Issue 6 is now live!

All About Alice

When Cee and Fox hang out, it’s like being in a Victorian speakeasy, or a bar of the Belle Epoque. Artists, writers, musicians, and drinkers stumble in, and the air is filled with their disjointed rambling and carousing; but then there is a golden hour in which the Oscar Wildes, George Sands, and Jules Vernes wander in and class up the joint.

This magazine is a safe space for hot messes and outliers. If someone doesn’t feel confident that their work is worthy of high literature—or if they don’t give a fuck about high literature—but they have a rant, a sarcastic tale, a satire, or an innocent Beatrix-Potter-style reminiscence regarding their beloved succulents, we will read it and perhaps we really want it. Perhaps we didn’t know what we needed until we read exactly this.

Send us work about your passions. It could be an essay about that one obscure Japanese film that you adore that no one else has seen or perhaps you’ve seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend for the first time and really wanna tell us about it. Maybe you’re like Cee and you tell everyone your favorite film is Amélie but it’s really Big Trouble in Little China. We wanna hear about it.

Poems from folk who never went to college, poems from folk who are really serious about what they learned in college. Scans of your artwork, photographs of your sculptures, or a photo essay of your day. Let us see it !

Short stories and flash fiction of all genres. It could fit a mold,  genre, or even a cliché—or it could be something freakishly new and abstract. We’ll give it a shot.

We want to be your absinthe-drenched home !

Another way to think of Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself is to consider the legendary Musée du Cinéma that Henri Langlois founded in 1936 Paris in the Palais de Chaillot. This magazine is the movie theater inside a literal, actual palace that shows horror films and comedies and romances and tragedies and experimental films and documentaries and rom-coms and family films and animated children’s stories and and and and and. We want to publish things we love—we don’t care if they’re highbrow or lowbrow or weird as absolute fuck with no brow at all. In fact, we’d like to publish all of those things. Send us your ranting first-person essay about John Wick. Send us your mermaid poem about that jerk who broke your heart but whom you still love anyway. Send us a personal essay about becoming a hobbyist potato farmer. Send us a 5,000-word short story that takes place in the span of a few moments during which one person sneezes and another person says, “God/dess bless you.” We don’t love a certain kind of art or writing. We love art. We love literature. We want it all. And we want to share it all with all of you.

We both have a longstanding affinity for Alice. For Cee, Alice IS the dreamchild. She is a stubborn, sometimes bratty, sometimes snobby, always curious little girl that Charles Dodgson immortalized on a golden afternoon in 1865. She is the dissatisfied grown woman who never felt like a child but never feels like a woman. She is defiant and self-absorbed, approachable and open to any experience but also not very concerned about what society thinks of her. She is quite certain the world will burn soon and she’ll have a delicious Caribbean Cask Glenlivet in one hand and a Madagascar Blue Rose Quartz in the other hand when it does. For Fox, Alice is the person willing to get completely lost—to go under—in order to gain new experiences and knowledge. Disobeying authorities, curiously sampling forbidden substances, getting lost in the garden among the talking flowers, until night falls and then even the moon seems to have things to cackle about. Alice has no prince to rescue her. Alice handles the Queen of Hearts and overcomes the Red Queen. Alice tells off the Mad Hatter. At the day’s end, Alice shakes off a strange & hostile world to hang out with her familiar.

Alice is us. And if she’s us, she’s also so tired of carrying all this intelligence and weird beauty and deep knowledge and barely-caged rage around silently. If you were to Go Ask Alice anything about herself and then pause to really listen, Alice would open her mouth and a swarming host of bees would come streaming out in all directions. And they might not stop for a really, really long time.

Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself.

—Fox & Cee, co-EICs

Want to send us work? Check out our submission guidelines first !

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