These Houston artists want you to get lost in their new newspaper

Once upon a time, alt weeklies and small community newspapers could be found, free of charge, in any coffee shop or newsstand in your neighborhood. One of Houston’s longest serving alt weeklies, the Houston Press, stopped printing nearly a decade ago and now exists as a husk of itself online. Outlets like the Houston Chronicle and the esteemed website you’re reading now cover the city as well as they can, but things fall through the cracks.

Edwin Smalling, an artist who owns Basket Books and Art in Montrose, felt there was an opportunity to start a different kind of publication in Houston. After conversations with other Montrose-area groups, such as the online radio station Ice House Radio, about the lack of thoughtful arts writing in the city, Smalling saw a niche.

“I had some notion to make a physical thing that was a sort of document of what was happening in the community,” Smalling recalled. 

Smalling turned to his longtime friend and collaborator, local artist and curator Adam Marnie. Marnie had publishing experience from another project: F Magazine, an arts magazine he started while living in New York back in 2014. Marnie said he was inspired by The Village Voice, the iconic New York alt-weekly that launched the careers of countless culture writers, and City Pages,the paper he read in his youth in his native Minneapolis. Marnie and Smalling agreed that they create some sort of publication that they could hold in their hands.

“Having the thing be in print is something that we talked about from the beginning,” Marnie said. “It was just making a newspaper, something that functioned in that way: print on paper.” 

From these conversations, the Houston Associated Experimental Press was born. The HAEP, which released its first issue on May 1 and will publish quarterly, launched with the goal of giving local artists and writers a place to be expressive and covering Houston’s arts scene. But the arts angle is just a jumping-off point. 

“We are going to provide a place where people can talk about whatever they want and write articles about what they want,” Marnie said. “It’s not going to be purely art-focused, even though it will be inhabited by artists, art workers, and art writers writing about a variety of topics that are important to them and to us.”

In the first issue, there’s a front page story about the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s donor wall and its many ties to Jeffrey Epstein; a piece about whether Galveston was prioritizing tourists over residents; and an interview with Chicano singer Manuel Mendiola. One column talked about a harrowing biking trip through downtown Houston. In the back, a personal ad from a “secret freak” seeks a gentleman for “late night dancing at Numbers.” There’s a crossword, too. 

The HAEP is a collaboration between Smalling’s Basket Books & Art, Marnie’s F Magazine, Ice House Radio, FLATS Film Lab and several other Houston-area arts groups (hence the “associated” in the publication name). Both Smalling and Marnie said they wanted to use the project to lift up groups in a city that can be hard on working artists. 

“Everybody here who’s in the arts is always trying to figure out, ‘How do we make it work here?'” Marnie said. “The newspaper is a way to knit together a few of these organizations to raise each other up by what we’re doing.”

“We wanted to foster the sort of community that we have already participated in different geographical locations, but also communities that we aspire to,” Smalling said. 

Crucially, they wanted those conversations to happen offline. The HAEP doesn’t publish its stories online. If you want to read it, you have to go to one of the many locations in town to read it. That structure allows the paper to stay true to its mission of being by and for the Houston community.

“There’s something so concrete about that structure,” Marnie said. “It is a local thing being only distributed locally, that means that its readership is going to only be local.” 

“Imagine a world in which you get your coffee and you walk out and you grab the paper and sit down and read instead of starting to scroll your phone,” Smalling said. “It’s such a counterintuitive activity, but it’s in some way such a liberation.”

The HAEP is part of a Houston indie publishing scene that Marnie said has “blood coursing through it.” A Montrose-area independent zine called swamp! is another publication on the come-up. There’s a tendency to think of these projects, made by both young people and older artists alike, as another part of our culture’s obsession with nostalgia and a longing for more retro experiences. But Marnie rejects that idea. 

“The desire is not for it to be some kind of boutique gesture, but to actually be a place where writing and ideas go that people do in fact need and want to participate in,” Marnie said. 

And besides providing an outlet for thoughtful writing and critiques, Smalling says that instead, part of the HAEP’s mission is to have a living, physical record of Houston. Smalling says he has similar projects from 25 years ago in his house decades later. In the same way, he wants the HAEP to exist in perpetuity as a community document that will live long into the future, something it can’t do on our ephemeral internet. 

“There is no corollary to that on the internet. There is no finding 25 years ago on the internet,” Smalling said. “That physical document that cannot be taken from me. I think that is so precious.”