A bold approach

“It’s sort of an organizing pamphlet-meets-literary magazine-meets-cultural criticism-meets zine,” Markham explained, “offering concrete approaches to navigating, surviving, upending, and acting in response to autocracy. Approaches beyond, you know, just, Call your reps and leave another message.”

By June, Markham and a handful collaborators — namely the East Bay-based graphic designer Justin Carder, along with the writer Jim Fingal and Markham's long-time friend Hannah Mulder — had established themselves as The Approach’s first editors and raised just over $12,000 on Kickstarter, which largely went to printing and distribution costs. Soon after, they published their first issue, with pieces from Bay Area writers like Rebecca Solnit, Manjula Martin, and Alexis Madrigal, art from illustrator Thi Bui, as well as other big names in the literary and media worlds, including bestselling author R. O. Kwon and Radiolab reporter Heather Radke. Markam herself wrote an article called “Virtue versus Strategy,” examining how to use social capital effectively for political organizing. She also said Madrigal’s analysis of how to reclaim technology from capitalism garnered a lot of positive responses from readers.

While a digital newsletter might’ve been a cheaper way to go, The Approach exists only in print. That choice was essential to the publication’s ideology from the beginning.

“There is more insulation and protection in writing for print,” Markham said. But it’s more than just a guard against internet trolls. The physical paper also allows for “the kind of sustained attention and deeper consideration of thought and feeling that I believe one experiences when they’re reading something in print.”

Markham will formally introduce the publication at City Lights in North Beach tonight at 7 p.m. as part of the local literary festival Litquake. She’ll be appearing on a panel that will include the writers Carvell Wallace, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Chris Feliciano Arnold, as well as Carder, who designed the first issue of the newspaper and who Markham notes has been her main collaborator on the project.

The Approach’s fall issue includes work by essayist Keenan Norris, who explores the idea of universal basic income for community college students; Rachel Neumann, who edited the writings of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh for over a decade, meditates on the dulling of language; YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall on book bans; and the second part of Arnold’s series on cash, “The Disobedient Dollar,” the first installment of which Markham said “really fired people up.”

The third issue, already in the works, will be populated entirely with voices from outside the US.

“Those dispatches from elsewhere, I think, will be really useful and instructive to offer insight and guidance from places that are further down the line in an autocratic reality,” Markham said. “You know, marching orders.”

Issues can be found at area bookstores like East Bay Booksellers in Oakland or by subscription for $40 a year.

In the short-term, Markham said completing four issues over one year is the plan. In an ideal world, The Approach will continue, but for now she’s taking it day by day. 

“It was my hunch that people would be excited about it, and I’m glad to see people continue to subscribe,” Markham said. “But I should say, because Justin [Carder] is such an amazing designer and because we have such brilliant people writing for it, it sometimes tracks more official than it is. It’s a rag-tag, scrappy operation. And, to be clear, I’m the parent of a three-year-old, which is a very demanding job,” she laughed.