It implants itself in the bones. An obsession.

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Vesical work demands everything. It will swallow you, chew you up, spit you out as something you do not yet have a name for. This is not metaphor. This is what it costs. Whether you call yourself a writer, a researcher, a thinker — it does not matter. The obsession does not care what you call yourself.

The work is amorphous. Excessive. Ungovernable. It is not polite. And does not wait for you to be ready.

Vesica Press is for those who reject the finite, the enclosed. Who not only refuse the available containers but smash them and floss their teeth with the fragments. For the reckless. Who have gone further than they were told to go, despite the risk, and come back with something still warm, still nameless.

Species is irrelevant, superfluous. I am not interested in what tradition the work belongs to. I am interested in work that is alive — that enlivens me — unapologetically itself. Wildness too essential to be domesticated. Existing in the only way it could exist. Saying what it says in the way it has said it. Compromise is not in its vocabulary.

Vesical work insists on obsession and whatever follows. Tears its own form from the inside — whatever it takes.

Hypnagogic Peacock accepts open submissions from September but I also commission work directly when I encounter something that feels right. If you think your work belongs here, or if you know someone whose work does, tell me. I want to follow and read.

Vesica Press is where the reckless go. Hypnagogic Peacock opens for submissions in September. The Discord is where the conversation continues. vesicapress.co.uk

Introducing these pages is a difficult task.

French writer and friend to the Surrealists, Pierre Mac Orlan wrote the above in the opening of his preface to the 1930 edition of Disavowals — a text which, in defying categorisation, eludes any instrument built to receive it. His preface is, itself, a morsel of stunning prose, circling Cahun’s poem-essay — or essay-poem, Mac Orlan cannot quite decide — and seeking steady ground on which to land. Reaching for genre, finding it inadequate, he describes Disavowals as almost cruel, a text whose aim is to set itself free, evading all modes of criticism. We are being promised an experience. Disconcerting, certainly, but thrilling.

In an edition of five hundred copies, Disavowals was largely ignored to be recovered decades later and is Cahun’s wildly disobedient answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the premise of the memoir entirely, it assembles autobiography, manifesto, surrealist prose, aphorism and philosophical investigation. Accompanied by photomontages made by Cahun and her lifelong partner and collaborator Marcel Moore, it is a visual and textual amalgamation, an inquiry in which word and image are plaited strands of the same rope that provides the vehicle for the reader’s descent.

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But it is not only with genre that Cahun boils up her heady brew, but with language itself. Never certain but always sure, writing into the spaces between words (and here, in attempting to capture the quality of her prose-poetry-poetry-prose, I find myself in the same no man’s land as Mac Orlan), Cahun works out thoughts like a tongue working gristle from the teeth. The unexpected turn of phrase displaces words from their usual semantic territory, somewhere adjacent but not-quite, close enough for familiarity, strange enough to halt the mind. The syntax that speaks to rhythm as much as meaning releases the held breath, quickens the pulse.

Holding the strange and the ordinary, infused with a peculiar light as Mac Orlan describes it, Disavowals lives in the middle. Not a bridge but a merge. The overlap that I have come to call the vesical. A term for work that is generated from within the vesica piscis, the space created when two circles converge. The text opens with an extraordinary prelude — and it is this portion of the book I return and return to. Both description and enactment, Cahun gives us her approach. The first line encapsulates the process: the invisible adventure.

From this prelude, a set of criteria emerges.

Disavowals is an uncompromising example of vesical work. What follows are the selection criteria it has generated.

1.1 I’ll start again. ESSENTIAL

The lens tracks the eye, the mouth, the wrinkles skin deep…the expression on the face is fierce, sometimes tragic. And then calm — a knowing calm, worked on, flashy. A professional smile — and voilà!

The hand-held mirror reappears, and the rouge and eye shadow. A beat. Full stop. New paragraph.

I’ll start again.

The masks we wear. Comfortable. Familiar. Nameable. Cahun traces the face, the surface representation and sees that it is all illusion. She pauses, begins again, and this is the point at which Disavowals kicks off a journey into the self. The memoir is not a story but an investigation. Cahun does not write about herself — she writes herself.

Apply this to the work and the analogy is clear. Genre is a mask. Poem, essay, memoir, novel — forms we know how to hold, how to read, how to navigate. The rouge of convention. We know what we’re looking at and we know what to call it.

Vesical work refuses this. Begins in the investigation and discovers, in the writing, what form the investigation requires. The form is not chosen — it is written into being.

This is what I’m looking for as a vesical editor — not work that wears its genre prettily but work that has set the mirror down.

1.2 This all must seem the most ludicrous merry-go-round. ESSENTIAL

To those who know nothing of the steps, obstacles and enormous chasms I’ve leaped over — and I’ve revealed none of it — this all must seem the most ludicrous merry-go-round.

To risk self-creation is to risk self-annihilation. Heaps of discarded masks must be clambered over. Deep canyons that threaten to swallow the self must be vaulted over. Unchartered private territory with no paths to follow, no borders, no signposts, must be navigated. To those who have not undertaken the same journey — we all must forge our own way, after all — the result looks like circling. The ever-deepening work of creating oneself looks like a fairground attraction (and not a very exciting one at that) from the outside.

In Disavowals this quality is everywhere — self-portraits that multiply rather than resolve, aphorisms that contradict each other, the autobiography that refuses to arrive at a stable genre. What reads as evasion is the surface of an enormous interior labour. Cahun has gone somewhere most writers will not go. She has simply chosen not to mark the route.

Vesical work carries this invisibly, present in the quality of what remains when the scaffolding is gone. The work holds the weight of the leap without revealing the chasm.

1.3 It doesn’t interest me at all. Vertigo is implied. ESSENTIAL

Should I then burden myself with all the paraphernalia of facts, stones, cords delicately cut, precipices…it doesn’t interest me at all. Guess. Recover. Vertigo is implied, ascension or the fall.

Is the living of a life justified through evidence? Here is what happened. Here is what I felt. Here is the proof. The conventional memoir justifies itself through evidence. Cahun refuses the entire apparatus — precipices carefully named and documented. The documented self is not her business because it implies completion — fixed in the past, stable, nameable. The investigation she is conducting is into a self that is still moving. And it cannot be caught in facts.

What Cahun offers instead is the experience of unknowing Her syntax discovers what it will not name. Her prose leaps before it has identified the landing. Disavowals goes before it has decided where it is going.

Vesical work does not document. It does not accumulate evidence of its own seriousness or its own depth. It trusts the vertigo. It trusts that the work will figure out what it has made in the making.

1.4 They would surely touch someone’s heart. Whereas… DESIRABLE

To please them, would you have to follow the unknown woman step by step, illuminating her up to the ankle? Heels worn down, mud, feet bleeding — these humble and truthful testaments — they would surely touch someone’s heart. Whereas…

Cahun knows exactly what she is refusing and exactly what it would cost her to refuse it. Careful self-disclosure that trades suffering for sympathy, damage for readerly warmth. These humble and truthful testaments would surely touch someone’s heart. She knows this. She refuses anyway.

The refusal is itself an act of self-creation. To offer damage as currency is to fix the self in its wound — to say, this is what I am, this is what happened to me, this is where I need you to meet me. Cahun will not be met there. The self she is investigating is not the self that suffered. It is the self that is still becoming, still in the process of discovering what it is. That self cannot be rendered in threadbare shoes and peeling soles without immediately becoming a finished thing. And the finished thing is not what she is after.

Whereas… The hinge. The sentence breaks before it arrives. Refusal enacted in the syntax. Discovery in the gap, in the unsayable.

Vesical work does not trade in damage. Not because suffering is not real or not present in the work, but because the wound is not credential. The work reaches for the other side of the space the refusal opens rather than the confession it declines to make.

1.5 The pupils’ mirage. ESSENTIAL

No. I’ll trace the wake of vessels in the air, the pathway over the waters, the pupils’ mirage.

Having refused the facts, having refused the confession, having refused the safety net under the leap — Cahun arrives at what she will do instead. The impossible. The thing that cannot exist and yet does. The self — composite, impossible, real in a register the documented fact cannot reach.

What Cahun discovers through this method is that the self is not a stable object to be examined but a series of impossible convergences — the familiar and the unknown, the real and the virtual, the seen and the unseen — that can only be rendered in images that hold their contradictions without resolving them.

Vesical work reaches for the impossible image not as a stylistic gesture but as an act of honesty. It lives in the overlap between what can be said and what cannot. The work that should not exist but does is the only true report from that territory.

2.1 No point in making myself comfortable. ESSENTIAL

No point in making myself comfortable.

Comfort is the enemy of self-knowledge. Not because difficulty is virtuous but because the comfortable position is always a stance already taken — a self already decided, a form already chosen. Cahun will not agree in advance. No point in making myself comfortable is not a statement of intention. It is a statement of method.

In Disavowals this refusal of comfort operates at every level simultaneously. No register offers safety. No mode of knowing provides solid ground. Cahun moves between them not because she is undecided but because settling into any one of them would mean settling for a partial self.

The refusal of comfort in Vesical work refuses comfort is not as an aesthetic gesture but a condition of the investigation’s life. The work that makes itself comfortable has stopped moving. It has chosen the version of itself that fits the available container and settled into it. The form is no longer being discovered — it has been decided. And what the work was becoming has been replaced by what the form could already hold.

2.2 The abstraction, the dream, are as limited as the concrete and the real. DESIRABLE

The abstraction, the dream, are as limited for me as the concrete and the real.

One of the most radical claims in the prelude and one of the easiest to misread. Cahun is not arguing for balance — the abstract tempered by the concrete, the dream grounded in the real. She is arguing that both are insufficient. That the self she is hunting cannot be caught in either register alone. The abstraction flatters. The concrete reduces. The dream romanticises. The real narrows. Each is a partial account of something that exceeds all of them.

Cahun refuses the temptation for preference. She will not allow herself the comfort of a native territory. Every register is foreign. Every mode of knowing is as limited as every other.

In Disavowals this produces the particular quality of restlessness that Mac Orlan could not quite name — the essay-poetry-poetry-essay. Not hybridity as form but hybridity as necessity. The self requires all of it and is exhausted by none of it.

Vesical work holds multiple registers in productive tension not out of a striving for balance but because what it is doing cannot be done from a single position. The third thing produced at the collision is the only authentic account of a work that exceeds both.

2.3 Show a part of it only, in a narrow mirror, as if it were the whole? ESSENTIAL

What to do? Show a part of it only, in a narrow mirror, as if it were the whole? Mix up a halo with spatters? Refusing to bump into walls, bump into windows instead? In the black of night.

The question mark is everything. Cahun does not state this as a refusal — she asks it, turns it over, holds it up to the light. The asking is the creation. She is catching herself at the moment of temptation — the temptation to present the manageable portion, the portion the available form can hold, the portion that will not require the reader to go somewhere uncomfortable.

Every single-genre container is a narrow mirror. The lyric poem shows the lyric portion of the self — the compressed, the imagistic, the emotionally immediate. The academic argument shows the reasoning portion — the structured, the evidenced, the intellectually defensible. The memoir shows the sequential portion — the self as narrative, as causality, as something that can be followed from beginning to end. Each is true. Each is partial. Each presents itself, in the reading, as if it were the whole.

What Cahun is refusing is not genre itself but the pretence that genre can contain the full investigation. The self she is hunting is larger than any single mirror. To show a part as if it were the whole is to close the investigation at the point where it is most productive — to say, this is what I found, when what she found is that the finding never stops.

Vesical work asks this question of itself continuously. Is this the whole? Or is this a narrow mirror? The answer is always the latter. The work that knows this and continues anyway — that presents the part honestly, without pretending it is the whole — is the work that keeps the investigation alive. The narrow mirror is not failure. Mistaking it for the whole is.

2.4 Hit the void bang in the middle. ESSENTIAL

Until I see everything clearly, I want to hunt myself down, struggle with myself. Who, feeling armed against her own self, be that with the vainest of words, would not do her very best if only to hit the void bang in the middle.

The self is both hunter and hunted — the investigation turned inward to the point where the investigator and the investigated are the same thing, pursuing each other through the same territory. This is not a metaphor for introspection. It is a precise description of what serious self-knowledge feels like when it goes far enough — the uncanny doubling, the self catching glimpses of itself from angles it did not choose.

And what is being hunted? The void bang in the middle. The absence at the centre of the self that all the circling has been approaching. Language, always inadequate, always falling short. Not a failure of the method but the method’s most honest acknowledgement of what it is up against.

This is where Disavowals becomes genuinely strange. The self-investigation does not produce a self. It produces a void. The deepest form of self-knowledge available. To know that the centre is void, to hit it bang in the middle, to remain there without flinching — this is what the whole investigation has been moving toward.

Vesical work hunts itself down. It does not settle for the what it already knows. It goes toward the void at the centre, armed with inadequate language, and it does not look away. The third thing produced in the vesical collision is not a resolution. It is a more precise encounter with the absence that the collision reveals.

2.5 It trains the eye. ESSENTIAL

It’s false. It’s very little. But it trains the eye.

No account of the self is true. The self that sits down to write is not the self that is being written about — it has already moved, already become something else, already exceeded the version of itself that the words are reaching for. Tiny against the void that cannot be filled by language, however precise, however hard-won. The writing fails yet Cahun continues writing. The writing fails and that failure is the point.

The practice of hunting, of refusing comfort, of reaching for the impossible image, of holding the contradictions without resolving them — this changes the capacity of the eye. Not what it sees but how it sees. Failing is the training.

Vesical work carries this acknowledgement at its centre. The form discovered in the writing will not hold everything the investigation reached for. The impossible image will not fully render the self that generated it. The void will not be filled. And the work continues anyway — because the continuing is the cultivation of the eye.

3.0 Only ever travel in the prow of myself. DESIRABLE

Only with the very tip would I wish to sew, sting, kill. The rest of the body, what comes after, what a waste of time! Only ever travel in the prow of myself.

This is the last instruction and in some ways the simplest. Cahun is not interested in the self that has already been — the self that is settled, consolidated, legible. She wants the leading edge. The point of the self that is still pressing into unknown water, that has not yet become anything, that is in the act of becoming as it moves.

This is where self-knowledge and self-discovery converge into a single gesture. To travel always in the prow of the self is to refuse the consolidation of what is already known in favour of the aliveness of what is still becoming.

In Disavowals this quality is present from the first line. The invisible adventure. At the leading edge of consciousness, where the self is always in the process of finding out what it is. Every page presses forward into territory Cahun has not previously mapped, moving through water that closes behind it.

Vesical work travels in the prow of itself. It does not consolidate what it already knows into a form that can be safely delivered. It goes to the leading edge of the investigation — the place where the form is not yet decided, where the knowledge is not yet legible, where the writing is still finding out what it is doing. The rest of the body follows. What a waste of time it would be to start there.

Identification of a vesical work is as easy as it is difficult.

The chief criteria: I cannot name it.

Cassie Fielding is the founding editor of Vesica Press. She is a writer and is completing a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where her research argues that surrealist poetry practice is structurally alchemical. She lives in the north of England where she is working on her thesis and building Hypnagogic Peacock, a journal of vesical work.

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I would encounter a piece of writing—or make one, or try to describe one—and find that every available category did something wrong to it. Made it ‘off’. Called it a poem, you lost the argument. Called it an essay, you lost the image. Called it research, you lost the strangeness. Called it experimental, you implied something vague, meaningless. Every label was a diminishment. Not because the work was unlabellable in some romantic sense but because the labels had been built for something else — for work that knew which side of a boundary it lived on.

I spent a long time thinking this was a problem with the work. That if I could not name it clearly it was not yet finished, not yet sure of itself, not yet arrived. I now think the opposite is true. The work that cannot be named by the available categories is often the most finished, the most certain, the most fully itself. It is the categories that are unfinished. Built for a world that has not yet caught up with what the most alive thinking is doing.

So I coined a term.

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Vesical

The vesica piscis is the figure produced when two circles of equal size overlap. You have seen it—in medieval sacred geometry, in the pointed arch of a Gothic window, in the shape of a mandorla around the figure of Christ in Romanesque art. It is ancient and it is precise. Neither circle alone produces it. It requires both, and it requires the overlap. The space no circle makes.

I call work that lives in that space vesical. Not hybrid—hybrid has become too loose, too available, applied to anything that combines two things without asking whether the combination produces something neither contains. Not interdisciplinary—interdisciplinary implies a researcher standing between two disciplines, borrowing from each, which is not the same as work that could only exist at the point where two disciplines collide. Not experimental—experimental implies the form is being tried out, which misses the point entirely. The form of vesical work is not tried out. It is discovered. It is the only possible form for what the work knows.

Vesical names the structure rather than the content. It does not tell you what the work is about or which traditions it draws from. It tells you where the work lives. It is a geometric term applied to an epistemological condition. I find that precision useful.

Why the term matters

I did not coin vesical because I wanted a brand. I coined it because I needed a word that did the right thing—that named the structural position of work I kept encountering and making and failing to adequately describe.

There is a particular experience I kept having. Reading something—a lyric essay, a surrealist criticism, a piece of practice-based research that had found an impossible form—and feeling a specific quality of recognition. Not the recognition of encountering familiar content or a known tradition. Something more vertiginous. The recognition of encountering work that had arrived somewhere new by refusing to choose.

I have felt this reading Anne Carson. Reading the Henri Michaux. Reading Maggie Nelson. Reading the thesis I am writing—which is itself an attempt to enact what it describes, a hybrid scholarly-surrealist text that refuses to separate the poem from the argument or the argument from the image, where the academic and the surrealist voices exist in genuine tension rather than taking turns.

What I was recognising was not simply interesting writing. It was vesical work.

The term matters because unnamed things are harder to find, harder to make, harder to defend. Writers working in this territory have been told for years that their work is ‘not quite right for us’—too creative for the academic journal, too intellectual for the literary magazine, too strange for either. The category problem is not just an inconvenience. It is destructive. When the container insists on separating the elements of vesical work—when it publishes the poem but not the argument, or accepts the argument but asks you to remove the images or, god forbid, ask you to relegate your creative work to the appendix which happened to one of my PhD colleagues—it destroys the knowing the work produces. The third thing requires both circles. Separate them and you do not have two halves of something. You have two different things, neither of which is what the work was.

What vesical work produces

Vesical work produces knowing. I want to be precise about this because it is the claim I am most committed to and the one most easily misunderstood.

For the creative practitioner this is probably the more familiar register—the poem that changes how you see without telling you what to see, the image that arrives before the understanding, the making that reveals what you were reaching for only in the act of reaching. This is knowing rather than knowledge. It is not vaguer or less rigorous than knowledge. It operates through a different cognitive mechanism, produces a different quality of understanding and changes what can be thought in ways that propositional knowledge cannot.

Knowledge aims at objectivity. It aspires to the view from nowhere—the claim that holds regardless of who is making it, that can be tested, replicated, cited, built upon. This aspiration is not without value. But it rests on a fiction. Pure objectivity is not available to us. Every knowledge claim is made from somewhere—from a body, a history, a set of assumptions so deeply embedded that they do not appear as assumptions at all. The view from nowhere is always a view from somewhere that has forgotten it is somewhere.

Knowing does not pretend otherwise. Knowing is not purely subjective either—it is not merely personal, not merely the report of an individual experience that has no purchase beyond itself. Knowing is what happens when the subjective and the objective are understood as entangled rather than opposed. The vesical does not report on the creator’s inner state. It produces an encounter—between the maker and the material, between the text and the reader, between what was known and what is now known differently. That encounter is real. It changes what can be thought. But it does not pretend to have arrived from nowhere.

This is why vesical work is not simply a middle ground between the objective and the subjective. It is not academic rigour softened by personal voice, or creative expression given intellectual ballast. It occupies a different epistemological position entirely—one in which the entanglement of the subjective and the objective is not a problem to be solved but the condition of the knowing. The knowing produced in vesical work is always situated, always made from somewhere, always carrying the marks of its making. And it is none the less rigorous for that.

For the academic practitioner—the researcher whose practice generates claims that the available frameworks cannot contain—the distinction between knowing and knowledge is the distinction between what the practice produces and what the institution can receive. Vesical work holds both. The knowing is present in the work itself. The knowledge—the translatable, citable, assessable version—is one face of something larger. To insist on only the knowledge is to flatten the work. To refuse the knowledge entirely is to make the work inaccessible to the conversations it could most usefully enter.

The essay that thinks in images produces knowing that the essay-as-argument cannot produce. The poem that makes an argument produces knowing that the critical essay cannot produce. Practice-based research—where the making is the inquiry—produces knowing that conventional academic research cannot reach.

The alchemists called it the coniunctio—the conjunction of opposites that produces something neither element contains. Not the harmonious union in which differences are dissolved and edges softened. The monstrous coniunctio—the union that maintains the distance between its elements, where the spark is generated precisely because they have not merged. Vesical work is monstrous in this sense. It exceeds the categories. It makes readers uncertain how to receive it. It does not resolve into either of its elements. This is not a flaw. It is the condition of its existence.

For a deeper look at the monstrous coniunctio in action—and what it looks like when alchemy meets cinema—take a look at my essay Bodies as Alembics over on Origami Chicken.

I think about this in relation to my own writing practice. My thesis is a hybrid scholarly-surrealist text—phenomenological accounts of the creative process interrupted by surrealist irruptions, alchemical stages structuring a practice that is simultaneously the subject and the method of the research. The scholarly apparatus and the automatic image are not taking turns. They are conducting the same inquiry through different instruments simultaneously. The knowing produced in the surrealist irruption is not illustrating the scholarly argument. It is producing a different quality of understanding by different means. Remove either element and you do not have a shorter thesis. You have a thesis that no longer knows what it knows.

This is what vesical work does. It holds the tension. It refuses to choose.

A note on rigour

Coining a term and arguing that vesical work produces genuine knowing could sound like a license for anything—as if any work that refuses categorisation is automatically serious. This is not what I am arguing.

The monstrous coniunctio is not chaos. The alchemists were precise. Genuine conjunction requires that both elements are fully present and genuinely in tension—not one element with a token gesture toward the other. The third thing is produced by the collision of two serious things. Vesical work has its own rigour. It asks whether both elements are genuinely load-bearing. Whether the collision produces something neither contains. Whether the form is the only possible form for what the work knows.

Not everything that calls itself hybrid can answer these questions. The decorative image inserted into an academic argument. The lyric interlude that softens the essay without deepening it. The creative writing appended to a research project as evidence rather than as inquiry. These are not vesical. They are two things in proximity.

If you are wondering what surrealist criticism actually looks like on the page, take a read of The Hijacked Dream—a collaborative paper by me and fellow vesical inhabitant Faith Harkey.

The space no circle makes

I set up Vesica Press because I needed the container to exist. Not as a service to writers—though I hope it serves them—but because the thinking required a home and I could not find one that had been built to its shape.

But this essay is not a pitch for the journal. It is an account of why I coined a term and what I believe it names. The term came first. The press followed from it—the natural consequence of taking the thinking seriously enough to act on it.

Vesical work has always existed. Carson and Cahun and the JAR and the thesis that refuses to separate the poem from the argument. The work that accumulates in drawers because the labels do not fit. The piece that gets the admiring rejection—not quite right for us — from the journal that genuinely wanted to publish it.

It has always existed. It has simply been waiting for a word and a home.

Both exist now.

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Here is the short version: there is writing being made right now that has nowhere to go. Not because it isn’t ready. Not because it isn’t good. Because the categories used to organise publishing were built for a different kind of making, and this work has exceeded them. It arrived in territory those categories do not map. And the publications that use those categories to decide what to accept cannot hold it.

Categories are useful. They just do not cover everything, What they fail to cover is often the most interesting thing in the room.

The writers making this work know exactly what I mean. They have been told, at some point, that the work is too creative to be research or too intellectual to be poetry or too strange to be either. They have kept going anyway. This press is for them. And it is built with them in mind.

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The name comes from the vesica piscis - the shape produced when two circles of equal size overlap, each passing through the other’s centre. The overlap creates something new. Something neither circle contains. The space no circle makes. That is the editorial position in a very convenient little diagram.

The Press is not looking for competence. Workshop polish. The well-crafted poem that could have been made by anyone. Work that uses difficulty as a mask for having nothing to say. Work that explains itself in a cover letter because it needs to.

Vesica Press is seeking work made at the collision of disciplines. The essay that thinks in images. The poem that is also an argument. The research that has found a form the institution did not provide. Writing that is formally strange because it had to be, not because strangeness seemed like a good idea. Work that knows something and cannot say it any other way, that pushes the limits of language.

For Hypnagogic Peacock - Vesica Press’s bi-annual journal - there is no hierarchy between the literary and the scholarly because we do not believe they are different in kind. Both make knowledge. Both require rigour. The form differs. The seriousness does not.

But this is not only a publishing project. It is a community one.

There are a lot of us working in this territory - researchers whose methodology has exceeded the frameworks available to them, poets whose work is also a form of argument, artists whose practice generates knowledge that conventional academic language cannot hold, writers working at the edge of form. We are working in parallel, often in isolation, often without a language for what we are doing or a community of people doing the same thing.

Vesica Press exists to change that. The journal - Hypnagogic Peacock - publishes the work. The Substack thinks publicly about the questions the work is asking. And the community - the Vesica Discord - is where we think together.

The Discord is an intellectual and creative community organised around the questions we are all asking: what does creative making actually know, where are the current paradigms failing, what are the new forms of writing and research doing, and what becomes possible when the categories break down? Thematic channels for ongoing conversation. A dedicated channel for every journal issue and every Substack essay - the conversation continues long after the reading ends. And occasional live sessions where we talk directly about the work and the questions.

This is the community I have been craving as I work in this territory alone. It doesn’t exist. So I am building it.

Hypnagogic Peacock opens for submissions in September 2026. The Substack is free. The Patreon - vesicapress.co.uk - is where you join the community directly: the Discord, early journal access, patron-only essays, and the ability to shape the conversations we are having together.

I am not just building a press. I am building a home for the work that cannot find one anywhere else - and for the people making it.

The space no circle makes. Welcome.

Cassie Fielding - Founder of Vesica Press