Q&A: Forever Magazine on making your own magazine

Forever Magazine was co-created by Anika Jade Levy, Madeline Cash, and Nat Ruiz as a group project among friends in 2020, and has steadily grown in influence and acclaim since. Last year it was named one of the five up and coming literary projects by New York Magazine.

Their most recent issue, titled “Relics,” is a celebration of cherished physical objects. The edition’s thick, glossy pages feature contributions from dozens of contributors including Caroline Calloway, Blake Butler, Joshua Citarella, hundreds of images, and much more. It was printed in a limited edition run of 400 issues.

We invited Anika, Madeline, and Nat to tell us more about their work.

METALABEL: What do you hope audiences feel and take from this release? 

FOREVER: One of the exciting things about making a print object is the perpetual potential that it might continue to have a life in future eras, to be forgotten, archived, and unearthed decades later. We wanted to imagine this issue of Forever as a future Relic, something someone might find fifty years from now and treat as a time capsule, a glimpse into some small piece of some small scene in the 2020’s. 

METALABEL: Walk us through the process of making this work and putting it into the world. What are some of the key decisions you faced?

FOREVER: We worked on Relics as a three-girl team, also with the support of our interviews editor Keegan Swenson and our favorite intern Skylar Zoe. Every issue begins with a theme, a rough sketch of an idea universal enough that it might matter to people but specific enough to feel new. In some ways Relics represents a return to our fixation on religious iconography, although in the end this issue feels like one of most visually secular we’ve ever produced. We asked all our favorite artists and writers to send us a relic from their own life, a future heirloom. Bernie Kaminskii sent us photographs of old New York City phone books he hoards, notable numbers like Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono circled in pencil. A notable podcaster whose name I won’t invoke here sent us an essay about stealing a small piece of Aldous Huxley’s house. 

METALABEL: What did you learn while making this release? How do you feel about it today? 

FOREVER: You have to have something seriously wrong with you to make an independent print project in the year 2024. With the cost of paper skyrocketing, logistics becoming more expensive and bureaucratically demanding as the supply chain strains, it’s no wonder that people assume you can’t make a print magazine without institutional backing or generational wealth. As with every issue we produce, RELICS was nothing short of a miracle. It is shiny, pretty, and imperfect. The magic print is that it’s ephemeral; it will not last forever. But hopefully it will serve as a keyhole into which some future forever girl can peer through and see our era amateurly preserved in all of its beauty and decay.