Dread (noun) 

1. great fear, especially in the face of impending evil.

2. extreme uneasiness in the face of a disagreeable prospect.

3.(archaic) AWE.

I have lived with dread for as long as I can remember. It has manifested in different ways throughout my life, and is an inevitable part of mental illness which I have had to learn to embrace.

In a system built for neurotypicals, and run by capitalism and consumerism, we are constantly offered "miracle solutions" to problems we didn't know we had. Fix your skin with this probiotic, do some gratitude journaling to fix your depression, diets, products, life coaches, self help books... But never are we encouraged to simply sit with our questions, to sit with the feelings and experiences of dread - fundamentally human feelings that seem perfectly reasonable when we are endlessly confronted with the horrors of this world and the struggles of trying to survive within it. 

I was born and raised in Paris, which has led me to learning and connecting to existentialist writers and thinkers from an early age - Camus and Sartre particularly - and therefore to become interested in the themes and questions raised by them: what does it mean to be truly alive? How do we keep up the eternal dance between life and death? Does any of it mean anything?

These explorations, as well as many other artists and film-makers' work have deepened my connection to existentialism (Kierkegaard, Kafka, Beckett, Lynch, Bergman,  Bourgeois, Hockney etc.) have led me to develop my own position on the matter: active absurdism. What this means is that despite the fundamental belief that everything in this life is absurd and nothing means anything, I still need to search for and create meaning for myself - otherwise, what is the point? 

This is where DREAD emanated from: a desire to create a space and community for fellow writers and artists who want to express their own dread, which manifests differently for everyone. It is, in a sense, a way to fight back against this capitalistic need to "fix", as well as a way to allow emergent voices to publish and showcase their work. 

As far as the zine being a physical object: I have been in love with print for many years, and actually started out as a magazine culture journalist. There is something impermanent and yet inevitably real about holding these carefully binded pieces of paper, with all sorts of words and minds contained within one's hands. It's almost as if this material object could anchor all of our dreadful feelings to reality, as opposed to letting them float in the ethereal world of ideas. 

All in all, I want DREAD to become a community, worldwide, for all those whom it speaks to - and I sincerely hope it will speak to you.

Stay dreadful, 

Alice, EIC of DREAD.