Danielle Pender’s beloved magazine has undergone a ‘super chic’ rebrand, with its latest issue featuring writing from Sheena Patel, Halima Jibril, Charlie Porter and more
When Riposte Magazine first launched in 2013, it quickly cultivated a space for the culturally avid and curious. Independent magazines were blossoming with fresh points of view, fostering communities with each conceptual revolution and zine drop. Ione Gamble’s Polyester was growing, a sparkling ode to having ‘faith in your own bad taste’ and a challenge to what we should both hold close and explode of girlhood. Kieran Yates’ British Values was celebrating the UK’s immigrant communities, while Strike! Magazine was anarchically swinging at the publishing industry, and Mushpit was running all over London to its own mad melody.
“2013 feels like a really long time ago,” says founder Danielle Pender today. “It was before #MeToo, the women’s march, and the Black Lives Matter movement had just started in July of that year. Tumblr was still at its peak, we hadn’t been Girlbossed yet, and Obama was still president.”
Riposte, founded and edited by writer and Watching Women and Girls author Pender, took on societal pressure points for women and the subsequent solidarity borne from them. “We were originally railing against the narrow representation of women in the media and writing features on forgotten women; it feels almost quaint now,” she says. “The magazine evolved and became a lot more progressive. I’m really proud of the women we platformed and the features we published, especially the more political articles and social commentary pieces.”
Issues explored the comfort and claustrophobia of motherhood, giving it the space as an ever-evolving concept, experience and state of being. The magazine unspooled the tendrils of how we care for each other, how we make our homes, find beauty and experience joy. Topics were expanded in our collective imagination and compacted into intimate shared experiences, all approached with unrelenting tenacity: workplace tensions and wild swimming, climate justice and queer club kids, modern witchcraft, motorsport, and art monsters. Political figures, artists, activists, models, musicians appeared in its pages. I still return to the issue featuring Katherine Angel’s radical writing on sex in the age of consent, as crisp and clarifying as ever on just as beautiful printed paper. Issue 8 with academic, sex educator, performer and breast cancer survivor Ericka Hart on the cover remains breathtaking. “I loved our piece with Betty Reid Soskin, who was the oldest park ranger in America and the cover with Stacy-Lee May who is a spinner driver in South Africa – we commissioned Kyle Weeks to shoot her doing ‘suicide spins’ on a racing track in Johannesburg,” Pender says.
Today, the media and literary landscapes are rivered by dearths of funding and algorithmic ways of working. The digital age can feel homogenous and lacking spontaneity, where the endless scroll and swipe-to-next-ad is an atrophying reflex.
But it has been a metamorphic time for Riposte: in new beginnings with the launch of Riposte Editions, a quarterly literary journal. Its inaugural edition features some of today’s most exciting and expansive writers: Amy Key, K Patrick, Sheena Patel, Kaliane Bradley, Charlie Porter, and Halima Jibril. There’s poetry, short stories and essays. Arrangements in Blue author Key contributes My Darling, My British Summertime, a simmering, stunning poem. This first edition constellates its writings in what Pender sees as an invitation to readers to live life as deeply as possible, especially when the world is as fucked as it is. Charlie Porter writes of the east London community garden he looks after, tilling and sowing ideas of climate change, political action and the current social landscape. Dazed’s junior writer Halima Jibril asks the question of who gets to experience a ‘good death’, and how confronting mortality can enrich the lives we’re crafting right now.
“The fiction and poetry fizz with desire and tension and they feel very visceral – much like what it’s like to move through the world at the minute,” Pender says.
Pender has been working in book publishing for the last few years, with a stint at Penguin Classics. “There, I saw the longevity of good writing and strong ideas packaged in a timeless way,” she says. “I suppose I’ve got older, I want the things I work on to have a longer or more meaningful reach. Also, a literary journal is super chic!”
The throughline from the magazine to a literary journal – besides the chic stature, absolutely – is an allegiance to quality, actual printed objects, and the ambition to share interesting ideas and writing. Still, “Riposte Magazine existed at a very specific time,” Pender says, “I loved it and everything we did but I don’t think things have to run on forever. It’s okay to call time on something and it doesn’t mean it failed but everyone moves on – our team, our readers, the cultural appetite. I also didn’t want to spend weeks of my life organising a photoshoot, only for the talent to cancel at the last minute!”
The journal is both svelte and sumptuous. The design aesthetic was created by Shaz Madani, who runs an independent design studio and crafted the original identity of Riposte – known for its bold, name-sloganed covers that reflected the magazine’s illuminatory perspective. The journal is more diaphanous in form. “Each issue will evolve and follow a different visual aesthetic and physical format based on the content,” explains Madani. “Riposte Magazine had a set of rules and pretty rigid identity, but this is a lot looser – we just want to keep it as open and interesting as possible so that we can take it where we want each time. Not being boxed in is a really refreshing way to approach each issue.” It’s also an opportunity for Pender and Madani to work together again after the magazine’s hiatus, and get as “stripped back and pure as possible”, says Pender.
Riposte Editions is a scythe for resisting the ever-predictable, person-as-product approach that online content demands and entrenches, where our waning attention spans are the currency. This is a way to challenge the scroll, break out of being the hot commodity, and cash back into culture.
“We all know digital platforms and their algorithms create profiles based on our behaviour and preferences, then serve up content designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible. This means a lot of what we see is perpetually similar to what has come before,” says Pender. “In contrast, printed matter and especially arts or indie bookshops, don’t know you. They aren’t curating their collections based on your data points. This allows you to discover something, a series of images you've never seen before that can blow your mind or make you think differently. No one is tracking your eyeballs, or clicks, no one is selling your data with print media – it’s an old school but radical medium.”
“We’re currently forming our identities from the content being fed back to us, and this isn’t healthy or conducive to new ways of thinking,” Pender continues. But there’s optimism too, and liberation in the work they’re doing now. “I think that in the future, those who can think critically, follow a train of thought without getting distracted, and look beyond the surface will be the ones who thrive and maintain a sense of self.”
Pender adds that she draws inspiration from the powerful writing of Palestinian poet and scholar Mosab Abu Toha, and she is in touch with Palestinian writers who will be published in the second edition. All proceeds from this first edition will go to Medical Aid for Palestine.
Riposte Editions is being distributed by Public Knowledge Books, and Pender encourages anyone to read the rest of its roster and visit its bricks and mortar shop in Walthamstow, where she recently bought All My Teachers Died of AIDS by Sam Moore. When I ask her for more writing she’s enjoyed recently, she cites Love’s Work by Gillian Rose, All Fours by Miranda July and Close To Home by Michael Magee.
“A small indie journal isn’t groundbreaking,” Pender relates, “but we all have to create our corner of the world in the way we want to see life continue, so this is my contribution.”