Launched on Karangahape Road and read from London to Baltimore, Rat World is a new arts magazine featuring the young, talented and yet-to-be-famous. 

“I didn’t expect this,” says Jennifer Cheuk at least five times in our interview. Cheuk is the editor of Rat World, an arts magazine “for the underground”; it publishes poetry, essays, criticism, comics and multimedia pieces which defy easy categorisation.

In her telling, Cheuk started in 2022 with no plan, no magazine, and no funding. “I lost my way a lot during the lockdown,” she says. After completing an English literature and linguistics degree, she thought about applying for a medicine programme, then mechanical engineering. “I don’t even have a science background,” she says, perplexed. “I just thought – what am I doing?” After tossing up a bunch of ideas, including starting a comics press, the idea for Rat World formed in January. Now, she’s published four issues – the final one over 100 pages – and hosted Rat World events and workshops in both Auckland and Wellington, as well as received funding from the Copyright Licensing Contestable Grants to support Rat World in 2023.

When we meet for coffee at Sandringham café Grays – she does most of the work and meetings for Rat World in local cafes – Cheuk is vibrating with energy. Rat World’s incipient success might have come as a surprise to her, but it’s clear that she possesses the bloody mindedness and determination necessary to launch a print magazine in 2022.

When, the night before the first issue went to print, Cheuk decided the design of the magazine looked terrible, she and her graphic designer Aidan Dayvyd made oven chips and stayed up all night to redesign every page. When she decided that Rat World needed T-shirts as prizes to give away, she screenprinted them herself. She wanted Rat World to be distributed internationally, so she cold-called hundreds of bookshops around the world, and the magazine can now be found in Baltimore, San Francisco and London.

The ”rat” theme of Rat World was clear at a launch party in November for the magazine’s third issue, held at Open Café on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. Several people had made the effort to dress up as rats. Two big rat heads sat on top of the speaker system, and at a table where I sat down there was a small rat puppet which, somebody told me, had been borrowed from a library. Why rats? Cheuk says that she’s always had an affinity for the rodent. “Rats are everywhere; [I realised] it’s not the people who matter, it’s the rats.” I show her the “outdoor dining” cover of New York magazine, where the rats are enjoying a feast beneath the feet of the humans. “That’s exactly what I mean!” she says. “There’s this lost underground of amazing creatives and they keep the world beating.” Cheuk says the “underground” of the magazine is for the voices of these creatives who haven’t found a space elsewhere in the media.  

Flipping through Rat World, which has interviews and photography with a kind of cramped, involved design that Cheuk describes as “retro, old school New Yorker”, I discover artists and musicians I’ve never heard of, as well as interviews with writers I have. I also pick up a free edition of the zine Speck, handed out at the launch party, with a variety of comic artists featured. There’s a sense of quirkiness: Cheuk writes her editorial in picture font Wingdings and offers a prize for the first person to translate it. She assures me the code will be harder next time. The magazine, focused on Aotearoa with some international pieces and distribution, makes me realise that I only cross over with a small section of Aotearoa’s creative world; the magazine makes the arts scene in Aotearoa feel vibrant and expansive, not small.

The magazine being in print is key to this. “Print can be quite exclusive,” Cheuk says; digital writing has decimated Aotearoa’s magazine industries. Cheuk, who spent hours browsing Mag Nation as a child and has the magazine collection to prove it, loved the idea of having something tangible to hold the stories of the creative work she felt was left out of the media. “It’s really validating for people to see their work in print, and it’s opened doors,” she says.

She gives the example of Felicia Duque, whose photography was published in Rat World’s first three issues. “She wanted to get into the fashion photography industry but didn’t know how,” Cheuk says. “I thought ‘let’s do something with that’, and now she’s gotten other photography work and it’s so cool.”

How does publishing a print magazine in the digital age work, financially? To launch the magazine, Cheuk withdrew much of her savings; to her surprise, each issue has made a “measly profit”, just recovering its printing costs. The latest issue has a few ads, all for local galleries and bookshops that the magazine wants to support. She doesn’t pay herself for her time, but each contributor gets $25 and a discount for the magazine (next year it will be a free copy). “It’s coming from my bank account, but that’s a decision I made at the beginning; it’s important for people’s work to feel valuable; creatives need funding,” she says.

Cheuk is realistic: she doesn’t know how long Rat World will be sustainable. As it is, she’s dividing her time editing the magazine with the feature film script she’s writing for her master’s degree and the work she does for a documentary film company. “We really want to make this financially sustainable, but it’s so hard to plan ahead with something like this. I just jumped into it and haven’t lost money – but that’s a depressing answer.”  

But while the magazine is around, Cheuk’s keen to keep supporting the community. “It can be so discouraging to get a straight-up rejection email without the ability to call or message back and ask why,” she says. So even for pieces that aren’t being published in the magazine – a decision Cheuk makes with the support of Dayvyd and some poetry and prose readers – she offers a café catch up, video call, or email feedback and tries to help people find another home for their work.

“I’ll ride this out as long as I can,” she says fervently. “I want to keep somehow supporting people in the community – I don’t know how, but I’ll figure it out. That’s my catchphrase right now, every day: I’ll figure it out.”

Cheuk didn’t expect to get into events when she started the magazine, but hosting poetry and zine workshops as well as magazine launches has helped her to build the sense of community she wants Rat World to foster. “I plan each event in about two weeks,” she says. “I just start putting up posters and hope people will come – there’s no strategy.” But – as the buzzing Issue Three launch party and the crowded Rat World table at July’s Zinefest show – that lack of planning is working.

For now, Cheuk is glad that Rat World exists, the community she didn’t dream of when she started 12 months ago. “People reach out to collaborate, and it’s so cool – none of us could do this alone. It’s like that Planet of the Apes quote: ‘Apes together strong’.” She pauses, beaming. “I’m going to use that: apes together strong.”