The latest issue of The Lifted Brow has caused some controversy by banning all instances of first-person pronoun. Here, the editors tell us their reasons behind their decision.

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Sam Cooney:

The Ego Issue of The Lifted Brow is intended – whilst also being as splendiferous re its contents as every other issue before it – as a provocation to readers, to writers, to publishers, to everyone. There currently seems to be a predilection amongst writers for the inserting of the self into every narrative, even when it’s unnecessary, or worse, detrimental to the work. Whilst some of my favourite writing ever is by authors who install themselves into every sentence and scene of their nonfiction (think Foster Wallace, Didion, Dyer etc), when it is done badly, it’s gross and unreadable.

I intended for this issue of the Brow to cause writers and readers and publishers to ask themselves what they are doing, and why.

Digital Director Elmo Keep:

An entre book exsts that omts the letter ‘E’, Georges Perec’s A Vod. We just wanted to make thngs slghtly more dffcult.

Artwork by Laura Callahan

Middlebrow Editor Ellena Savage:

I is haunted. I is always, before knowing anything, an I-love-you.

This sentence by Helene Cixous is one of my favourites. It captures the warm mysteries of subjectivity, the intertwinedness of selves and others, and the intimacy of belonging inside a porous bubble, a self, that bloats and contracts and is coloured according to its surrounds. It explains why I’m usually drawn to work that’s embedded in the authorial I. But that’s not to say that the authorial I automatically supplants the reflexivity that is required to capture I’s gravity: in high-turnaround commercial media, the first person pronoun is often used as a stand-in for reflexivity, conviction, or research.

So, this edition of the Brow poses a challenge to writers to consider how their voice operates when it is detached from I. The writer is always present in their work, and no grammatical trickery can circumvent that; but how will that presence be registered?

The Ego Issue is now available at Readings, in-store and online.