Anxy — The Magazine For Your Inner Worlds
The ones we often refuse to share, despite all that they drive inside us.
Nearly half of American adults develop a mental illness in their lifetime; depression affects 350 million people worldwide. Yet the struggle to be well is still a shameful secret so many of us lock away.
Anxy aims to smash those stigmas.
Anxy will be a bi-annual beautifully-designed magazine about our inner worlds — the personal struggles, the fears that fool us into believing that the rest of the world is normal and we’re not.
Each issue of Anxy will use a central theme to build an original, insightful, and creative perspective through interviews with folks we admire, personal essays, reported features, visual stories, and recommendations for what to read, watch and download to round out the conversation. This won’t be your therapist’s scientific journal.
This won’t be some self-help manual. And we won’t be telling you how to “fix” an issue.
We feel a real revolution taking place around normalizing mental health outside the medical arena and in the creative space. Anxy will cut through the clutter to offer real discussions and striking explorations of the wildcards our brains and bodies throw our way.
Why make a print magazine?
Yes, there are great conversations about mental health, depression, anxiety, self-care, basically all the themes we care deeply about, on the Internet. But the truth is they fly by at such a rapid rate, and are surrounded by so much digital junk food, we often don’t have time to form thoughts about or responses to what we’re reading.
So in addition to hosting discussions online, we wanted to create a tactile collection of conversations around these important issues that you could really sit with for months at a time.
Plus, we’re all design nerds. We believe in the power of a stunning publication that sits on your bedside table, on a bookshelf, or even in your therapist’s waiting room, for months to come.
The Anxy team
We come to Anxy with an openness about our personal baggage. Occasionally, we can even appreciate it — or at least joke about it. We’re just tired of pretending it doesn’t exist. And we’re committed to ripping the stigmas off our challenging emotions.
Indhira Rojas is the founder and creative director of Anxy. For over a decade she has worked in the intersection of branding, editorial, and interaction design for publications such as The Bold Italic, Once, Modern Farmer, Atlas Obscura and the platform Medium. She leads her design consultancy in Berkeley, CA under the name Redindhi Studio.
Jennifer Maerz is Anxy’s editor-in-chief. She’s the former editor-in-chief of Gannett’s digital experiment The Bold Italic, a longtime music editor, and she freelances for a number of publications on topics related to culture, tech, and music, including RollingStone.com, Cosmopolitan.com, Salon.com, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Bobbie Johnson, Anxy’s editor-at-large, is a senior editor at Medium, and the founding editor of Matter, the ASME-winning, Pulitzer-nominated, online magazine. Before that he was previously a reporter and editor at the Guardian, where he covered race riots and cults, interviewed luminaries like Steve Jobs, and helped coin the word ‘podcast.’
Michelle Le, Anxy’s director of photography, is an award-winning editorial photographer and photo editor based in the Bay Area, specializing in investigative reporting and in-depth enterprising stories. She is a former photo editor for Medium and her work has appeared in WIRED, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Bloomberg and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other print and online publications.
Katie MacBride is Anxy’s assistant editor. She’s a freelance writer and essayist whose work has appeared in The Establishment, Cosmopolitan, and The Bold Italic, among other publications.
Madison Kahn, Anxy’s senior editor, is also senior editor at Medium. She was previously a senior editor and managing editor of the ASME-winning, Pulitzer-nominated online magazine, Matter. Before that, she worked on the editorial teams at Outside magazine and Boston magazine.
Kati Krause, Anxy’s contributing editor, is a writer, editor, and maker of magazines. She has lived in Munich, London, Barcelona and now Berlin, where she is the correspondent for Monocle magazine and develops digital storytelling strategies for media companies. Other magazines she created or worked with include Ling, A Mag for all Seasons, Companion, and Matter.
We also count on an inner circle of mental health professionals and advisory board members, including Natalie Harvey, Coley Williams, and Natasha Vianna, who will collaborate with us and help guide the content around specific issues.
If you are feeling Anxy too
We could really use your help to bring this independent publication to life. We’ve been overwhelmed with all the encouraging emails, newsletter signups, Instagram follows, and Facebook likes that we’ve gotten — just through word of mouth. We feel like we’re on to something special here.
With your help, we hope to make Anxy a sustainable venture.
This means we’re asking for your assistance in raising the funds necessary for printing the magazine, yes, but we’ve also made a commitment to launch only if we have the money necessary to pay our contributors as well. So you’re also funding the community around us that’s yearning for a voice.
In order to really be onto something, we need the financial backing necessary to print and distribute the magazine as well as to pay our contributors.
What are the rewards?
We’ll take whatever you can afford to drop in our digital bucket, from $15 (which will earn you a collection of colorful postcards printed with Anxy-approved quotations) to copies of the magazine, invites to an upcoming Anxy private event, and beyond.
Questions?
Wanna contribute to the magazine when it launches? Email us at hello@anxymag.com. For updates on the project, you can connect via our Facebook page or join the mailing list on our website.
