably stay there, because there are zines popping up and keeling over all the time and I am not about to commit myself to any one goal when I don't know how long this thing will run for. It's like an on-going project that threatens to implode with every issue, but so far I've managed to keep it going. There have been technical disasters, relationships ending, I've moved house twice in the last year, begun a new relationship, had a family crisis to work through, and that's not stopped me. I can only say I will do my best to keep this thing going, even if I have to get down to the very basic basics to do it.

ST: You're a writer yourself. How do you balance between Rachel the editor and Rachel the writer? Do you find one ultimately trumps the other?

RK: Yes. Mostly that's laziness on my part though. I'm mentally lazy, so if I can get out of writing, by working on Sein, then I will. Also, Sein is cathartic so I will often work on it to forget other worries. Paradoxically, there is never enough time in the day, so I often chastise myself for my laziness and then over-compensate. I read submissions on the bus on the way to work, in the bath, while I eat... But in order to write, there are certain factors in the equation where n = the number of coffees I've had that morning and x = how much sleep I've had etc. So yes, the Sein thing is definitely something I focus more on and, unfortunately, the writing comes as and when it wants to.



ST: In your submission guidelines for S&W, you say you want "experimental, non-genre, erotica, horror, philosophical, noir, crime, hard-boiled, surreal." How would you define the stories you write?

RK: Erm, that's kind of tough. I have always struggled to define my own stories (without labelling and boxing them; is that possible?) because I am not trying to write in any particular style or genre. Unless I am writing for a specific anthology, I guess my writing is a subconscious mutation of the authors/books I have grown up reading, from The Magic Faraway Tree to The Worst Witch to Stephen King to Anais Nin, to [Henry] Miller to Dostoyevsky to Angela Carter to [William] Burroughs to...

ST: How has the internet affected you as a writer, if at all?

RK: It has opened up so many opportunities. As much as I love books (I work in a library just so I can rub their musty pages over my synapses) the internet has provided a cheap and easy way to make writerly contacts. If it wasn't for the internet there wouldn't have been any Sein and I wouldn't have made so many good friends and got to know the beautiful creative people! In fact, editing a web zine has been the best thing I could have done regards my own writing because I have a whole host of critics at my fingertips. I read them, they read me. It's a love/hate thing.

ST: You've had some really good writing in past issues of S&W. Which writer, alive or dead, would you to see in there?

RK: Oh lordy, there are too many to choose from. Henry Miller; Borges; [JG] Ballard; Kathy Acker; [Jean-Paul] Sartre; [Simone] de Beauvoir; [Leopold von] Sacher-Masoch; Octave Mirbeau; Frank Wedekind... the list is almost endless!

ST: Does S&W have any direct literary influences?

RK: In answer to this I would have to say there are three direct influences which make up the ethos of Sein und Werden, which, as mentioned earlier, are Surrealism, Expressionism and Existentialism. Literary influences would therefore include Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, Sartre, Heidegger, [Georges] Bataille and so on, and others who branch out from the core of these movements such as Angela Carter and Italo Calvino, Bruno Schultz and [Franz] Kafka.

ST: Finally, what's the last good book you read?

RK: Well I am currently reading an unpublished novel by a previous contributor to Sein: Infirmative Actions by Fabian Delecto. This is an excellent, bizarro, Sadiean, Batailleian, terrifyingly brilliant anti-novel and it needs to be published. As far as published books goes I think the last good one was Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille.

---

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Susan Tomaselli is the editor of Dogmatika as well as a contributing editor to 3:AM Magazine, where she writes on comics.