About
We are a newly founded critical magazine featuring short and long-form writing in non-fiction and fiction, criticism, and visual arts. Based in Toronto, Ontario we are small but growing volunteer-run group of young and emerging writers, artists, editors, and designers.
Our vision is to create an anti-capitalist genre-bending magazine which platforms the filthier aspects of our lives often hidden from plain view. No subject is off limits, and we aim to encourage a pluralism in literature that actively confronts—and rejects—the delusions of our aesthetic sanitation.
All profits of The Vermin go back into the production cost of the magazine.
Get involved
If you are interested in joining The Vermin team as a volunteer, we review applications at this link on a rolling basis
https://forms.gle/wC4Kzv4RmYnvvW3t9
Editorial team
Editor-in-Chief
Nazanin Zarepour
Associate Editors
Mohamed Serageldin
Saara Frank
Production Editor
Sarah Sarofim
Copy Editors
Joy Xiang
Vidhya Elango
Nadine Violette
PACBI
In solidarity with the people of Palestine, The Vermin is proud to commit to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), initiated in 2004 inspired by the cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa.
By endorsing PACBI, we commit to the boycott of:
1. Israeli cultural institutions
2. Cultural products commissioned by an official Israeli body or a non-Israeli body that promotes Israel
3. Events and activities sponsored by an official Israeli body or a complicit institution
4. Normalization Projects
To learn more about PACBI, please click here.
Visuals team
Designer
Fahdad Atin
Designer
Monica Chung
Creative consultant
Nima Esmailpour
CALL FOR PITCHES + SUBMISSIONS
Issue 03: (un/in)scripted
“Was the Palestinian revolution really written on the void, an artifice superimposed on nothingness, and is the white page, and every little blank space between the words, more real than the black characters themselves?” Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet
The Vermin is returning for its third issue! We’re looking for work that explores the theme “(un/in)scripted.”
Inscription is the marking and cutting of a material surface toward the production of meaning or signification which can include writing, printing, casting reliefs, cutting or burning, circumcision, and other bodily modifications. In our moment of being inundated by documentation of catastrophe, we are also paradoxically facing a moment of people, places, and things being erased from the public record. Yet the absence of a mark might also be an inscription: how might we trace silences, erasures and excisions, trauma, spaces between words? (Un/in)scripted is a politically urgent invitation toward questioning both the marked and unmarked surface – that which has been written, that which has been left unsaid, or that which has been written only through its non-writing.
(Un/in)scription is a forum for questioning publishing within a publication – a self-reflexive terrain to examine what we are both doing and not doing when we write, print, and disseminate. We are interested in the theme of inscription both literally (e.g., writing, printing, mediality and materiality such as paper or celluloid film, photographic contact, cutting performances and book arts) but also conceptually (e.g., requiems or glorifications of media and counter media, trauma and the unassimilable and uninscribed, the inscriptions of absence, and more). Inscription is the moment that the concrete and the abstract; the psychic and the corporeal; the literal and figurative, meet and produce one another.