In 2017, Kirstie Millar posted a call for collaboration on Twitter. She had endometriosis — a condition that takes an average of eight years to diagnose — and she was tired of the way medicine talks about women's pain: dismissively, sceptically, as if the experience of your own body were somehow up for debate. She wanted to make a magazine about it. Not a wellness magazine, not a self-help guide, but a literary publication that treated illness, health, bodies, and pain as subjects worthy of the same creative attention that fiction and poetry give to love, or grief, or war.
Rosalind Reynolds-Grey responded almost immediately. Katrina Millar (no relation to Kirstie) completed the editorial team shortly after. Together they built Ache, an intersectional feminist press that has published a literary magazine, books, and art prints by women, transgender, and non-binary people since that first call went out.
The magazine's premise is rooted in a well-documented reality: there is a persistent bias in how pain is perceived and treated depending on who is experiencing it. Women wait longer in emergency departments. They are less likely to receive effective pain relief. People of colour, trans men and women, and non-binary people face additional barriers when seeking bodily autonomy and medical care. Ache takes this reality and responds to it not with statistics or policy proposals but with art — essays, fiction, interviews, poetry, and visual work that explore what it means to live in a body that is not believed.
Each issue orbits a theme. The third issue explored the concept of abrasion — the ways that illness and pain wear against the surface of a life, slowly, persistently, in ways that are difficult to articulate in the rational language of medical discourse. The magazine's editorial voice is literary rather than clinical, interested in the irrational, the subversive, the ways that writing can resist the tidy narratives that medicine imposes on bodies that refuse to behave.
Beyond the magazine, Ache has hosted events with authors like Olivia Sudjic and Sharlene Teo at the Second Shelf bookshop in London, and organised a monthly reading group dedicated to discussing the themes of health, pain, and illness. For Reynolds-Grey, the sense of community was always the point — connecting people who live with illness, offering a space where experiences are believed and deemed worthy of discussion. The solace of knowing that others have been there, and that there is a place where you will not be dismissed.
At its heart, Ache makes a demand that sounds simple and is anything but: believe us about our bodies. In a culture that routinely undermines the testimony of the people most affected by illness, that demand is a political act. That Ache makes it through poetry and fiction and art rather than through polemic is what makes it not just necessary but genuinely beautiful.
Explore Ache at <a href="https://www.achemagazine.co.uk/" target="\_blank">achemagazine.co.uk