A conversation with Anyway founders Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara. Interview by Arjun Basu

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT FREEPORT PRESS.

While it’s not true that kids don’t read it may be true that adults aren’t teaching kids to read. It’s also true that today’s children face issues that those of the past didn’t. And the pandemic—there’s that word again—impacted everyone in ways we’re still figuring out, including kids. Perhaps especially kids.

There are, amazingly, and encouragingly, many new magazines for children of all ages now. One of them is Anyway, a magazine for tweens founded by two mothers—and long-time friends—who grew up loving magazines and, yes, were worried about their kids’ screen time. They also knew that tween’ issues weren’t being addressed properly and that a root cause of some of them was a media landscape that pushed consumers, no matter the age, into silos—or communities—where they could go through life unchallenged.

Go to the Anyway website and you are confronted with the slogan: “Growing up is hard. You can do it Anyway.“ This speaks to both kids and parents, another reality of a kids magazine that most magazines don’t have to face: you have two very specific markets—kids and their parents—and your readership will eventually age out. Meaning the marketing challenges never end even while reader loyalty does. What does that mean for a media brand?

“With a magazine that continues to come to the house and we can build a sense of community and a sense of belonging.”

— Keeley McNamara

Arjun Basu: So what’s the story here? Or better yet, what’s your story and how did we get to this point?

Jen Swetzoff: Keeley and I met when we were five years old in an art class after school, after kindergarten, and we have now been friends for about 40 years. We had never worked together before starting Anyway magazine. By quick way of background, I am a journalist, writer, editor, and brand strategist, and Keeley is a midwife.

But during the pandemic we were home with our kids quite a bit. Me more than Keeley. She was still at the hospital. And the kids were on screens a lot. And we were also hearing from fellow parents that their kids were approaching adolescence and they weren’t sure what resources to turn to.

So Keeley and I started having this conversation and we remembered what a big role magazines had played in our life when we were adolescents. And we thought, “Hey, let’s start one!”

Arjun Basu: Was it that simple?

Keeley McNamara: The idea was, we grew up together, we went through our adolescence together, and we were raising our kids through their adolescence. And we just remembered how much we loved magazines, how much we loved squirreling away with them and tearing out the pages and putting them on our walls and were sad that our kids didn’t have a similar experience.

Arjun Basu: Putting pages on the wall is something I think most people who grew up at that time can relate to. Our walls were just covered depending on what you liked. But starting a magazine is not something that you can take lightly. Jen, you as a journalist and a brand person understand how difficult that was and is. So you should know better. But, Keeley does something much—she’s a midwife, so I guess she does something even more difficult. How did we get here? You had your Kickstarter, a lot of the pandemic magazines have that in common too, and that was a success. So did that show you that there was a need for this or that there was an audience? What did you learn there?

Jen Swetzoff: I think we have seen some precedent. I think another magazine called Kazoo had launched a couple of years before us, and we were able to fund the Kickstarter in just a few days. So that was a great sign that there was a sort of product market fit. Based on my experience, I was able to connect with an amazing creative director, her name’s Elizabeth Goodspeed.

And she was really instrumental in helping us bring the vision to life with a strong brand identity and really understanding how we wanted to chase nostalgia, but also have a really future-forward lens on what we are creating, keeping it very diverse, gender-inclusive, topics that are related to health and culture of today.

Arjun Basu: An honest magazine for curious tweens. I have a hard time saying tweens all the time. So that obviously resonated. What was missing? Were the magazines that you read growing up gone or were they inadequate?

Keeley McNamara: So both, they were gone, but also they were not great. The magazines we read growing up were aspirational for kids and for teens in an adult way in a, What’s the best way to attract a guy or Teen Beat put Jonathan Taylor Thomas on your wall? Right?

Like it’s not the healthiest way for teens’ and tweens’ brains to be developing. And what we wanted was to provide an honest magazine that was vetted and expert-driven, but that kids or teens would see as the same feeling as what we had growing up.

Jen Swetzoff: And what I would just add that I think is a pretty important piece of our story is that before Keeley was a midwife, she was a health educator in public high schools in New York City. And so whenever I had a question or one of my own kids would ask me a question like, what happens when you get your period for the first time? or when do I start wearing deodorant? I’d be like, “I’m not sure. Let me ask Keeley.” And because she has this very evidence-based calm explanation for most things related to health and wellbeing, which are things kids have questions about as they’re growing up. I think her voice is a really integral part of what we’re doing. We are also amplifying kids’ own voices.

We’re combining this expertise along with kids’ own experiences. And I think the really great magazines like Jane and Sassy and YM, all of these magazines that we grew up with we’re really focused on girls and sexualizing what it meant to be a teen girl. So we’re really trying to steer away from that. Body positive, all the things. We’re more than that. Kids are more than that.

Arjun Basu: So you’re obviously not alone. There was that story recently in Fast Company that wrote about not just you guys, but about this upswing in magazines for kids Kazoo, as you mentioned, Honest History, Illustoria, Spark, Anyway. There’s obviously a lot of “why” here. What’s your take on that?

Keeley McNamara: Why is it back? So we think for a couple reasons. First, the data is pretty overwhelming that screens are bad for our kids. And I think that, while Jen and I, felt that during the pandemic because we were like, wow, they are on so much.

Like we can’t get them off of these screens because they’re on there for school and then that’s what they were doing for fun already. I think the data is now pretty strong that we know how terrible it is for their mental health and for anxiety. And I think that parents and parenting adults are coming along to that now and seeing that we need an alternative for our kids to enjoy time and to learn and to be social and feel like they’re part of a community that’s not on a screen. So for us, that was a big part of making the magazine.

Jen Swetzoff: Somewhat anecdotal, but I think we’ve seen a real rise in graphic novels over the last few years and I think magazines have a lot of synergies with graphic novels. So as kids are prone to wanting visualization, I think magazines do a really good job of breaking stories into shorter chunks, like graphic novels.

And we’re hoping, I think the other magazines would say something similar that the storytelling is critical, the information, the inspiration, but also that visual feeling that you get looking at really great photography, art, bringing stories to life in that way. Magazines are positioned to do that.

Arjun Basu: I guess you know the counter to that, if it’s even a counter, I’m not arguing, is that magazines are so unfamiliar. The kids aren’t really familiar with them. Graphic novels. There’s a lineage that they can go back to comic books but magazines, some kids look at a magazine and it’s like looking at a rotary phone for them. They have no idea what they’re looking at or how it even operates. That’s like almost like this friction that you have to deal with as well.

Jen Swetzoff: It is a challenge. And I will say when we launched Anyway, kids would call it a book instead of a magazine. Like they weren’t even familiar with the term. But in my own experience, I think what’s great about magazines and what we do in our house is we leave them on the kitchen counter. They’re easily accessible and it’s not a steep learning curve to understand how a magazine works. They just have to see them.

Arjun Basu: I want to go back to something that you said in terms of kids. The backlash to screens that we’re seeing all over the world, you have time limits. There’s a town in Japan that is limiting screen time. So that’s part of it. And then the other thing we’re hearing about that you alluded to is how kids are just having a hard time. The pandemic amplified it, but kids are having a really hard time. We hear about the loneliness crisis, which is not just kids. And so all of that is connected and maybe a magazine is the start of an antidote because a magazine can also create community.

Keeley McNamara: That was our hope, right? That we were able, with our books, obviously, for teens and tweens and with all this information, but when we get our kids books, they read it, they maybe read it again, but then that’s it. It’s done, right? It’s there. But with a magazine that continues to come to the house and we can build a sense of community and a sense of belonging.

They get excited. They’re excited to see it, they’re excited to read it, even if they put it away and pick it up later, there’s another one coming. And give them this sense of something just for them that we hope parents know that they can trust and just, your screen time’s up, throw an Anyway mag at them and be like, go have fun, enjoy. Not have to worry too much about what’s on there.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I think the Fast Company article started like that, like the writer just notices that the house is quiet. And that means our kids are reading the magazines. Blessed silent house,

Keeley McNamara: Nothing better.

Arjun Basu: “Growing up is hard, you can do it Anyway” on the website. I love that as a slogan. If it’s not a t-shirt yet, it should be for parents and kids. That Jen, that’s where your brand background, I think comes in too. You can just take an idea and distill it into a slogan. Who is that for? Is that for the kids or is that for the parents. Or both?

Jen Swetzoff: It’s a really good question. Let me start by admitting neither of us are ad executives or marketers, or salespeople. So we have really struggled with that part of this business, in quotes, it’s really a labor of love for us, but I’ll say when we launched Anyway, we were very mindful that we were creating a product that had two audiences.

It has a kid audience, so everything inside the magazine is for the kids. And everything on our website, on social media is really targeted at the adults. The parents, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles who are probably chasing a little bit of nostalgia like we are and want to share something they love with their kids.

When we initially created that line, “Growing up is hard, but you could do it Anyway,” I think we were really thinking about the adult buyer of the magazine since they’ve been through growing up, and that really resonates once you’ve gotten to the other side of adolescence.

But when we ended up printing it inside the magazine, it’s on our inside front cover. Kids have actually told us how much it resonated with them and gave them comfort to know that. To your point earlier about feeling lonely, I think when you understand that the experience you’re having is universal, you feel a lot less lonely. So I think that actually works for both audiences.

Keeley McNamara: We also liked the idea that Anyway could mean any way, or like any way you want to do it is fine. We’re all going to get to the other side.

“Part of what we’re trying to do is say, ‘You don’t have to like everything in a magazine.’ The point of a magazine is tasting, like a snack board.”

— Jen Swetzoff

Arjun Basu: It’s such a Gen X word too. I’ve just been signed to contribute to an anthology that’s coming out 2028 or something about Gen X writing and it’s going to be called Anyway, so you guys might want to get your lawyers ready for that.

Keeley McNamara: We’re prepared.

Arjun Basu: Looking at your first four issues, you can almost see both of you learning as it’s going along. It’s just different enough that you can see okay, we’re going to try this now, this didn’t work last time, this is going to work now. Even with your taglines, you’re still finding that spot and maybe it’ll always be like that. But what have you learned from the start to now?

Keeley McNamara: Great question. We learned that kids do not have a very large attention span. We need to shorten our articles and chunk them more with images. And, we had a feeling from the beginning that we wanted it to be artistic and engaging and visually stunning. And that really resonated with the kids.

So making sure we continued that line of our magazine, but then not bombarding them with too many words, just making it more palatable for them while still getting to the crux of the articles. because they do love to learn. They just didn’t have the attention span for as long of an article as we thought they did.

Jen Swetzoff: I think it’s interesting too, if you notice our first issue is the longest one and the glossiest one. We don’t need to do focus groups really, or much market research because we live among the tweens and the teams.

And so watching the kids interact with the magazine, that first glossy long version, was hard for kids to lay flat on the table, for example. So when they get to the activity section, it was harder for it to lay flat. So we changed from glossy pages to more matte or pearl pages. So every choice and iteration we’ve gone through has been really rooted in our own observations of our primary customer.

Arjun Basu: That’s interesting that you’re calling them your primary customer, because one, the reaction as you’ve moved along, but you have more than one customer. You have the kids who are the end user, but you have the parents who are the purchasers. I can imagine libraries are very important in the ecosystem as well. So that’s the third customer. Are their reactions aligned? How do they see it?

Keeley McNamara: I think so. When we first started we had a hard time, especially with the male buyer, adult buyer, understanding why you would even want to do this. There was a lot of “But why?” They have screens. They like their screens more. Moms or women tended to get it a little bit faster, being like, oh yes, please get them off their screens. What can I give them? That’s engaging. I think that the reaction since we started publishing though, has been pretty positive across the board.

The kids seem to really like it. We get a lot of messages from readers and from parents and parenting adults, telling us how much they love it, telling us how much their granddaughters or their nephews have loved getting it. Our favorite thing is that we get letters and emails from readers asking to contribute to the next issue.

So a lot of our kid contributors are readers who are like, “I live in the Philippines. Can I do my life in the Philippines next?” So that part’s really exciting for us and really gratifying.

Arjun Basu: I’d imagine most of your readers are in the States.

Jen Swetzoff: Most yes, but not all, which is interesting. A lot is relative. We still are a small, independent magazine, but we have subscribers all over the world. The UK is pretty big. Other countries in Europe, Poland, New Zealand,

Keeley McNamara: Mexico.

Jen Swetzoff: Canada, obviously.

Arjun Basu: What is your inspiration just from a purely creative, even content, point of view? This obviously isn’t nostalgia, kids aren’t interested in nostalgia. So what are the inspirations behind here?

Jen Swetzoff: So we talk a lot about making sure we’re meeting kids where they are, giving them enough information that satiates their curiosity without talking beyond I guess I would say. But I think a lot of the questions kids have as they’re growing up in these tween years are related to body changes. So we are inspired by the questions our own kids ask and their friends. For example, deodorant, I think I mentioned, but that was like a hot topic when our kids were around fourth grade.

All my friends are wearing deodorant. Should I be wearing deodorant? So we did a story. Why do we have body odor? What’s the science behind it? Similarly with body hair, why do some people shave? Do you need to shave? Things like that are just like pieces of information that kids want to know might be too embarrassing to ask. Better for them to know the facts.

Keeley McNamara: I was a health educator. I still do this in groups, but the most productive conversation I have is when I have kids write down their questions anonymously, fold them up and throw them at me. And then I can open them up and read them and answer their questions, and no one knows who asked what.

And it’s all anonymous. But they’re always, they don’t want to know anything insane. The questions are always like, so much more naive and Lily White than you anticipate them being and that’s really what we’re trying to get at. Like health education, you should only answer what your kids ask you, right? You don’t want to give them more than they’re ready for.

And that’s what we’re trying to do with Anyway, is just to say, this is what we hear you’re asking for, hopefully this will open up a conversation and if you do have more questions, we always say find a trusted adult.

Ask your people, right? Because we don’t want to give them more than they’re ready for. We just want to make sure they have a base knowledge in truth and science and evidence-based knowledge so that they can go out in the world and make smart choices.

Jen Swetzoff: And so I would say on the health side, like we really are trying to provide the information that kids want to know. And then on the culture side, if we say we’re a magazine about health and culture, on the culture side, we’re really trying to inspire kids to be themselves, to express themselves.

So we do lots of stories about real kids fashion, real kids hair, real kids interests. We always do roundups, like sports or inventors or different things kids are into. So again, that goes to, we all have unique interests, personalities, vibes, and they’re all welcome here.

Keeley McNamara: Yeah. Our covers have been just regular kids. They’ve been a soccer player, a robotics team, a band, so we try to really keep it varied to show all kids that they’re seen.

Arjun Basu: People who don’t know think it’s really easy to do this stuff for kids because they’re kids. I’d say it’s much harder. My first job out of college was as a children’s book editor. I did that for five years. And it made me into a pretty good editor because, just, words. But also it’s tricky. We were editing books for many age groups. And that’s the main thing. You have a target audience who is, normally we think about demographics and things like that, but here we’re thinking about the most demographic thing of all. And that’s age. You can’t talk down to them because they sniff that out immediately and you’ve turned them off. We’re also in this age where, you know rightly or wrongly, the perception is out there that kids don’t read. Which isn’t true, but they’re probably reading less than they did when we were growing up. But it’s tricky, you can’t talk down to them. You have to talk to them and with them. You’ve talked about your own kids and your focus groups, but do you ever try to get a text and test it out on them or, do you just know instinctively now?

Keeley McNamara: No. They tell us immediately when things are cringe. They are our first people to be like you. Why? But we have done real kind of more formal focus groups as well, but it pretty much echoed what our kids and our kids’ friends tell us.

Jen Swetzoff: Kids are different. They’re tough critics. It’s hard to satisfy everyone. All the things. That’s real. I think part of what we’re trying to do is to also say you don’t have to like everything in a magazine, right? Like the point of a magazine is tasting, like a snack board.

Keeley McNamara: Flip through.

Jen Swetzoff: Some of it’ll be great for you and some of it might not be your thing, but you’re still exposed to it. I think what’s happened with the media, you probably know this better than anybody, but technology is amazing, but we’ve gotten more and more segmented.

So when the kid goes on TikTok, which you know, we hope they do later in life, but that algorithm is only showing them things that they have looked for. What we hope to do at the magazine is to bring a little bit of what they already love, but also expose them to some new ideas and diversity.

Arjun Basu: Critical thinking.

Jen Swetzoff: Yeah.

“It means a lot to show kids that if they’re passionate about something there is a way to share it with other people.”

— Keeley McNamara

Arjun Basu: Which is hard these days because like you say, we’re just being fed things that we want to watch and nothing else. And the other tricky thing, of course, and so this is more of a business question, is that your audience keeps aging out. And of course there’s people aging in, but your biggest fan is going to at one point think you’re like, I can’t believe I love this, at one point. That is a challenge that is unique to this type of media.

Jen Swetzoff: Absolutely. And it’s one of the many reasons people said we were crazy for starting this magazine. Customer retention is really tricky. And again, Keeley and I are making Anyway magazine as a labor of love. Like we both have other full-time jobs that we make our income from.

And while we don’t want to lose money on the production of the magazine, we hope one day it’s hugely profitable. Our primary goal is having enough subscribers to be able to keep providing access to the magazine. So yes, I think the fact that kids age out is tough, but often they have siblings or they have younger friends.

I think increasingly in communities, parents are friends with other parents who have kids of different ages. I know that’s our own experience. So you have something you like, your kid is older than your friend’s kid, you’re recommending it. So we really do rely on word of mouth and we’re so grateful to everybody who has just told somebody else about the magazine.

Arjun Basu: So then Jen, I’m going to ask you the brand question because brand is what people say about you when you’re out of the room. And this magazine, more than quite a few that I’ve spoken to, I think the brand is going to be really important. One, because of the ethereal nature of your audience, but two, because you’re not anti web, but you’re not on screens. This is the antithesis of all that. So the brand of this, and it’s a great brand name as we’ve discussed. So what’s the future of the brand to sustain itself?

Jen Swetzoff: So when we started, I will say I think we were a little naive, otherwise we wouldn’t have done this. But we envisioned the brand growing beyond the magazine and I think to a certain degree we still do. We’re still optimistic and hopeful.

So I think increasingly, and this goes to what you were saying about the landlines that families are bringing back for their kids, the idea that Jonathan Haidt’s book talks a lot about the anxious generation of kids having the freedom and independence to explore.

So we would love to partner with like-minded brands and like-minded nonprofits that are interested in getting their kids more opportunities to have independence. You know what we like about the magazine is if a parent believes in it and subscribes, you can give the magazine to your kid and let them own it in their room.

It’s not like a screen where when they’ve been on it for two hours, you then have to go tell them to get off the screen. It’s like a magazine’s theirs. They can read it, they can tear it up, they can collage with it, whatever. And similarly, as we build our community, we’d love to offer more events. We’ve done a handful of them and they’ve been incredibly meaningful to interact with other parents, other kids who I really believe want to establish, like you said, critical thinking and also creativity, which is so important at that stage of life.

Keeley McNamara: We talked about the kid writers and our kid contributors. From a publishing standpoint, it’s really special to be able to provide kids a space to see their writing in print. That’s not something that kids get to do anymore. So I think being able to be like my daughter came up with one of the ideas for one of our articles, this time and we wrote special thanks to her. And I, she’s going to lose her mind when she sees it. Like it’s going to be so exciting for her.

And I know that our kid contributors—we send them copies to their house and they share it with their community and it means so much to them. So I think for the future of journalism and publishing, I think it means a lot to show kids that if they’re passionate about something there is a way to share it with other people.

Jen Swetzoff: I would like to add to that, to say that, journalism is such an important part of our society, and I think that giving kids the opportunity, like Keeley said, to be published in the magazine, but also we’ve had college kids intern with us and high school kids intern with us. To understand the way the publishing business and reporting and questioning and curiosity really works, that’s what we hope our brand is. The legacy of the brand with the readers is that.

Arjun Basu: You said you were doing events. What kind of events?

Jen Swetzoff: So for one of our issue launches we celebrated sort of the launch at a store in Los Angeles and we partnered with a number of other brands to have some activity stations and really do a meet and greet with our readers and just have a sort of afternoon to be together. We would love to do more of a sort of road show with like-minded brands and maybe offer panels or other sort of DIY activities.

Keeley McNamara: Coloring, tote bags, bracelet making things, friendship bracelets, things like that.

Jen Swetzoff: Again, getting kids together to just be together in community.

Arjun Basu: Are your readers, are there more girls or more boys?

Jen Swetzoff: There’s more girls, I’d imagine. I would say it’s 60-40, maybe 70-30. It’s hard to say exactly because for girl subscribers that have brothers at home, I am convinced that those brothers are reading the magazine too. But in terms of our subscriber list names on the list, it’s 70-30.

Arjun Basu: Every reading stat shows almost any kind of book shows that it’s becoming more and more of a female activity, which of course, as a writer and as a magazine person, bugs the hell out of me. Is there like a conscious effort, boys more, or just to do things that maybe boys don’t think are too girly? I know there’s such a sensitivity around that kind of thing, but boys aren’t reading. That we can see.

Keeley McNamara: We are as gender neutral as possible in our magazine. Jen has a son and a daughter. I have two daughters. So I think Jen’s son is a real North Star for us. We’re like, “Would Alex read this?” And I think that’s really important because we really try to make sure that it’s not too femme and not too girly for lack of a better word, and that we’re focusing on things that any kind of kid would like. It doesn’t matter how they identify.

Jen Swetzoff: We really work hard on diversity of contributors to the magazine. So we’ve had a lot of boys write for us. We featured a lot of boys in our stories, and I will say this is where I think parents can make an impact. I think before we say things like, “Boys aren’t readers,” we need to give boys a chance.

So if they don’t pick something up the first time, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to pick it up the second time. My son’s a voracious reader. But it also requires me leaving that magazine on the kitchen counter every morning at breakfast. Saying before bed you have to read for 20 minutes before bed. There are things we can do as the adults in the house, I think, to encourage reading and we hope this helps.

Arjun Basu: So I think part of my brand question was thinking about almost parent guides or that side of it. Because the culture starts with them. The culture of reading, the culture of anything starts with what the parents provide or the environment that they provide in the house. And that’s where I think the brand can go in interesting directions beyond the regular media around the magazine.

Jen Swetzoff: We did work with a sort of marketing expert and one of the things that came out of that was the idea that we should potentially offer, like, webinars for parents. Keeley and I just don’t feel like parenting experts, like there are a lot of people out there who are excellent parenting experts, psychologists.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. But the marketing person isn’t telling you to be a parenting expert. The marketing person is telling you to own this part of it, like the love of reading part of it. The brand strategist in me is thinking I would say exactly the same thing, that you find your niche and then you just fill that room as opposed to trying to build a room that you know nothing about.

Jen Swetzoff: Totally. I think we were just trying, and this is probably coming out of the pandemic, but try to take something off of parents’ plates, not add something else on their plate. So the idea with Anyway is let this be a conversation starter. Let the magazine arrive in the mailbox and then your kid will hopefully read it and come to you with questions.

Keeley McNamara: Even just come to you with a recipe. Like my younger daughter will take it and be like hey can we get this stuff so we can make this? And then it opens us up to doing an activity together that’s not on a screen, right? Yes, we’re going to make carrot noodles this week. Here we go.

Arjun Basu: It’s almost like you could send a cheat sheet to the parents for every issue, right? This is what can come out of it, and you just send it to them by email so that the kids don’t even see that. Then it’s a conspiracy, and you send the issue and then you have a parents guide that goes out for each issue and saying, “This is what can happen,” or, “This is what you guys can do together,” based on what’s in this issue.

Jen Swetzoff: That’s actually a great idea because I’ve had a few parents say, I really wanted to see what’s inside the magazine, but my kid took it away and I didn’t get a chance.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. We used to do the parent guides when I was in publishing for not all the books, but for some of them that were more educational and parents loved them. I’m going to ask you each a question: What are three magazines that you love and recommend to anyone right now? Jen, let’s start with you.

Jen Swetzoff: So the first one I have to recommend is The Week Junior, and that goes out to all of our tweens or parents of tweens. The Week Junior is a weekly news magazine. And our kids really love it and I love that they bring things that they’ve read about the news and the world to the dinner table. I also have a background in geopolitics and international affairs, so I’m really interested in the news.

Secondly, The New York Times Magazine section called “Lives.” And before or after that it was “His and Hers.” And they were basically these one page profiles of just a human interest story. And while they don’t do that column anymore, I think they still do excellent coverage. But I feel like even as a teen, reading an adult magazine like that can really inform how you think of storytelling in the future. So The New York Times Magazine section.

And then finally I would say The New Yorker, especially the “Talk of the Town.” I’m just a big fan of really human-first storytelling and I think those are good for adults and kids.

Keeley McNamara: I feel I love everything that Broccoli publishes—specifically like Mushroom People magazine. It reminds me of the punk scene, quirky zine trading. It just makes me really happy. Also Catnip from them I think is super fun.

We’re both huge fans of Mother Tongue—we’re friendly with their creators. It’s for community and motherhood. It really means a lot to me to have to know that there’s other moms out there feeling the way that we’re feeling and this beautiful magazine that they create to come into our house every half a year. And then there’s another one that my partner gets called A Profound Waste of Time. It’s like the art of video games, like a visual, it’s just striking. The visuals are striking. My family plays a lot of games and I think it’s to get that off the screen and show them like, “This is the art that you’re looking at. This is what it looks like not moving on a screen, not when you’re distracted.” I think it is really valuable.