StrangeText · 2026 · Ongoing Zine Project · anticipating first issue October 2026
What is StrangeText?:
StrangeText is a zine project focused on analysing the more peculiar aspects of contemporary life. Spanning arts, culture, and environmentalism, I founded this project with the help of talented collaborators to curate an engaging critical resource and create an opportunity to reflect on our strange place in the world.
In the lead-up to our first issue, I have been responsible for setting themes, reviewing and directing content, copy-editing, curating features, graphic design, art direction, and editorial illustration. All content displayed is my own work and contributions to this project.
This page includes an introduction to StrangeText as a whole, followed by a preview of the Inaugeral issue: Anthropocene Monster.
StrangeText Introduction:
The world is a strange place.
Of course, this is neither a new nor unique sentiment. Many of us have paused to reflect on our ever-evolving world. However, the strangeness we now experience, the strangeness that defines our existence in contemporary society, feels different, more encompassing, and more unusual than ever before. Crisis is no longer isolated. Disaster appears on our televisions, on billboards, in our pockets, and in our hands. The world has exploded with connections. These ties bind us together and make the scale and immediacy of this shifting world far greater than before, shining directly into your eyes: completely unignorable.
Dr Henry Ivry, Lecturer at the University of Glasgow and author of Transscalar Critique, states that the crisis of the contemporary is also a crisis of “ordinariness.” We now face competing environmental, financial, and political catastrophes with absurd frequency. It seems that an “ordinary” life, unentangled and mundane, is wholly unattainable.
Within this magazine, we seek a different conclusion. In a world that resists the ordinary, perhaps it is time to stop making sense. Perhaps the best reason we can find to comprehend our experience in the modern world is to embrace the weird, the eerie, and the uncanny, to bring strangeness to light and abandon all illusions of sense.
StrangeText seeks to engage with the bizarre and unnatural through creative, critical, and analytical responses rooted in modern and contemporary culture. Abandon reason, let go of the ordinary, and lose yourself in the arcane, mystifying, and unnaturally strange texts.
Enjoy
Issue 1
Anthropocene monsters
Monsters arose naturally as an inaugural topic. These creatures that lurk in the gloom and haunt our nightmares tend to appear at times of crisis (as Jeremy Jerome Cohen states); they are a way for our intangible fears to manifest into something more comprehensible. Thus, at this time, when we stand at the precipice of accumulating and diverse disasters, be they war, cost of living, environmental issues, pandemics, or financial crises, to name a few, it is only natural for monsters to emerge from the rubble of horror and planetary unease, standing in our periphery, waiting to be acknowledged. The concept of the “monster” and the “monstrous” has become both a product of fear and a pivotal means of articulating the fear that accompanies an ever-stranger world.
This issue explores the diverse approaches to monsters in contemporary society, examining them as uneasy incarnations of psychological horrors, shifting figures of change, and considering how monsters are created, among other perspectives.
So, beware the paper you ruin, for there are monsters within these pages.
Prepare to embrace the unusual, and get Strange.
Anthropocene Monsters Introduction - Preview: