A interview with Leah Jing McIntosh

Tiffany Ko

Leah Jing McIntosh is the multi-hyphenate powerhouse behind Liminal magazine, an online platform interrogating and celebrating the Asian-Australian experience. In just five years, the magazine has made great strides in knocking down stereotypes by showcasing the work of talented creatives from minority backgrounds through art and writing, and has formed a wonderfully diverse and empowering community as a result. It was a pleasure to speak with Leah about the inception of Liminal, why its stand against racism is important in our current literary landscape, the thrills and challenges of running an inclusive magazine, and where it may be headed next.

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Tiffany Ko
You are a writer, editor, photographer, and founder of Liminal magazine. How or when did you become interested in the arts?

Leah Jing McIntosh
I grew up reading; my parents’ house is filled with books, so a love of language seemed pretty inevitable. My mom is also an artist and taught me how to take pictures. She made it seem so effortless; it’s nice to think I have inherited her eye for composition. When I was in high school, she gave me her old OM-1, a film camera from the ‘70s, and I used it to take silly photographs of my pals in high school. I still use it now.

Tiffany Ko
You describe Liminal as an anti-racist literary platform that interrogates and celebrates the Asian-Australian experience. Tell us how it all started and the significance of its name.

Leah Jing McIntosh
There are so many literary journals and arts organisations in Australia which often, intentionally or not, perpetuate structures of white supremacy. I am interested in creating a space which is actively against racism, within the literary arts. I think it’s important to keep this intention in the tagline: as a reminder to myself and to others, that it’s possible to envisage how we might create and support art within an anti-racist framework. 

Tiffany Ko
Liminal is made up of interviews, art and writing by creatives from a wide range of disciplines, as well as prizes and fellowships, and much, much more. In 2020, the Liminal anthology Collisions: Fictions of the Future was published with Pantera Press, a wonderful achievement! 

Leah Jing McIntosh
Publishing Collisions in the middle of a global pandemic feels like a strange dream. I feel very lucky to have worked with Pantera, who were very supportive and generous in the editorial process. I feel even luckier that they have partnered with us to support our new Nonfiction prize, and our second anthology, which will be published next year. 

Tiffany Ko
Although it will be hard to pin down among the myriad of things Liminal is involved in, what has been the most exciting or memorable project you've done with the magazine to date? 

Leah Jing McIntosh
When I started Liminal, it was with a vision for a capsule collection of twenty interviews; we’re currently approaching 200 conversations. I think there is a lot that is special about Liminal, but I’m very honoured by the relationships which have grown out of the project. Maybe the most exciting thing is that out of this tiny idea of a few interviews, a community has gently formed. I have met some of my favourite people through this project, and they have met some of theirs, and that feels very special. Producing work, or, the idea of ‘literary merit’, for example, is great, but I think that the work always needs to be directed towards others, towards community. 

Tiffany Ko
The work Liminal does is so important, and very much needed in the current political climate. What challenges or surprises have you come across whilst running the magazine? 

Leah Jing McIntosh
I think a main challenge in running Liminal has been continued experiences of racism within the literary industry. It’s exhausting. One example – when I started the Liminal Fiction Prize in 2019, the first of its kind, I experienced backlash from the white literary establishment, including some angry emails from a white male editor. It was fairly distressing. 

A few months later, a white male writer tried to explain to me that I didn’t quite understand the editor, and that the editor was ‘just having a little fun’. 

I couldn’t articulate why his explanation felt so uncomfortable until I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Hong describes ‘minor feelings’ as ‘the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed’.

Hong’s concept allowed me to fully understand and articulate why it feels so hard to be a racialised or minoritised person living within a white supremacy, working within a very white industry. No one runs a lit mag for the money; on a good day, it’s a very thankless task. 

I run Liminal for my community, for the writers and artists who might see that we won’t stand for this kind of shit. The accretion of minor feelings exhausts me, and I’m sure it will one day crush me. But I haven’t been crushed just yet. 

Tiffany Ko
What do you hope readers and supporters of Liminal will take away from the magazine?

Leah Jing McIntosh
My intention is that Liminal might serve as a resource, intellectual and emotional. I would hope that the site is a space to meet others, on their own terms; that through art, writing and conversations, we can illuminate what is currently happening in the arts, or what could happen. 

Tiffany Ko
If monetary constraints didn't exist, what would your wildest dreams be for Liminal?

Leah Jing McIntosh
I’m very taken with the model that the Centre for Stories presents; a beautiful little house, with workshop spaces, a library, and some of the best people I know working together to create and nurture a wonderful community. I’d love to create such a space for Liminal in Melbourne, but as I’m on a grad student stipend, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. 

Tiffany Ko
If there was no Liminal, what do you think you would be doing instead?

Leah Jing McIntosh
I’d spend less time answering emails.

Tiffany Ko
One last (and very important) question for our Portside Review readers: If you were a sea creature, what would you be, and how would you navigate reading and writing underwater? 

Leah Jing McIntosh
I think maybe I’d like to be a Psychrolutes marcidus – and I wouldn’t have to read or write, because I would be a blobfish.