Olivia Spring: Launching SICK, a magazine for sick and disabled people
With a journalism degree and lived experience of chronic illness, Olivia founded SICK to showcase the stories that mainstream media often misses. Our conversation explores the origins of ‘a thoughtful magazine for sick and disabled people’, the realities behind the magazine, and why stories like hers deserve more than just a moment in the spotlight.
What’s the most straightforward way to explain who you are and what you do?
I am a chronically ill writer, editor, and facilitator who works slowly when my body allows. My main focus is publishing SICK, a print magazine that explores illness and disability from the perspective of lived experience from folks around the world in the form of essays, artwork, poetry, features, interviews, poetry, and more. Our aim is to offer a richer, more expansive representation of illness and disability than is often found in media and culture, and to challenge common stereotypes and misconceptions. SICK is also about solidarity; an object that provides company to a group of marginalized people who are often isolated, misunderstood, and unsupported.
Outside of SICK, I have spent the last five years writing a memoir reflecting on my own illnesses with a focus on fatigue, (dis)belief, guilt, and embracing the body’s refusal of a ‘cure’. I occasionally run writing workshops and host talks about disability and accessibility in the context of publishing.
SICK Issue 6 - Buy issue in US | Buy issue in UK
What assumptions do people make about you? How right are they?
Interesting question! A lot of people assume we have a big team and more resources than we do. But it’s really just me doing all the day-to-day stuff with help from my assistant Hannah, and Kaiya, who does all our design. People often think we accept any work, as long as it’s made by someone who is disabled, which isn’t true. I think some folks don’t understand that this is very curated, and we receive a lot of submissions! Our acceptance rate is around 4%, and I have to turn away a lot of strong work every issue. With non-disabled folks, I often find that they will bring up this one disabled artist or writer they’ve heard of and tell me I must have them in my magazine — as if there aren’t millions of us who are talented individuals, and content is not something I’m short on!
What’s your background to get you to where you are today?
I’ve been reading and collecting magazines since childhood. I became sick when I was 11 years old, but it wasn’t until I went to university that I started exploring this experience creatively. I studied journalism at Goldsmiths University and found myself seeking stories related to disability whenever possible and eager to write from that perspective. As I became increasingly frustrated by the limits of my illness during a time when I often pushed through my symptoms and tried to conform to the standards of non-disabled people, I felt inspired to create something that spoke to this reality. A print magazine was what excited and made the most sense to me—and still does. I was lucky to have had work placements at the Guardian and Marie Claire that taught me a lot about a more traditional approach to publishing.
What excites you most about SICK, and how can people support you?
What excites me most is the feedback I receive from readers; people telling me that this magazine has changed the way they see or live in the world. Many folks have shared with me that they not only feel seen when reading SICK, but that it has provided companionship to help them survive isolating times, offering a sort of roadmap to living a disabled life, as well as hope and inspiration, which can exist in tandem with struggle and suffering.
There are many ways readers can support SICK—from something as simple as liking and sharing our social media posts, asking their local bookstore to stock our issues, sharing their copies with friends (both sick and non-disabled friends!), pre-ordering our products (helps us cover upfront costs and ideally increase print runs), subscribing to our Patreon, wearing our merch, donating to us directly, and sharing feedback with us!
What role does digital play in what you do?
The digital world is key for us in reaching our audience, connecting with new people, and sharing when we have new issues or other happenings. Many in the disabled community rely on social media and other digital worlds as a way to connect even when you might be stuck in bed, your house, your neighborhood, etc. I also want SICK to be able to offer something digitally for people who don’t have the magazine - which is as simple as sharing pull-quote graphics on social media and having some excerpts from the publication available to read on our website. To me, print is much more powerful than digital—it feels more real, requires more time and attention, takes up physical space, is visually engaging, and offers an experience as a publication that I think is difficult to translate into a digital space.
A niché question but an important one...How aware are you about accessibility?
I think about accessibility with everything I do and encourage myself to view things from multiple perspectives. Accessibility is very important to me and something I am committed to putting into practice, continuing to learn about, and see as an ongoing journey rather than an end point. Accessibility can look different to everyone, it can contradict, it can provide challenges. I want to continue to ask myself what I can do to make the magazine and any other work I do accessible to the widest audience possible, and to be an approachable organizer that can communicate well and action any feedback. Some things I have done with SICK in an effort to be more accessible include only hosting events at ADA-compliant venues, ideally on the ground floor, providing various food and drink options, masking, having ASL interpretation when possible, writing image descriptions for social media posts, offering PDFs of issues, having all issues available on a sliding-scale basis, using clear, simple language in communications, and having alternative ways to submit, among other things!
And finally, What's the plan for SICK? Where do you hope It'll be in 2-3 years time?
The plan is to keep doing what we’re doing! I trust that things will organically grow with time, as they have the past six years. I do have a lot of dreams for SICK beyond the print magazine, like having a lot of merch—we just made hats after years of longing—but of things more specific to sick people like pillboxes, compression socks, canes, water bottles, etc.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about being a publisher of works beyond the magazine—think memoirs, novels, and poetry collections by sick & disabled folks. Since I began querying agents for my own memoir, I’ve been fascinated by not only how brutal, inaccessible, and challenging this process is, but also by agents and publishers saying that illness memoirs have ‘had their moment’, that this category is now too dense, that memoir isn’t profitable, readers don’t care about your life unless you are famous, etc. I disagree. If literature about illness & disability is only given a moment, it should be a moment that lasts our whole lives. I don’t blame these agents because I understand their job is to sell books, and if the numbers aren’t there to make something profitable, why would they take it on? But I know from my experience in publishing SICK that people do want to read these stories (on a smaller scale, of course). I am tapped into a community that craves raw experiences, vulnerability, and non-traditional narratives, and I would love to be able to publish more work in this realm. I’m excited by the possibility of publishing books not to be profitable, but to be shared. Maybe in three years you’ll find us selling books alongside the magazine. (And if you want to help make that possible financially… email me!)
Links: Keep up to date with Olivia and SICK
Website - sickmagazine.org
Instagram - instagram.com/asickmagazine
Facebook - facebook.com/aSICKmagazine
