A magazine run by writers. Is that such a bad idea?
We’re an impecunious, impractical lot and that’s all to the good. The Journal grew out of a conversation between Susan Zakin and Salon magazine founder David Talbot. Newspapers and magazines were in decline, and too many great writers were without a home. We created a magazine that harks back to the heyday of Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice, when journalism’s rigid parameters were bending toward literature, and reading was personal - and necessary.
The response was more than we could have imagined. Veterans of those very magazines, writers like Steve Erickson, Blanche McCrary Boyd, and Mikal Gilmore, were incredibly generous to a startup. They were joined by the next generation of boundary-breaking writers, people like Brin-Jonathan Butler, Lori Jakiela, and Dave Newman, along with an international group of fiction writers: two-time Giller Prize winner MG Vassanji, Lawrence Osborne, and Senegalese-American poet and novelist Baba Badji.
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With so many magazines and newspapers tanking, we embraced the contrarian move, publishing eminently readable journalism and literary writing that possesses the urgency of our time. We see around corners, looking at the motives and historical trends affecting our lives.
We work hard and it’s easy to get burned out, especially if you’re not making a living. Our goal is to get 10 percent of our readers to subscribe. If you believe the work we do is important, please consider signing up for a paid subscription to our Substack.
In a media ecosystem drowning in clickbait and cowardice, Journal of the Plague Years offers something rare: insurgent intelligence with literary bite. Edited by Susan Zakin—an award-winning journalist whose bylines include GQ, Vogue, Salon, and The New York Times—this Substack publication feels like dispatches from the resistance, written with the clarity of hindsight and the urgency of now.
Zakin has built a collective of writers who don’t flinch. Their tone is unapologetically sharp, often darkly funny, and steeped in history, art, and power politics. Pieces span the personal and the political—one week, a meditation on grief or exile, the next, a deep dive into authoritarian drift or ecological collapse. The unifying thread? A kind of war-room clarity about what time it is.
William Finnegan, The Long Memo
I believe that what you write is vital to the health of our republic.
David Barry, journalist and musician
Susan Zakin is doing the hard journalism we need more than ever during these ominous times, and I'm happy to support that work.
Michael Dwayne Smith, poet and publisher
You tell it like it is.
Julie Unbound, reader
Susan Zakin is a national treasure.
Carolyn Cooke, Novelist and professor
