For the Work that Refuses

An introduction to Vesica Press — and an invitation to the people making it.

I started a press. This is the bit where I explain why.

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.

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