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Interviews

Roisin Agnew image

Name: Roisin Agnew
Degree: BA (English and Drama) 2011

Roisin Agnew is a journalist and publisher of Guts magazine. Follow her on Twitter @Roisin_Agnew

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m Italian-Irish, an only child, and I have a weird fascination with LeBron James. I listen to about 12 hours of podcasts every week and I can’t cook very well, but I like to think I have a very discerning palette. I’m 26 and fancy myself a writer, and in the meantime, I’m more of a journalist and publisher. I used to do a bit of children’s theatre at festivals.

What do you remember most about your time in Trinity?
I remember the Samuel Beckett Centre and the theatre at night time;  the smoking area outside the Arts Block; lying around on the cricket pitch after buying my Trinity Ball tickets; the endless trips up to the 5th-floor toilets in the Arts Block because they were the only ones that didn’t have queues in between lectures. I remember second year being the toughest in terms of where I was at mentally. I crossed Front Square one night on my own in the winter and the thought crossed my mind that at least I had Trinity even if everything else had gone wrong.

My toughest class is the one that has stayed with me the most - US Poetry. I had never studied modern poetry before and this was a mixed postgrad-undergrad course. It was a small class and the lecturer was very tough on us. Had she not been so frightening though, I wouldn’t have been introduced to Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg or Wallace Stevens, who became some of my great loves and influences.

What is Guts? Why have you limited it to six issues?
Guts is a collection of confessional writing and illustration. The idea was to create something that was visually impactful and well-designed, but whose chief focus was the writing and the writers. I was tired of sort of feeling like there was no middle-ground between literary journals and slick magazines. In my little way, I wanted to attempt to bridge the two in Guts. The idea is that it’s a collectible object – its production is of a high standard and part of a limited edition of six. The name Guts refers to both its confessional nature, spilling your guts or even having the guts to admit something. We wanted to apply tell-all blogging culture to a print medium and make the writers as individuals the focus.

How did you approach writers and artists to submit pieces?
I sort of knew a lot of the people from around and from work – I interned in Le Cool, worked in Image, I write for Totally Dublin, Prowlster, and I currently work in The Irish Times. I came across them either seeing them acting, or having read their writing, or having met them at parties. I approached everyone for the first four issues and was incredibly lucky that they were all so supportive and up for it. Since our Kickstarter campaign I’ve been getting submissions – it never even occurred to me that people would want to write for it! So come issue five we’ll be taking on writers that have submitted which is really exciting.

To quote Egon from the movie ‘Ghostbusters,’ “Print is dead!” What are your views?
Print will never be dead, it’s just going to keep metamorphosing into different iterations. I think that indie publishing and magazines are getting a second wind and experiencing a lot of new energy, they’re definitely having a moment anyway. We made over twice the amount of money we asked for on Kickstarter and we surpassed our target in five days so clearly people were hungry for it. I think the desire to experience something tactile and beautiful is important for the reading experience, and I think as we become more design-focused it’s going to become even more important.

What are your plans for the future?
I’m currently working on Issue two of Guts which is out on 20 February. Rob Doyle, Patrick Freyne, Ciaran Walsh, Megan Nolan, Brian Herron, Maggie Armstrong, Donal Fynn, Simon Ashe-Browne and myself are writing for this one, while Aran Quinn is doing the illustrations and Oh Hey Friend are designing it. I’m really pleased with how it’s come together, it feels like we sharpened things and streamlined them in this second issue, and there’s some nice raw writing in it. Our first issue was magic, this is going to be on the money.

Tell us a secret about yourself.
I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about what I’ve started to call ‘click-bait feminism’. I tweeted about it [recently] and the first favourite I got was from someone whose profile read ‘right-wing gal don’t care’ – needless to say it freaked me out a little. I’ve always been a feminist. Learning feminist theory in college blew the top of my head off, it was liking being taught to speak when you’ve been communicating through gestures all life-long. But I have to say that I’m sort of on-the-fence and a little mystified by the recent wave of trendy-empty feminism – from the Miley Cyrus interview I recently read, to the Bjork interview, to the Karl Lagerfeld show of a couple of months ago, to the free-the-nipple campaign. I don’t know if it’s really getting the point at all.

I’d call it a secret because I’m scared of communicating this dilemma in my head out loud in case I may be betraying the cause by saying what I think. And right-wing-gal didn’t help! I like my feminism to be accessible and fun (à la Caitlin Moran) and I’m glad it’s going through this fashionable moment in many ways. But my secret is the presence of that twinge of uncertainty that I don’t vocalise often or ever.