Sour Winery #1
Sour Winery is Vinegar Press’ monthly newsletter, featuring staff picks, fiction and nonfiction columns, and blog pieces by guest writers. Each month, you receive an acidic report curated by Miel, staff writer and newsletter editor. We hope it intrigues, suffocates, pleases, burns you. We hope you feel the tartness.
Big moment for Vinegar Press. Our first newsletter, live!
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Through the grapevine
EIC foreword, by Cathrina Jakeman
Dear Vinegar Fiends and Friends,
As we move toward fall, Vinegar Press has been busy fermenting new projects, curating new voices, and preparing for the season’s releases. With that, I wanted to share some updates, reflections, and dates to keep you all sated until Issue One and our chapbooks release on October 31st.
Submissions & Issue One
Submissions for Issue One are open until October 1st. We like to see work that takes risks, champions honesty, and blurs the line between genres. Vinegar lives for the unpolished, the strange, and the experimental, pretty much just the kind of writing that stays down. If your piece doesn’t quite “fit” anywhere else, it probably belongs here. Send us an email to vinegarpress@gmail.com to submit.
Chapbooks & Upcoming Releases
We’re thrilled to announce our first set of chapbook releases dropping October 31st:
Lucifer’s Icing by Allister Nelson
Boy Apparition by mk zariel
Crash by tommy wyatt blake (digital-only)
And potentially another chapbook announcement very soon.
Staff Shoutouts
Our staff continues to grow. Allister Nelson leads and teaches us all with her sharp writing and visual work in Lucifer’s Icing and her contributions to our Substack. Sind brings our vision to life via layout and design. Miel curates our newsletter and columns with zest. These people, these creatives, have visions so sharp I feel myself getting cut with each DM.
Important Dates
September 21st – Newsletter drop (Hey, that’s today!)
October 1st – Deadline for submissions to Issue One
October 31st – Release of Issue One + Vinegar chapbook
+ keep an eye out for biweekly staff writing on our Substack!
This is only the beginning. Thank you for being here at the start of something we hope lasts a long time.
With vinegar and love,
Cathrina Jakeman
Editor-in-Chief & Founder, Vinegar Press
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Vinegarish taste
Staff picks.
September’s taste test: what have the Vinegars been listening to? Music, podcasts, white noise, the song of a certain bird… we share our favorite sounds with our fiends and friends.
Cathrina: I've been loving Phoebe Bridgers and the sound of fall rain!
Sind: always asmr and my favorite albums over and over again
Allister: KPOP Demon Hunters!
Miel: Helen 55 (this month’s musical discovery), NTS Radio by Pretty Sick (always forever my favorite band, and they have immaculate taste), kids screaming in the playground by my house (reminiscing on times where everyone was unapologetically loud)
[Psst: we are in desperate need of staff! Wanna be a staff writer or marketing/social media rep? Know someone who does? Go to @vinegarpress on Instagram and fill out the linked staff form!]
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Slightly nauseating
Fiction, by Miel. A peek into a life, each month. Bitter, floral, spicy, animalistic. Might make you gag.
That time of year where the temperature intra muros becomes unbearable, accumulating in bodies until it oozes out of flesh. We radiate a halo of heat like angels would light. There is nothing to do but tongue kiss tile floors and wait for the night.
Charles and I have an ongoing dare to forget as many people as possible. Some Eternal Sunshine thing or other, sans the literal brainwashing. Truth be told, I haven’t watched that movie. It was Charles’ idea and I ran with it, mainly because he’s the only person I see semi-regularly these days, mainly because I’m crashing at his place. Mainly because I’d like that to continue. He’s a bit of a maniac. He likes to roleplay. He had a sad, rich childhood, so I cut him some slack. So far, he’s got me beat, seven to three; lots of ex-girlfriends, I don’t have that luxury. I make do.
So I’m on a terrace, waiting for Yasmin. She is today’s mission.
I regret shaving my brows off so late into July. Sweat falls into my eyes and when she finally comes, forty minutes late, I see her through perspiration drops, fragmented light. She looks ablaze. She gives me her left cheek, her right cheek to touch with my right cheek, my left cheek. I leave drugstore foundation all over her face and don’t say a word. She orders chardonnay. I order water and ask her for a sip, drink half of her wine. I see her think, asshole. I see the word writing itself in her mind. It only makes me want her more.
We leave the bistro at nightfall. Like every other sixteen to twenty-five year old in this city, we go to the docks. We dangle our legs off the canal bank. She goes through my bag, lays down each item close, too close to the edge, lighter pen keys mints coin hand cream coin metro pass lighter coin solid perfume that I was gifted a thousand years ago. I’ve used it for so long that I associate myself with it, not the other way around. White floral. Sickening, frankly. I flick a coin into the water, pray to take her home, which is an incorrect euphemism, what I mean is to take US to HER home, I don’t have a home, I’m an asshole. Who just wasted fifty cents. Which is to say, I want her miserably. She asks me to put the perfume on her, and I do. I rub tuberose into her carotid pulse and it smells a little like sweat, a little like a skin fold somewhere in the body. An armpit, a love handle, the back of a knee. She hates it, isn’t into wilting, mildew, what makes us animals, my bad, your majesty, I’ll lick it off.
And I do, in her tomb-sized apartment, swallowing my own perfume off of her skin, alcoholic taste of her being someone else, someone who is not quite me on my palate. But. Almost. In my mind I’m touching everyone in the world. An infinite well of potential. Mission: accomplished.
She doesn’t come but I see her through the sleep in my eyes. She looks like a blur of greys.
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Oxymel
[Oxymel: honey mead made with wine vinegar. Vinegar’s overarching tone with Miel’s personal touch.]
Nonfiction, by Miel. THIS IS NOT AN OBJECTIVE COLUMN. Miel writes out loud.
September’s aftertaste: HBO’s Girls.
I went into this show completely blind. I had a vague idea who Lena Dunham was, I didn’t know the show starred Adam Driver, and most shockingly, I didn’t know it was released when I was but a wee child. Given that it’s still relevant enough to be brought up every now and then online, I expected it to be, say, five or so years old. Imagine my surprise when I start the show and see the main character using an iPhone 3. The early 2010s music was a real punch in the face, too.
When I started watching Girls, I got to witness 2012-specific culture happening in real time. Marnie’s songs sound (to my inexperienced ears) like iPod-era music, Grumpy’s is a coffeeshop in a newly gentrified neighborhood flooded by hipster men in flannel and skinny jeans, I Love It by Icona Pop featuring Charli xcx plays at raves, an average day in the early 2010s. None of this is bad, per se, but it is extremely representative of its era.
This slight outdated-ness (too recent to be vintage, too old to be current) has brought me a very interesting change of perspective. I tend to forget that most of what I consume in terms of media is a product of its time and not some transcending, independent production. I also tend to be overly critical of my own work when it isn’t following a sub sub subgenre of writing that has been popularized recently. Even though I have a tantalizing individuality complex, I am but a human being and thus, by nature, influenceable (specifically when it comes to submitting pieces to a publication that favors a certain type of work). But there is a spectrum when it comes to taking inspiration from relatively popular work. I don’t believe that the popularization of a genre is a direct indicator of its quality, but when a very specific tone, theme, or writing style gets popularized, it starts being reflective of its time in people’s minds, and that tends to inspire contempt years down the line. The psychology behind this phenomenon must be fascinating.
A very telling example is what I will broadly call Weird Girl Lit. In the past few years, there has been a surge in popularity of work that explores girlhood under what was historically considered unflattering angles. Take The Princess of 72nd Street, a (greatly written) book by Elaine Kraf that came out in 1979. Google Books says it better than I could: “This remarkable novel by Elaine Kraf received almost no attention when it was first published in 1979. For whatever reasons, America was not ready for this dream-like look at life inside the head of a young woman, a struggling artist, living in New York's Upper West Side and coping with the ravages of manic-depression.” Most articles and reviews that I could find about this book were written in the 2020s, an age post the success of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the likes. While the aforementioned works deal with mental illness in young women, Weird Girl Lit isn’t limited to that. Just browse Substack and you’ll see what I mean.
But I digress. My point is: while we inevitably will be influenced, we have to keep in mind that everything evolves, in every field. It takes experimenting and trying out things people have done before and mixing the characteristics of different pieces you find good to find your own style, but it also requires detaching yourself, just a bit, from the zeitgeist. It’s funny to think that someone will watch Adults (2025) - a show that I found to be similar to Girls - in ten years and feel the same about the presence of an Airtag and the pop culture references whatnot. It’s refreshing to remember that nothing is static.
Anyway. I’m now about halfway through season 4. After the first few episodes, I tried to align myself with one of the Girls, à la Sex in the City (I’m 30% Miranda and 70% Samantha, if you must know, which may sound antithetical… what can I say, I contain multitudes), and I genuinely couldn’t. I found the whole lot of them incredibly selfish, irresponsible, self-centered, spoiled, childish, naive, annoying, and frankly unbearable. I ragequit watching this show in the middle of an episode about fifteen times, but I haven’t been able to stop it cold turkey. It remains compelling to me because of the very awfulness of its characters, of how intentionally appalling they’re written, all the while preserving a certain tenderness. Girls shows girls under their worst light, on purpose. It peppers in a few, subtle moments of sisterly love (usually wordless, and usually at the end of an episode in which they gutted each other out emotionally), and the personal growth that they all go through to a certain extent (at least this far in the show) is slow but potent enough to denote how realistic the show is written. It is, in fact, so realistic that it’s infuriating. And it works. We root for the Girls, despite ourselves.
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Pickled notes
Blog posts by guest writers. This month, the talented r.p. singletary has the spotlight with the piece “Transfiguration (or the reply)”.
Nothin but a drunk cad, a philandering liar, church-hatin cheat, fluffed-up fornicator, two-timin no-count dead-beat drugged-out, no scruples here with me, can't not even spell it, don't care to vote, and about that damn toilet seat
I-- the reply started
I don't care to--
know, and ended.
and I was in love, so I shut up for once, changed my ways, and here we are fifty years on, a lesson in mother's nature.
About r.p singletary: rural native, america - writer : across :: genres - rpsingletary.com
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Thank you for tuning in to Sour Winery!
With vinegar and love,
Vinegar Press