Category: Mycelium

Dan Sumption and I have started work on the 3^rd issue of the Mycelium Parish News. This will cover weird, strange and wonderful events and creative projects from 2024. We mostly focus on people we know through our networks, but we’re interested in anything counter-cultural from the past year.

The cut-off for your submissions is November 16^th – but the sooner you can send things the better.

We’re want to hear about: counter-culture, Discordianism, mushrooms, folk horror, magick, ritual, zines, high strangeness and the like. We want to include books, events, podcasts, celebrations, records and gatherings. Our typical listing is 50-100 words, but we can go longer if needs be. If you’re able to type your entry up for us, great, otherwise send us a link and we’ll sort something out. We can’t guarantee to list everything, but we will do our best.

If you’d like a look at last year’s edition to see what it looks like, you can download the previous year’s edition.

As with last year, we’re going to produce a lo-fi printed edition, one that is light enough to be sent by standard post. Given the price rises in our privatised mail services, we’re unlikely to keep prices as low as last year (which was £2.30 including postage), but we won’t be far off. We’re aiming to send this out by Christmas, so you can read it over the Christmas/New Year break. A PDF copy will be released once we have distributed all the physical copies.

We’re also doing an in-person event on Saturday December 14th, and we’ll announce details of this soon. But if you’re up for coming, let me know.

The Mycelium Parish News is an annual publication produced by myself and Dan Sumption from Peakrill Press. It’s a gazeteer of UK counterculture, inspired by the underground catalogues from people like Loompanics and Disinfo back in the 90s. We produce it as a physical zine as we think that’s an important statement – this is something worth printing, and something worth paying for. When the print run is exhausted, we will release it online. You can buy this year’s issue on etsy, and download PDFs of the 2022 edition.

We started compiling the latest issue in September, with the final text locked down a few days after the Toxteth Day of the Dead. The first copies were out before Christmas. We been mentioned in a few places, with my favourite being from Michelle in the Mycelium newsletter (no relation, although they inspired our name):

Loads of creative capers and happenings have happened this year amongst you beloved discordians, pilgrims, seekers and star seeds. The best place to find out all about 2023’s bountiful harvest of books, events, podcasts, dramatic tributes, vision quests, must-read newsletters, free libraries, people’s pyramids, porcine plays, gong baths, pop operas, poetry, metaprogramming courses, dream symposiums and more is in Dan Sumption and Orbific’s annual almanac, Mycelium Parish News – a lovely new tradition bursting with heart and art

There were three main things I learned from compiling this issue.

• Recent changes on social media mean that promotion is hard. We sold a handful of issues when Dan and I announced this ourselves. An announcement on John Higgs’ newsletter sold over a hundred copies. Word of mouth seems to be the only way to get noticed now, and it’s harder to grow audiences than it used to be. I don’t think people realise how important it is to shout about the things you like.
• Packing over 100 envelopes, including a number to other countries, was harder work than I expected. Luckily John’s announcement came just before Christmas, which gave me a little longer than normal to fulfil the Etsy orders. Everything went out on time, but it took several hours. It’s something to consider if I ever try a larger project.
• Given how important word of mouth is, it’s important for projects to be easy to share. Listing something in the magazine requires describing it. It’s often hard to work out which URL to share; and I’m grateful to anyone who provides clear copy that I can use for a summary. This is something I’ve been pondering for my own writing, where I have no simple description of what I do, no simple elevator speech. Seeing how hard it was to share other people’s work has made me much more aware of this. If you want something to be shared, you need to make it easy to share.