Erin Spens grew up in a tiny town in Iowa and learned most of what she knows about the world from reading and travelling. Together with creative director Davey Spens, she launched Boat in 2011 as a project of Boat Studio in East London — a biannual magazine built on a concept that no other publication has seriously attempted: every six months, the entire team packs up and relocates to a new city for a month. They bring a handful of contributors with them, set up a temporary studio, connect with local artists, writers, photographers, and musicians, and create an issue about that city from scratch. They go in as outsiders and they leave as outsiders — and that honest positioning is precisely what makes the magazine work.
The cities are chosen for their stories rather than their tourism potential. The first issue was Sarajevo. Then Detroit, where novelist Jeffrey Eugenides wrote the opening essay dismantling the city’s ruin-porn reputation. Athens came next, during the financial crisis. Then Kyoto, Reykjavik (with features on geothermal energy and saga paintings), Lima (where a feature documented girls in a shantytown learning self-defence), Los Angeles, Bangkok, the Faroe Islands, Havana, and Tel Aviv. Half the content comes from local contributors, half from the travelling team, producing a joined-up insider/outsider perspective that reads like neither a guidebook nor an anthropology paper but something between the two — a postcard constructed from human narratives.
Erin now runs the magazine from Los Angeles while the design team She Was Only remains in London. The publication is designed to be read cover to cover — 96 to 112 pages, depending on the budget — with a carefully considered thread from first page to last, always ending with a piece of fiction that leaves the city unresolved. There are no top-ten lists, no restaurant guides, no maps. Just stories from places that are misunderstood, undergoing enormous change, or simply not well known enough — told by people who showed up, listened, and wrote down what they heard.
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