Backwoods Journal & Bacchus Editions
Bacchus Editions is now the publisher of Backwoods Journal: A Journal of Anarchy & Wortcunning.
Backwoods first appeared in 2018, conceived by its editors as “a kind of suture in journal form” between the anarchist and permaculture milieux. Across its issues, anti-civilization anarchism, desertion, autarky, reinhabitation, voluntary servitude and Neo-Luddism have lived beside forest gardening, foraging, subsistence, ecological knowledge and the practical recovery of capacities increasingly surrendered to industrial life.
It is a journal interested in what happens when anarchist thought enters the material arrangements of living.
The Bacchus Editions crew has been reading Backwoods since its first appearance. It has travelled around the press for years, through conversations and disagreements, bookshelves and projects, and through a shared interest in the difficult territory where autonomy ceases to be an abstraction and becomes a question of how one actually lives.
For Bacchus creator Fíona Vivienne, the relationship has taken an especially sustained form. Her six-book Dancing in the Backwoods series is quite literally an intellectual dance beside the journal. The books share Backwoods’ encounter with anti-civilization thought, ferality, domestication, desertion, autonomy and the question of how to live outside the arrangements one refuses, while entering those questions through Fíona’s own individualiste terrain of embodiment, desire, intimacy, forested life, death, motherhood, disappearance and sensual refusal. The dance has never depended upon agreement. Proximity, divergence, provocation and return have made it considerably more interesting than that.
Backwoods arrives at Bacchus as an established journal with a considerable readership and a substantial body of work already behind it. Our first attention is therefore to the journal that already exists: keeping its issues available and in print, tending its archive, et carrying its publishing life forward with care.
Its editors remain its editors. Backwoods retains its own editorial character, intellectual direction and identity. Bacchus takes responsibility for the publishing life surrounding it.
There is an adjacent direction beginning to take shape at Bacchus….
Alongside the journal itself, standalone Backwoods books and booklets are forthcoming.
These will grow from precise writings already published within Backwoods and from conversations that have developed around them. Certain subjects and inquiries have travelled through the journal in ways that invite a life beyond the issue in which they first appeared. In a few especially interesting cases, the beginnings of future volumes can even be found in the responses and conversations of Backwoods readers themselves.
This gives Bacchus the opportunity to work through the journal as an archive that is still alive: to recognize where a particular inquiry has accumulated enough depth to become an object of its own, and to make books from those concentrations without dissolving their relationship to the journal from which they grew.
We have built Backwoods Journal its own home at Bacchus Editions, with a fuller history of the journal, the relationship between Backwoods and Bacchus, and a dedicated signup for readers who want news specifically about the journal, returning editions et forthcoming Backwoods books.
This work will take some time. Backwoods enters a press already rather full of books, journals et projects in various states of becoming, and we intend to give its editions the attention they require.
For now, we are very pleased to have these woods in our care.
Welcome to Bacchus, Backwoods.
Visit the new Backwoods Journal section at Bacchus Editions: