An Interview with Madeline Cash

Edited by Mira Alpers

Madeline Cash is the founder and co-editor of Forever Magazine. Her fiction has been featured in The Drift, The Baffler, Muumuu House and more. Her debut short story collection Earth Angel was published by Clash Books in April. We sat down with Cash over zoom back in February to talk about everything from being banned from cemeteries, to religion, to Y2K aesthetics.

The interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Advocate: Could you tell us more about how you started Forever Mag?

Madeline Cash: I started the magazine about a year ago in Los Angeles as this reading series at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It garnered a lot more attention than we anticipated. Tons of people came. I'm actually banned from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery permanently because it was so much larger than I thought and had said. It snowballed from there and we picked up editors along the way. This was also a reaction to the press, New York Tyrant folding and the death of its founder, Giancarlo DiTrapano. I was such a fan of the writers he was putting forward and wanted to continue there being a platform for them.

You mentioned New York Tyrant, but I’d love to know how you found your editorial voice and what were other inspirations that made this magazine unique to you and your co-founders?

I felt that there needed to be a platform for these otherwise unchampioned voices. A lot of the people that New York Tyrant were publishing were day laborers or literally currently incarcerated or not able to speak through normal platforms and get agents and representation or publish at all. So it was nice to continue that legacy of finding more unconventional voices and giving them opportunities.

The literary world is kind of an interesting landscape always, but especially right now post-pandemic. Where do you think Forever Mag fits into that? Like, what are the kind of trends that you're more focused on propelling besides publishing people who don't otherwise get published?

Literature is having a renaissance right now, which is great for us. And I'm sure that it comes out of the pandemic—having to have more solitary activities, and reading being one of them. Now that we can be together again, people are finding ways to create a community galvanized around literature, which is normally so solitary. For the magazine fitting in, I'm just excited to be able to work on being an editor outside of any institution, like, we don't have any rules. So whatever happens next, whatever happens with the trends, I think we can be flexible for what Forever looks like in the future. But right now, I think just capitalizing on people's enthusiasm for literature is our focus.

Could you maybe speak more to that “renaissance” and whether you think that your magazine has its own style or it's contributing to that renaissance in any specific way?

I think that we're following what we're comfortable with, the magazines of my youth. I would read HTMLGIANT and Muumuu House and Sex Magazine and these very online early aughts publications I thought were just putting out the most interesting and often transgressive work. I wanted Forever to function in that digital atmosphere.

We're also trying to make it fun again. We'll throw large scale parties and it gets people enthusiastic about reading, but also like going out and socializing. This is new, but it's also very old. I mean, this was happening with, you know, the Algonquin Round Table like writers used to actually be like the social ‘glitterati.’ For so long, that wasn't the case. I feel like it's coming back into prominence in this really exciting way.

Do you feel like Forever Mag has a particular regional identity or perspective?

I don't feel like there's a physical location governing the magazine, more like a traveling circus. We were in New York and we're in L.A. and now we have this foray into Europe because we've gotten some distribution. So maybe we'll be Forever Mag worldwide. I don't think it really matters where it is as long as it has this digital landscape that people can go to and live on. We do publish a lot of people from, you know, from Appalachia to Canada to Honduras. There's no particular home.

Do you have a particular favorite part of the publishing and editing process?

I always like finding someone new who’s really excited to be able to benefit from even our small platform. I think that a dog nurse in the middle of England sent us a story that I thought was phenomenal recently and that was very exciting. People have sent us stories from prison or from just the strangest places and about the strangest things. It's nice to see that reach. So that's one of my favorite things.

I'd love to change gears and start talking a little bit about Earth Angel. I think a lot of us were curious about how you went from having these short stories that you published in all of these literary magazines to publishing this collection. When did you start thinking of these stories as existing in relation to each other?

There had been this connective through line in a lot of the stories I'd been writing. So I started compiling them and organizing them and fitting them together like puzzle pieces. When it started to create sort of a full picture for me, I started shopping the manuscript around a little bit. But, at the time I was living in my mom's back house in L.A. so I was just so excited to get a book deal that I didn't question it too much. It didn't make a lot of sense. It was more just, okay, let's do it. Maybe for the next book or with hindsight, I would have included or not included certain stories to make it a more cohesive picture. I think just naturally there was a throughline, you know, there's characters that repeat and come back.

Could you talk a little bit more about how you see this as kind of both cohesive work blending together and as separate entities that can be read at any moment?

I guess that the stories can function out of the context of Earth Angel. They all can stem autonomously in their own little worlds. But I do kind of imagine them existing in the same Earth Angel extended universe.

I actually thought this was, as short story collections go, this was a pretty damn cohesive one, especially with recurring themes, character names, motifs. It was actually like, made me wonder what you see is kind of the border between a short story collection and a really formally inventive novel?

Money and distribution. No, no, I was actually just thinking about this. Just, maybe a tension? It's easier to write in short bursts in sprints than to have the patience to sit down and make the characters and story flow and marinate for the period of time it would take to write a novel, which I'm working on now. It does really test your patience. I think writing a short story with characters that come back is significantly easier.

What I found most striking and cohesive was your amazing absurdist tone. I was wondering if you could describe your literary voice in your own words, and then talk a little bit about how you developed that?

I think that it was kind of a rebellion against all the writing advice I'd been given as a kid. Like writers should ‘show and not say’ was a big one. So I was like, “Actually, I'm going to tell you everything that happens right up front immediately. “ And another one was like, ”You should write about what you know.” And I was like, I'm going to write about a situation that I have never been in and can't imagine. I think a lot of it is just being a little flippant and seeing if I can make it work by breaking these conventions.

How do you feel the form in which a story is presented affects the story itself?

At least on our website, I try to keep the writing pretty barebones, whereas the rest of the website has kind of a whimsical early Internet aesthetic. I like the writing to not have anything around it, so it can be read plainly. I definitely am someone who is swayed by a book's cover, and so I feel that at least for reading work online, it should have as little influences as possible other than the writing itself. I hate when a piece of my work comes out and it's in a publication that's highly stylized or broken up in a way that's distracting. I think that it detracts from the work. So I try to be conscious of that as an editor as well. We have an amazing designer for Forever who really dances with InDesign and does such a lovely job, but I always have to ask her to rein back a little bit so that the writing can be at the forefront.

Two themes that really stuck out to me in the collection was the repeated interest in girlhood and young women going from innocence to a different place and in different and complicated ways, but also dealing with religion and relationship to God and spirituality. I was curious about what was interesting to you about that spiritual side of the bildungsroman-type narrative?

Now, I'm going back on not writing about what I know. But, so much of my coming of age was predicated on religion or rejecting it, being rebellious of the church in my community.  Now, I'm trying to head back into it more carefully as I get older. I was just speaking to my co-editor Anika about this. And I mean, we're not that old, we’re like 26, but I still feel like I'm getting older and at the end what do you have except for this house that you built inside yourself? So why not build it with a foundation that has been established for thousands of years? I don't know why I thought that I could ever do any better. I don't know. It's just something that's been governing my thoughts lately. So it becomes evident in the writing.

You seem to have this interest in Y2K aesthetics that is evident in both the visual presentation of Forever Mag and in your short story collection. Historically visual aesthetics have had literary counterparts, like there’s surrealism in visual art and then there's surrealism kind of moving parallel in literature or like impressionism, you know, those kinds of big movements. Do you think there's kind of a similar parallel movement between the visuals of Y2K and the literary aesthetics of it?

It's pared down. It's a low quality image. This writing is often thought of as very glib and dry or straightforward or not borrowing from techniques of traditional literary repute. It's the low quality aesthetic of the early digital age, which I think is really reflected in the writing and just how pared down it is.

You are both a writer and an editor, and I was wondering what skills overlap between the two processes, how they differ, how they feed and help each other, how you see those two areas in your work?

I mean, I’m also a copywriter. So I feel like that has actually been the most informative for me as a writer. It is like having to use your talent in the confines of capitalism and just have it completely divorced from anything that you care about. They have to fit in three distinct categories. I can't switch from writing to editing to copywriting with a lot of ease because they feel just very different. They function separately from one another.

Do you feel like you are able to kind of apply some of the editorial techniques that you would use on other people's work to your own work? Or is that something that it's difficult for you to separate?

There are definitely things I pull from the editorial process and then I'm lucky enough to get to implement into my own work. Just by the sheer mass amount of reading I do for the magazine, I'm sure that I get influenced unconsciously as well. But like I said, I do kind of try to keep it removed. I never publish my own work in Forever. I like it to be like copywriting, its own job that I view as sterile and not my art practice, or else it gets to be too complicated. It’s like dating your coworkers or something ... which I've done so ...

There's culturally a new interest in religion right now that’s developed over the last few years, especially an interest in Catholicism. Catholicism is really, for lack of a better word, trendy. I was wondering if you have an opinion about why that might be or if it's just kind of, something happening.

I think the easy answer is that it's just a pendulum swing away from neoliberal sensibilities and aesthetics. This generation is embracing tradition as an act of rebellion. But I do think it's a little bit more complex than that. We're in this new, almost frightening age. I've been reading a lot about technological determinism and like with these rapid advancements, the future is just really unclear and scary. When people feel like things are nebulous or lost and need to grasp onto something, it's most often God that they gravitate towards. In terms of Catholicism specifically, I think it's just our milieu. If you were conducting this interview with youth in Utah, Mormon fundamentalism might be the rebellion, but Catholicism is just probably the backgrounds of the people we spend time around. But yeah, I think that there is something a little bit deeper than just being tongue in cheek.

We’re going to move into our speed round. We ask a version of these questions to everybody we interview and you can answer in just one or two sentences. Who's the first person who reads your writing?

My mom.

Do you have a special talent or party trick?

Oh, I can make this sound like a helicopter landing. This is going to be hard for you guys to articulate into print, but it's like “whhhhhrrrrrp.”

That is very impressive. What's the last movie that you saw in theaters?

I saw Infinity Pool, the Brandon Cronenberg movie. It was bad.

What's the last gift you gave or received?

My co-editor Anika went to Mexico City, and she brought me back some Klonopin. The last gift I gave was I got my mom a massage for Valentine's Day.

When you were college age what works of writing were influential to you?

When I was in college, I loved Barthelme. I really loved George Saunders. I actually emailed him obsessively until he answered me and we had a very nice correspondence and sometimes I still email him and I think he's like, “Please stop writing.” I was really obsessed with Japanese writers like Kōbō Abe. I really loved Jenny Offill. You should all read Joy Williams, if you haven’t. The Quick and the Dead, that’s a must.

Who is your Y2K idol?

What's her name from Crystal Castles? Alice Glass.