A History of SPAM in Two Voices

Maria’s story:

Hi, I’m Maria. My first encounter with SPAM was on Facebook. I remember a cascade of memes and a call for submissions. Maybe some Comic Sans. In my relatively recent status as an Eng Lit alumni, I was like who do these cool kids think they are. A few months passed and my interest was piqued again: this time by a new call for submissions themed around ‘the Glitch’. My wayward internet studies syllabus, fitted around restaurant shift work, had taken me to Rosa Menkman’s The Glitch Moment(um) (2011) and I had been making glitch art on my shitty phone all summer for kicks. Plus, my undergrad dissertation, completed the year before, was all about the internet. The internet mediated through radio, historical fiction, psychoanalysis and cryptonymy, but that’s another story. I was still forming a nascent idea about how you could talk critically about this thing that totally shaped our lives. I submitted to SPAM zine and Denise Bonetti, founding co-editor, invited me to read at the launch. Having barely done a poetry reading before, let alone one starting at 9pm, I had a few gnarly shots of tequila, dragged some friends out with me, danced to my friend’s chiptune band and the rest is history.

So the story goes, SPAM started because of a perceived lack of space to platform work that acknowledged the internet at all. It’s hard to think back to a time before the internet was almost all we spoke, thought, wrote and posted about. It did seem to exist though. The early days of SPAM took shape around a series of manifestos: calls for submissions framed in endless word banks of ideas. We wanted a third way that wasn’t spoken word nights or official verse culture, something which existed between print and digital space – which ‘put the internet on the page’ as we kept saying. We did ten issues of black & white zines (with full colour riso covers) whose themes spoke almost prophetically to the obsessions of the times: Glitch, Vape or Dream?, Astroturf, Notes from the Watercooler, Prom Date, Astral Projections & Talismanic Persuasions… These issues platformed work that interrogated and indulged in equal measure our obsession with astrology, girlhood, sport, the anthropocene, high school drama, vaping, internet surrealism. Our calls for submissions were poems in themselves, featuring extensive catalogues of prompts such as ‘soft-looking but rough-feeling’, ‘Deliveroo ennui’ and ‘the underlying bathos of limousine aesthetics’. The final issue, Millennium Megabus, was pipped as a ‘funeral’ for SPAM, as we had planned to retire the zine in its current iteration on the tenth issue.

The idea of apocalyptic infrastructures grinding to a halt on the event horizon of everyone’s favourite (& most hated) transport option took on greater proportions in Covid-era March 2020, when it was being pulled together. We had a five hour online launch in May 2020, featuring music by Double Discone, Signalement, boosterhooch, a short film from Taylor Stewart, Marc Johansen, various readings and more. Our dress code was ‘Megabus colours/end of the world’. Over 70 people showed up crammed together in the Zoom room in yellow and blue and it was like a big aquarium of exes, crushes, friends, poets, legends. We had 15(!) poets on the bill plus an interactive transport quiz and raised a bunch of money for the Trussell Trust. The afters was literally just five drunk people watching Tom McCarthy interviews screenshared from YouTube. The promo copy read: ‘We encourage sweaty bedroom dancing to recreate the musky aromas of an IRL megabus’. Everything that month was like living out a bizarre fever dream Bolaño novel online.

Maybe there’s some affinity between the low-cost transport service which connects UK cities (remember the £1 ticket and Megabus Gold and the sweetheart saver!) and the creative economies of zine culture. SPAM has never had a base as such beyond Instagram, and its platforms have hopped between various web hosts. We’ve not had quite as many breakdowns as ye olde Megabus though. Just a few swerves. Over the years, my roles at SPAM have shifted around as life and work demanded. I was editor-in-chief between 2020 and 2023, an era of many pinstripes, when I handed the reins over to Kirsty. There’s a tradition of having business meetings in weird situations at SPAM. For instance, while drinking in secret South London parks or playing table tennis outside in Scottish winter.

What is spam?

A multi-modal DIY machine and small press publisher. In the early days, we were fed on metamodernism, modernist manifestos, insomnia, rollies, memes, Rhizome.org, Real Life Mag, the post-internet poetry tumblr, I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best (2014), Glasgow Uni’s English department, the Net Art era, photocopy aesthetics and Neopets; we were trying to grow wholesomely out of the ashes of alt-lit.

We are first and foremost a publisher of poetry and criticism, more recently expanded into experimental prose fiction and hybrid forms. We have platformed everything from conceptual readymades to concrete poetry, ekphrastic work, experimental lyric, memes and poetic essays. Our ekphrastic publications pull in everything from Brian Eno to Alanis Morrisette and Love Island. We have published over 50 print books and pamphlets from authors such as Courtney Bush, Jack Young, Jay Gao, Parel Joy, Jennifer Soong, Samantha Walton, Oli Hazzard, Jack Underwood, Dom Hale and Helen Charman. Many of our writers were at a very early stage in their career when we published them and others were further on and taking a chance on us. What a pleasure to work with our heros!

If there’s one thing that defines us, then (apart from our iconic RAT POET dad caps), it’s the books. Most of the time we published via open call or selection, meaning our network of writers was always expanding and a slew of exciting new manuscripts would often tumble into our inbox come open season. It’s hard to put a finger on what sustained us in those early years, sifting through literally hundreds of manuscripts and poems to select just a handful for publication. Maybe youth, maybe exuberant teamwork, maybe coffee from whichever establishment would allow us to squat with laptops all afternoon. At the time, I was also doing editorial work for my own zine, Gilded Dirt, and the Manchester-based Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Those years I remember as a blur of late-late nights reading endless pdfs and populating google sheets with a traffic light system of yes/no/maybe. My head was a pure feed of poetry. Sometimes poets would reply to their rejection emails saying ‘that’s totally fine about the poetry but are u okay? u sent that at three in the morning’.

We tend to publish in seasons of two, three, sometimes five pamphlets. This brings together different sensibilities, geographies and thematic interests – plus it helps with sales when people order in bundles. We liked the idea of poets being ‘label mates’, able to read or tour together – as we got to do in 2024 with a jaunt around Glasgow, London and Bristol featuring poets as far flung as Hastings, New York City and Iceland. The tour reminded me that my favourite thing is basically to be with poets all the time and talk nonstop and make notes of weird things said, writing plans and recommendations. I came back feeling super inspired and it was the start of an enchanted spring. When we used to do a lot of open calls, we ended up falling in love with more manuscripts than we had initially allowed ourselves to, and so we’d commit to say two seasons of work from ten authors which made things easier to space out.

As both a teacher and editor, I want to encourage people to start their own presses. If you can’t find a home for your work, why not start your own press – not just to self-publish but to platform work you might have affinity with? You can do so much with scarce resources, a stapler and the internet. To paraphrase something Hoa Nguyen once said, I think everyone should do a little public service to poetry.

At some point roughly coinciding with the pandemic, we moved more into the online space and started a magazine there. Not long before that we’d started SPAM Plaza: a space for reviews of poetry and essays of cultural criticism. It was inspired by the blogosphere of music journalism I was involved in at the time (shoutout to GoldFlakePaint!). The idea was to write fast, publish in the moment, edit with instinct. It was really great having people pitch stuff to us and setting up particular strands for content including our SPAM Cuts (reviews of single poems), Archive Fever (critical pieces engaging with poetry’s long existence on the internet) and our Interviews & Features. Over the years, different editors took different directions with. We’ve worked with: Maebh Harper, Max Parnell, Loll Jung, Mau Baiocco, Alice Hill-Woods and Maya Uppal. We even had an editorial and research intern, Emma Urbanová, who almost got us onto TikTok with her elegant and persuasive marketing strategy! Alas, we are resistant millennials as ever… We tried to cultivate with The Plaza a home for small press poetry criticism: one that prioritised pamphlets and indie presses. Our end of year list Deep Cuts is always a hit and a good way to recap what everyone’s been reading and publishing while life passes by.

One of the most magical parts of running a small press is bringing a book into fruition. I loved talking to Jack Young on Zoom about King Arthur and medieval manuscripts and meadows; forcing fred spoliar to finish With the Boys by leaving them in a pub with a laptop during some raucous football final; loved the cherry chocolate baked by Nell Cardozo for Romy Danielewicz’s launch at Category Is; loved working with individual poets to tease out a manuscript and into a book; collaborating on cover art; seeing reviews trickle in. It hasn’t been total utopia and sometimes running SPAM has been a pain in the ass!!! Mostly the stress comes from trying to meet too many people’s needs at once with very limited resources – from printer mishaps, balancing team responsibilities, human errors and the odd bout of poetry scene drama. Like most DIY endeavours, we run SPAM alongside our day jobs, care responsibilities and ongoing chronic health problems. The dream to make SPAM our day jobs, with a dedicated office studio and printer to boot, have sadly not yet come to fruition (angel investors slide into our DMs). Overall most people are kind and understanding when it takes us months to reply to an email. As a lecturer, 99.5% of my life is now email, and sometimes I feel like a shimmering barely breathing missive machine.

One of my favourite aspects of running a press is the potential for collaboration. In 2024/5 I teamed up with the artist Maisie Florence Post to co-edit Digital Dreamland: a special Plaza series exploring the relationship between dreams and the internet. This all started because Maisie pitched an essay ‘The Dreamification of the Internet’ and I was a few years into doing research around Sleep Studies through Project Somnolence, so a hopeful invitation cascaded from there. We published nearly 30 pieces of criticism, verse essay, fiction and visual essay on this theme. It was good to have an open call focused mostly around critique and what we gleaned from this experiment was how so often there is a collective interest in a particular topic, but it takes an open call and a few buzz words for people to realise these affinities. I love free associations and wordplay. Through Digital Dreamland people were able to explore how the web functions as a dream space of memetic unconsciousness, a site of deja vu, haunting, slop proliferation and sleep procrastination.

Oh, and why is it called SPAM? For the love of trash of course! That’s half the story… The other half is idk, convenient lunch food items? Our first ever pamphlet was Max Parnell’s And no more being outdoors / and no more rain (2017) which involved poems slipped into actual supermarket food items. This came out around the same time as Gilded Dirt’s Supermarket Verse issue, and we’ve since published many titles inflected with edible obsessions: from Hannah Read’s Aldi pizza featured in Poems by my Imaginary Boyfriend About his Imaginary Girlfriend (2020) to Colin Herd and I’s Cocoa and Nothing (2023) collaboration, which compiles poems for every flavour of Ritter Sport chocolate. The latter was launched with an epic (aka way too long) piece of original poets theatre, Chocolate Sprites Lost in Kaufland, performed at The Poetry Club with an all-star cast of anthropomorphic vending machines, crypto guys and German chocolatiers. It required me to do the splits in a pair of leopard-print tights and make a heartfelt address to a beanie baby rat. I mean, I wrote myself into that, what can I say.

Party era

Earlier this year we were working towards our anniversary party at SWG3’s Poetry Club. While we’ve switched up venues over the years (hosting events at Many Studios, The Doublet, Category Is, Good Press, Mount Florida Books to name a few), The Poetry Club is our spiritual home, thanks to nominative determinism. This club was the intimate site of our first nine launches. If I so much as sip a can of Red Stripe I am plunged Proust-style back into its dark embrace.

One highlight was the Notes from a Watercooler party where an actual legit office party being hosted in one of the warehouse spaces upstairs spilled out into our queue with folk in lanyards and business suits trying to make us their afters. We were all cosplaying in oversized charity shop two-pieces and eating the cheese sandwiches laid out in our ironic conference buffet. The actual business people were shocked about the £2 cash only entry fee… They lasted longer than we thought though. It was kind of performance art (we let them in for free to see what would happen if they mingled with poets).

Kirsty’s story:

I heard the story: Maebh Harper, one of the co-founders of SPAM alongside Denise Bonetti, was working as a waitress and she told this regular that she wanted to start a zine and he gave her £50. So, Denise and Maebh then went and produced this first SPAM zine (no theme, just SPAM which I guess is a theme!) and hand bound the zines together at the cobblers. There’s something so beautiful about this old fashioned process and what now feels like a v nostalgic image of a patron giving you some money to start something. Turns out money also did go further in 2016, huge shock.

Apart from our project Brilliant Vibrating Interface funded by the Edwin Morgan Second Life Award, SPAM has never received external funding; so much of how it has been shaped is due to the commitment and excitement of editors, writers, and performers, with the support of external collaborators. We’re 10 years old now and this feels like a big deal in the context of a DIY endeavour that began with the internet, because of the internet and on the internet.

I had been engaged with SPAM in various ways prior to joining the gang in 2019 - cue me doing a Britney Spears collab with Colin Herd at a SPAM Glasgow International Event in 2018. It was an interesting moment to join the press: when I was asked by Denise to come aboard the SPAM ship in 2019, we were at the tail end of the Zine editions (I was blessed to jump on that Millenium Megabus, thank goodness!) And then lockdown, and we also sadly </3 weren’t able to host the launch of our Season 3 pamphlets (Anjeli Caderamanpulle’s Boys, Han’s tiny pamphlet Imaginary Boyfriend, T. Person’s Cymbolism and Lemonade). New ways to reach out and share these works began, including the podcast URL Sonata, which was a perfect escapist project for us over those lockdown months.

Many of these podcasts episodes were totally chaotic - us talking about what we were reading/listening to/ watching for the first 40 minutes, but also yay to long form content during that moment. Max Parnell was our sound guy and he was able to create a wee jingle for us and get them edited. This platform allowed us to discuss and reflect on our publications, interview guests and chat about things we didn’t have time to review, which was the mode of SPAM Plaza.

A big part of SPAM was a collective endeavour through both editors, writers and the works we produced to figure out what living through and being mediated by the internet means for us. So much change has happened since 2016 when the phrase ‘post-internet’ as coined by artist Maria Olson (understood as a time where we cannot imagine not living online) has become more fast-paced, eradicating meaning and truth. A quotation from Sophia Al-Maria in her incredible book Sad Sack still rings true to me, which we included in our ‘what the hell is post-internet?’ online collage:

‘Irritating things. Irrelevant things. Irreverent things. Irrevocable things. But I’m afraid of erasure. The wiped drive of my mind. I know I know nothing. There’s less and less to understand every day. Information ground into digital dust. The world stopped making sense a long time ago.’ (2018)

One thing that I really loved about SPAM’s production when I first joined was learning that Denise Bonetti used Microsoft Publisher to produce the zines; anyone else love producing books through that programme as a kid in the early 2000s or was that just me? Since then, we have stuck with typesetting and designing in varying ways, attending to each book’s needs. There is something about both trying out new and adventurous modes of designs and also sticking with a simple zine format too; I guess this is also what I understand about the high x low culture entanglement of the press; the commitment to play and the small as well as to ambition.

Brilliant Vibrating Interface

Back to Brilliant Vibrating Interface, our first funded project; alongside Ian Macartney, Loll Jung and Maria Sledmere, I set about designing a programme that was both a workshop series online and in-person in Glasgow and an online exhibition (more on that can be seen on our website). Much of my research and writing interests during this period was around multimedia hybrid forms, writing my practice based doctorate around what I propositioned as ‘Emergent Essaying’: an interactive game based mode of hybrid writing. I was curious about what other practitioners of electronic forms existed in Scotland and moreover what the relationship was between Edwin Morgan as a proto-internet poet and queer literary experiments in the digital age. We invited guest practitioners alongside the SPAM editorial team to lead open access workshops between 2022-23 including New Media Writing, Trash Poetics (led by Colin Herd and fred spoliar) and re-mixed reject text (led by Ian Macartney and T Person). Specific podcast episodes were also set aside for the series including an interview with author and editor Aischa Daughtery on her collection of lesbian love letters This is How We Love.

The culmination of this project was an open submission and edited collection by myself, Ian and Loll which took the form of a transmedia publication (what we named sibling publications) which included a physical book and an interactive online exhibition and in-person launch. You can access the interactive website I designed and coded here! One of the most exciting aspects of this project, for me, was discovering new artists and writers, particularly those from more of an art school background with a connection to Scotland who were also making genre and media bending pieces that engaged, played and subverted with the internet as a site of discovery. From Maria-Wrang Rasmussen’s gorgeously slow paced, emerging coded line animations, to Eleanor Oliver’s ‘Cyclical Excursions’, a shift shaping creative archive of hyperlinks. I think there is more to discover about the ways in which we can engage as a press beyond language to multiple art forms and BVI allowed us to do that.

SINGLE AUTHOR PAMPHLET SERIES AND READINGS
I have felt so lucky to have had the opportunity to edit, work alongside, collaborate and meet so many writers I love. SPAM has genuinely introduced me to a whole new subset of a literary community I might never have encountered otherwise and it continues to create vibrant new possibilities. There are so many beautiful moments I could mention: from the first book I edited with the press, right up my street, the amazing hybrid art writing book Portals, by PAM editor Rosie Roberts, to more recently working on the Glitches series with SPAM editor Maya Uppal (more on that below) to going through hundreds of submissions to pick our Season 5 and 6 pamphleteers (there were way too many amazing pieces for just one season!), to going to book fairs and readings across the UK and overcoming (or trying to) my fear of London. I was constantly startled by people who I’d never met coming along to our readings and I think that’s testament to the amount of work put in.

Small press is a joyous thing and it’s also difficult, particularly to maintain. As SPAM grows, sometimes this is more sideways than a linear optimisation, which suits us and me. I’m interested now in working on projects that take longer, working with writers over long term periods, applying for more funding and responding to the needs of the artistic community in Glasgow as it is today. Whenever I’m struggling over another tax return (shout out to our accountant Pramay, who does so much work for us behind the scenes), I remember how much SPAM feeds into my life and hopefully can feed into others’ lives too and that the emerging change of where the press can go isn’t always certain but that this is also fun, and absolutely never boring too.

What now?

AFK era
Events and sustaining the arts has always been a challenge but there’s been a rising (and evidenced) feeling in the Glasgow cultural landscape, that venues are closing, projects ending, live events getting more limited. We wanted to support a casual reading series (that wasn’t also the popular open mic format, of which there are many) to showcase work both local and from further afield and support poets and writers trying to get small press books out into the world in the process.

We decided to name the series Away from Keyboard as a gesture to the popular internet term we had as our MSN status throughout the 2000s. Your mum’s shouting dinner’s ready? Need to pee? Go out and play football? Well you’d just update your status to AFK. Given we’d spent the past few years mostly inside or in limited social orbits, AFK was a gesture to getting people into a room again and away from the virtual world. We now livestream the events in a slightly janky way (iPhone propped in an Alasdair Gray Archive mug via Instagram Live) and record the audio. There’s a whole bunch of recordings backlogged that we need to get on the podcast once we find the time and user-friendly software…

Another impetus was for the series to have a regular beat, allowing us to host poets who were going to be in town anyway plus local writers. Running bimonthly, we’ve prioritised a mix of emerging poets alongside more established names (Peter Gizzi, Richard Price, Iphgenia Baal) and hosted many icons from the SPAM back catalogue to boot (Oli Hazzard, Dom Hale, Anjeli Caderamanpulle). The vibe is very casual and we take things slowly. Sometimes on a Sunday night, sometimes a Monday, it helps to banish the scaries. I like the friendly bar staff and sound tech, the tartan carpet, the Guinness, the juke box and the lipstick impressions in the toilets. The SPAM team (mostly Kirsty and her print credits!) work hard at pulling together a zine of the performers’ work which then raises donations for causes like the Poets Hardship Fund and the North Gaza Fund. We’ll occasionally do more prose-leaning lineups too. We started adding more sound-based acts to the bill (including Han, Fuck This, ELANDA and Texture Texture) which broadened our audience a bit. There’s always been a certain level of osmosis between Glasgow’s DIY music, literary and art scenes and we want to keep making space for that. What I (Maria) especially like about the series is when a particular reading captures a more intergenerational audience: SPAM has always had a younger crowd but now we’re ageing millennials it’s interesting to see who comes out to our events.

GLITCH ERA
For many years since I joined SPAM (Kirsty), I had a vision of a series that entered hybridity. Some of it could look and feel like poetry too but I imagined mash ups of sound and text, glitchful shimmerings, book objects that demanded alternative modes of interaction, alongside continuing our poetry series (we’ve done 7 of these now as well as individual poetry pamphlet and collection releases).

Season 1 of Glitches has been released by iconic writer Iphgenia Baal whose glitchy approach to assembling (writing straight into inDesign - I don’t know anyone else who does this ha!) sets the precedent for future releases. What kind of work often can’t get accepted or isn’t deemed publishable (sellable?) even in the small press sphere? What if you don’t figure yourself as a poet, or prose writer, sound artist or visual artist but somewhere in between, in motion, glitching? I’m curious about how we can find inventive ways to pursue this series, while still on a budget (all our budget is sales). How do we get this work out into the world and what other partnerships will be support systems for us to do so? As prices continue to soar across so many aspects of our life, how can we still make some room for difficult work, work that refuses to be commodified or categorised? There is still much to learn in this territory - I had never realised even how challenging finding a printer able to print an A3 book would be for Iphgenia’s publication and in the end our trusty friends and design geniuses at Good Press gave us some advice which involves me doing the physical labour of folding the books and manually perforating so they can be taken apart – oh right, yeah, full circle, back to SPAM’s origin, proper DIY stuff.

Look out for:

Sam Rodilosso London book launch and Q&A / 14th November at Housmans Bookshop with readings from Luke Roberts and K Lewis Hood.

Season 2 Glitches forthcoming in March 2027 (Kate Paul and Will Aghoghogbe)
Open submissions for following seasons next year!

SPAM is open for submissions of reviews, essays, interviews, SPAM Cuts and Archive Fever pieces until the 5th December 2026. Email pitches, submissions, questions to spamzine.editors@gmail.com. We can’t wait to read your pieces!

Upcoming AFK events at The Doublet:

Poetry night on the 26th October at the Doublet. This one has a California twist, by way of Margate and Edinburgh, featuring Poppy Cockburn and Roshni Gallagher alongside Bay Area poets Andrew Kenower, Lindsey Boldt, Steve Orth plus music from San Diego skater kid Kevin Leomo.

Sam Rodilosso Glasgow book launch / AFK #13 on 30th November at The Doublet with readings from Tom Bailey, Tim Tim Cheng, Nat Raha and Julie Laing.

Select pamphlet picks:
Iphgenia Baal, Black Skulls (2026)
Leo Bussi, Life-Sized (2025)
Maria Hardin, Sick Story: A remix (2025)
Courtney Bush & Jack Underwood, Thirteen Morisettes (2024)
Colin Herd & Maria Sledmere, Cocoa and Nothing (audiobook version) (2023)
Jay Gao, TRAVESTY58: Lake Poems (2021)
Samantha Walton, Bad Moon (2020)
Rosie Roberts, portals (2020) + an interview with the author
Daisy Lafarge, Capriccio (2019)

Further resources:
Online magazine
SPAM Plaza
Announcements
Digital Dreamland
SPAM’s podcast: URL Sonata
Brilliant Vibrating Interface: an archive of workshop handouts, podcast episodes and more
Archive Fever
What is postinternet? scrapbook
Glasgow Life throwback to our Glasgow International collab That’s Hot! back in 2018

Kirsty Dunlop is Kirsty Dunlop is a multimedia writer, editor, researcher and musician, based in Glasgow. She has a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Her practice encompasses fiction, poetics, non-fiction and the hybrid essay, alongside code and performance. She is Editor-in-Chief of SPAM Press.

Maria Sledmere is managing editor at SPAM Press and a senior lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. Her most recent publication is Scar Code, an ekphrastic pamphlet published by Weather Band.

SPAM Press is a Glasgow and London-based small poetry press, publisher and Community Interest Company established in 2016.

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