Radically open literature in Mnemotope magazine

by Steve Watson in October 2025

In the last episode of our podcast, I featured eight of the publishers that I spoke to at Indiecon in September. But for this episode I’m focusing on just one of the titles I saw there, because my favourite new discovery from this year’s festival was Mnemotope magazine.

A literary magazine that’s tired of traditional literature, it takes a radically open approach that allows it to look beyond the publishing industry’s usual niches and present a new type of storytelling. As editors Réiltín Ní Aodhagáin and Lilou Angelrath explain, that means casting the net wide, for example soliciting submissions via adverts on beermats, as a way of reaching writers who might not normally think of themselves as the sort of people who would submit a story to a literary journal.

And when it comes to editing the magazine they remove themselves from the process as much as possible: They don’t correct spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, and the order of the stories is randomised, so there’s no hierarchy to the structure of the magazine.

These decisions mean that Mnemotope is radically different to a conventional magazine – part of what I love about the magazine as a format is the control it gives to the editor and designer, allowing them to take readers on a carefully constructed journey through the pages. But Réiltín and Lilou are totally committed to their more open, more surprising approach (it even surprises them). And it provides a perfect fit for the ideas they’re trying to explore.

Together they run Bog Bodies Press, named after the Iron Age human remains that have been found in peat bogs across Ireland and Northern Europe. These so-called bog bodies are remarkably well preserved, effectively mummified by the bog, but unlike the mummies from Ancient Egypt, they’re not kings or queens. They’re just people who fell into a bog one day thousands of years ago, and as such they offer a rare glimpse of what everyday life was like across time. A mnemotope is an archaeological term used to describe the effect of viewing bog bodies, as Réiltín explains:

“A mnemotope is an object that holds multiple timelines and cultural memories in one. So it’s used a lot with bog bodies, because when you see one in a museum, you think of the time when the person was alive. You maybe think of how they died, and when they fell into the bog; the amount of time they spent there; the excavation; and then also you being there in the museum, seeing it. And since Mnemotope [magazine] is such a wide-ranging collection of stories from all over the world, and from lots of different time periods, with things written specifically for the magazine, but also things someone wrote 10 years ago, it has a similar feeling of this kind of collision of stories and of memory.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a magazine being used in quite this way before, and I love the energy and enthusiasm that Réiltín and Lilou bring to the project. As you’ll hear in the episode, the new issue of Mnemotope magazine is due out in the coming weeks, bigger than ever before, and they’re also working on expanding into video and live events, and other manifestations of their shape-shifting storytelling project.

I hope you’ll enjoy listening to our conversation, or watching via the video below. And if you’d like to stay up to date with all our new episodes, please follow us on YouTube or wherever you normally get your podcasts, and we’ll be able to send our new stuff to you as soon as it’s ready.