Expiration as Inspiration

Callum Angus is a lot of things—a writer of renowned books, a publisher of the queer and weird, an independent teacher and long walk taker—but what I want you to know first is: Cal is my friend. He is responsible for the first publication of my career, in smoke and mold, the very journal you are reading. I cried when I got the news; I was newly transitioning and reeling from a near-death experience, both of which had convinced me I would die before my work ever found a readership. I called my parents and my long-term partner, who I had only known for a few weeks, to try and impress on them the tectonic shift this one email had produced in me. What I was trying to say was: I’m going to live.

And I have—I’ve lived long enough to become an editor at smoke and mold and a publisher myself, to sit in Cal’s driveway in Portland and to paint his portrait on his birthday in rural New Hampshire. This arc from editor to collaborator to friend is typical of Cal. It’s a slow, intentional deepening of relation rooted in the mycelial ethic that’s characteristic of his work. It’s why I’m writing to you at all.

I’m telling you this so that you understand the type of person who would start celium, Cal’s new creative container for his many projects, classes, and collaborators. A person who is, above all, generous and curious, uninterested in manicured paths, perpetually leaning down to take pictures of dew drops and the striations of moss across bark. celium flows through the grooves of this personality; it is growing towards a borderless world where publishing takes its time, where quality of relationship is valued over quantity of product. Along with collaborators like Jzl Jmz, Cal seeks to make celium worthy of the liberatory future it’s working towards. In our conversation, we talked about how we might get there.

– Luke Sutherland, May 2026

This interview was conducted over video in February 2026. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

---

Luke Sutherland (LS): You’ve carved a pretty untraditional path in the literary ecosystem as a writer, publisher, and teacher. Of all the roles you’ve played, most of them are based in connection, creating containers for people and ideas to gather together. To open up the conversation, I want to give you something broad: for you, where does this impetus to connect come from—the desire to publish, to teach, to relate?

Callum Angus (CA): Part of trying on lots of different hats has been figuring out which hat fits the best and where my specific skills and temperament find the best match for a role to perform. I’ve always sort of felt ill-suited for many traditional jobs. I don’t really like having a boss, and even as a writer and as an editor, I’ve always felt a little bit adrift, not really feeling like my voice fits in, whether it’s in a class or a workshop or a publication. I’ve always felt a little bit on the outside. It wasn’t until the last couple of years working with smoke and mold when I really settled into that role of publisher, which felt like the connector of the connectors. It’s like, not only are you connecting people to your publication or connecting writers and editors to each other, you’re also connecting to the broader world. I really feel like publishers try every type of job until they realize they can’t do anything else, and then they end up doing this. 

A lot of my connecting and literary work comes out of a desire to make places for others where they can feel seen and valued, places that I wish I had had. Even pre- smoke and mold, when I was in the MFA, I was very frustrated with the lack of mentorship and the lack of direction for queer and trans writers there, with not reading any queer and trans writers when I was in college or graduate school, with not seeing a lot of journals that were obvious places where I would feel like my voice would be valued.

More recently, I’ve realized I don’t just want to make a container for people to come and feel at home. I also want to be pushing people, and myself, to improve our writing, improve our style, improve the way we connect with the rest of the world, to fail and try again. To give us a place to fail and try again. 

I also want to be pushing people, and myself, to improve our writing, improve our style, improve the way we connect with the rest of the world, to fail and try again. To give us a place to fail and try again. 

LS: To dig into your new project celium’s namesake—through your writing and our personal conversations, I know that you have a deep relationship with mycelial networks, lichen especially. You’ve talked about this relationship as a means to not just write about these networks but with them. Anyone who has ever had a pet understands how a human can form a relationship with a non-human animal, but lichens and fungus are not beings people typically associate with sentience. How do we build relationships with these beyond-human and beyond-animal creatures? Why write not just about, but with?

CA: Lichen isn’t something most people would associate with publishing either, but I want to start with the non-human relationship question and work backwards. For me, I think I’ve always felt an attraction to lichen or mosses for the very subtle but intricate patterns that they lay on the landscape. It has always felt to me like that there is more information there if I slow down and pay attention to it. Over the years of just paying attention, that has built a relationship based in slowing down and altering my very human default or at least capitalist default of: “be busy all the time, extract as much value from your relationships and jobs as you can, exploit every niche that you can.” These are economic precepts that lichens live very directly against. That has slowly become a model for how I want to live my life, especially in a country where death and speed and violence are the norm. This listening to lichen is just one example; we all have some connection to the non-human world, even non-animal world, whether it’s through plants or rocks or weather, that if we slow down and listen to it more, if we do that over a period of years, we can access other registers of being.

This is kind of an aside, but I’m really interested in how other writers have spent time looking at or developing a relationship with the non-human, like Ursula K. Le Guin and Mount St. Helen’s, or John Cage the composer, who was extremely into mushrooms. Those relationships didn’t just show up in their work, they deeply informed how they felt about the world. And I think that’s getting to some of the with instead of about. They weren’t just writing articles to publish online, either to make money or build their brand. They were taking in this influence and letting it change their work and change themselves on a very deep level. That’s a process of attention, that’s a process of relating to one another. All of this can also be applied to our relationships with people, it’s just that they’re usually steamrolled by relationships of commerce, which we’re taught is how things work. Sometimes it’s easier to access that with the non-human, at least for me, and then bring that back to my relationships and connection work. 

They were taking in this influence and letting it change their work and change themselves on a very deep level. That’s a process of attention, that’s a process of relating to one another.

I want to know, where do you fall on that? I know that you also have a relationship to different non-human entities in the world—Do you feel like you have this sort of long-term, multi-year conversation with any other non-human being going on that informs the work you do in the world? 

LS: The deeper I go in my artistic practice, the more that answer seems to be the ocean,  particularly the shoreline I was encountering as a child. It started to bubble to the surface in short stories set in or along the ocean, like “King Tide,” the story that first connected us. I’ve been living inland for four or five years, but where I grew up, I could walk to the ocean in ten or fifteen minutes. I think being this far from the coast has really done something to me not just psychologically, but corporeally. In a weird way, the distance might have been required in order for me to realize there was a relationship there that needs tending, and that I want to tend to it.

CA: It feels very tidal. Living far away for a long time, coming to some realizations, and tuning into those ebbs and flows.

LS: We’re touching on where I want to go next, which is stillness and time. On celium’s about page, you name slow growth as a principle, particularly in contrast to the traditional publishing industry and the expansionist death drive of capitalism in general. You also describe celium as a learning organization. I’d love to know what that means to you, and how a project like celium can embody slow growth when so much of the world, the industry, and even small presses fall for that trap of endless growth. 

CA: Expansionism is really the only way that a lot of American entities know how to do business, which is to grow at all costs. That’s why we think about GDP as an indicator of national health. It goes back to our colonial roots of manifest destiny, pushing ever westward, building this nation. That’s why I don’t like the phrase “mission statement” for its very missionary roots, which I also reject. I think most people use that phrase in a very unconscious way, but because so much of this project is about being as conscious and intentional as I can be, I want to push back on it. It’s the same reason I want to push back on phrases like “founding editor” for smoke and mold because it rings far too close to founding fathers and American myths of origin; and also because smoke and mold has changed and grown and become a different animal through the input of others. I hope that celium retains some of this responsiveness as other people become involved. 

smoke and mold has changed and grown and become a different animal through the input of others. I hope that celium retains some of this responsiveness as other people become involved.

Learning organization is not my phrase. I should find the source. I read about it a while ago and haven’t really been able to find where it’s from.¹ It’s a phrase that, at least the way I first encountered it, comes from people who are trying to push back against non-profits that resist learning and change. We’re all very familiar with non-profit industrial complexes where they just become so corporate, even if their bottom line isn’t profit. They still walk the walk and talk the talk of for-profit corporations, especially in who they are helping, and especially in the distribution of power and compensation. A learning organization, the way I have come to understand it, is an organization that is not static in its understanding in how power moves through its own operations, through the people involved. It is always willing to stop and to be like, “oh okay, we did this wrong, or we didn’t understand this at first so now we’re going to change or respond to this feedback we’re getting.” A lot of that I have also learned about through people I’m close with who have done a lot more work in non-profits than I have. This false sense of urgency is often preventing more intentional conversations about change and asking the question, “is how we’re operating actually in line with our ‘mission statement?’” celium is not a non-profit at the moment, and doesn’t have plans to be, because we’ve all experienced enough betrayal from non-profits at this point. I’m not really interested in going down that avenue. But I am interested in learning and changing the way that I think and operate in response to feedback that I get and conversations that I have. 

There is this de-growth movement of people who are doing really interesting things and having really interesting conversations about what our responsibility is as creatives, editors, publishers, and artists in this country, a “developed country,” an over-developed country, which wields such massive power on a global scale that it can perpetuate genocides in multiple countries without suffering any international consequences, causing pain and suffering and putting people in detention camps, people who, we are told, are outside of what it means to belong to this nation. We have a responsibility to go against a lot of these precepts, to go against growth, instead of just slowly growing. These days, capitalism has been growing for so long that the growth has slowed down, and that’s part of the supposed problem, right? A lot of Western countries are like, “How do we accelerate our growth, how do we tap into that growth that we experienced in the second half of the twentieth century that made us such superpowers on the global stage.” That’s constantly where we’re trying to get back to. 

And I think a lot of people—myself included—are saying, “No, I don’t want to do that.” It has caused so much inequality and made us arrive in this place where we have so many billionaires funding vanity presses or whatever, and what we want to do is de-grow and find ways to reject that while also building systems that allow us to connect and share our work. It’s not easy, because in order to decay or de-grow, you have to have something in the first place. How do you grow responsive to that responsiblity while also trying to not backslide into some of the very subtle and insidious nonsense that surrounds the business of publishing? It’s not easy, and like you said, a lot of small presses also do that. But I think if you approach this with these things in mind, you can at least be held more accountable. 

And that’s part of being a learning organization, too, is wanting to be held accountable by the people that you work with. I hear that a lot from smoke and mold readers who have been with the publication for a couple of years. They’re so grateful that this publication has just continued doing what it does on the scale that it does, and it hasn’t tried to grow itself, because it knows it’s going to end, it has this expiration date. I’ve learned a lot from that process about how to manage expectations and overreach, mission creep, that sort of thing. I hope to apply it to celium, too.

I hear that a lot from smoke and mold readers who have been with the publication for a couple of years. They’re so grateful that this publication has just continued doing what it does on the scale that it does, and it hasn’t tried to grow itself, because it knows it’s going to end, it has this expiration date.

LS: It sounds like this is a type of growth that welcomes failure, or re-directs it. Tell me more about failure!

CA: When I’m talking to writers who are trying to get their first book published, I will often ask, what does the success of this book look like for you? I want to ask that of presses, too. What does failure mean to you? Can you conceive of failing, is that something you’re even willing to acknowledge as a possibility? Because it’s always a possibility. We don’t have growth without failure. Failure is an inherent, integral part of how we grow, because we learn from it. If we look at the broader landscape of publishing today, especially in the US—has it succeeded? Is it doing what we want it to do? Because to me, when I look around, I see a lot of empty talk, I see a lot of striving to publish as many books as possible, on as cheap of paper as possible, that can get remaindered or pulped immediately. I see a lot of self-congratulation in a very closed conversational sphere about global politics. Like, okay, we published this book, it got this prize—What changed? 

I think a lot about this one moment—it was when I was in my MFA, probably 2016 or 2015—when the far-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, a real Neo-Nazi, had a book contract with Simon & Schuster. It was a moment when people realized that these publishers have right-wing imprints because they know they can make money publishing books marketed to a very specific political viewpoint in this country. It doesn’t really matter to them what the fallout is. That’s how we got JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, and all the Hollywood-ification of that after. That’s a failure to me. At the time, there was this moment of reckoning—Milo’s contract was canceled, some big name people like Roxanne Gay left Simon & Schuster. So some stuff happened, but it has completely been forgotten in the broader landscape. There is absolutely no conversation about that today. Which is scary! I would say that is a failure of publishing, to not examine those relationships closely and say what are we learning from this? How have we failed? People of good faith should be doing that. There are obviously bad faith actors in there too, who want to spread those ideas, but there are also a lot of people just going along with business as usual in publishing and other creative fields that are unwilling to turn the lens back on themselves and learn from failures, or even admitting that they are failures. 

We don’t have growth without failure. Failure is an inherent, integral part of how we grow, because we learn from it. If we look at the broader landscape of publishing today, especially in the US—has it succeeded? Is it doing what we want it to do?

LS: I do remember the situation with Milo Yiannopoulos. I can see echoes of that in all kinds of media sectors, like how Netflix can get away with platforming Dave Chappelle and trans films at the same time. Then you have a total rag like The New York Times. I actually don’t think I want to talk about The New York Times. [laughs]

To re-orient us a little bit—we’ve already touched on expansion being one of the pillars of colonialism. You’ve described celium as a borderless project. I’m interested in the idea of a border not only in the context of geopolitical violence, but also in thinking about what a border looks like in art. How is celium a borderless project, and in what ways do you imagine this connects to a larger liberatory project against colonialism and the borders of nation states?

CA: Naming celium a borderless project is a little aspirational, because at the moment, as a writer and publisher and editor in this country, it feels like the borders are closing in all around. They are, literally. I don’t mean to say it just feels like that, they literally are. Citizens of seventy-five nations can no longer get visas to come to this country—more than one third of all the world’s nations—though this number keeps changing, and it has a chilling effect overall even on so-called “legal” immigration. 

LS: Even within the country, the range within which Border Patrol is supposed to operate is also widening. Not only are our borders closing, but the walls are getting thicker.

CA: The borders are moving in, literally, from the actual lines on the map, but they’re also moving in on our lives, and it does something really awful to a mind to be cut off from the rest of the world, especially in a time when virtual connection is so widespread. In this increasingly surveilled and militarized borderland that we live in, I want to look out and think about what a borderless publishing project could look like. It’s necessarily going to involve translation in some aspect. That’s something I’ve been really passionate about for a long time. But it doesn’t just stop at that, because even at a lot of mid-sized publishers that do wonderful translation work, there’s very quickly a slippery slope to grow, to make as many translations as possible in order to make more money. That’s not what I’m interested in doing. And so, I think breaking down borders involves asking: Why do we want to have translated voices here, what’s missing without those voices from other places in the world? 

In this increasingly surveilled and militarized borderland that we live in, I want to look out and think about what a borderless publishing project could look like.

We’re in a moment also when a lot of borders are breaking down between genders, different kinds of identities are being re-shuffled. You hear a lot in the media right now about these big seismic changes in how we understand the world working geopolitically. Ideas about race, and ideas about ethnicity, who belongs and who doesn’t. There’s a lot of opportunity to move positively into that space and embrace the softening of rigid categories that we once put so much stock in. It doesn’t have to be a scary thing. It can be a beautiful thing to break down borders and to find new ways of living and connecting and learning from one another. 

That connects a lot to lichen and to the mycelial aspect of it, that these are non-human things that pay no attention to borders but still have differentiation; there are still different organisms. I don’t want to use the word ‘species’ because that adds a lot of baggage, but there’s still difference. They are stronger and working with that difference in a way that I want to work towards too, both in an internal structure sense and in the kind of work we publish and the kinds of classes that we host.

LS: While you were talking, I was imagining a sketch of a plant cell in an old biology textbook. If we think of the cell wall as a border, what happens to that cell if its walls thicken too much, if somehow all of the pumps and pores that connect it to the outside world stop?

CA: There’s a really interesting theory about how organisms evolved from single cellular to multicellular.² According to this theory, cells “ate” other cells, absorbed them, and that’s how we got organelles, different parts inside of a cell that do different things. Those were originally other organisms, and instead of being eaten and dying, they kind of lived together and were more efficient at various things. I think it’s so powerful, because all the way down to that very micro level, if we think about things like competition and success and failure and cooperation, it can really reshape every aspect of a society. 

LS: In the purpose statement of celium, the word imagination and its synonyms come up a lot. Personally I think of imagination as a place beyond the veil, so to speak. It feels like my ideas come from somewhere else, somewhere outside of me. Where does imagination live for you? What do you think an idea is made of? 

CA: I don’t often think of imagination in terms of images, which is really interesting because it’s right there in the word. For me, imagination has always been something I cannot see. It’s something that has to be felt or understood in other ways that are not visual. Because if it was visual, if it was right in front of me, it wouldn’t be imaginative, it wouldn’t be something that would be so flexible and so based in intuition and the possible, or the impossible. For me, that connection between imagination and the impossible is really vital. It’s an important part of the political project. In a way, a lot of people have lost sight of the boundless possibility of imagination in our political reality, and the power of art, of creating something from nothing, of working with what you have to make something heretofore unimaginable. A lot of people have settled instead for an impoverished imagination of received ideas and false limits. 

There’s something kind of oppressive too about the idea of imagination. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about how they feel like they’re not able to imagine, whether they think it’s because they haven’t had a lot of practice or opportunity, or because they think it’s a lack inside of themselves, something inherent, that they don’t have this mythical imaginative talent. I believe an unimaginative populace is an obedient populace. To me, this is the real danger of AI and people using ChatGPT to smooth out every though they have. There’s something very subversive about really using one’s imagination and pushing back against different powers-that-be which tell us how we’re supposed to live. There’s something to do there with the idea of genre and rules around work and around categories of work that start to hem in imagination in a lot of ways. That even goes back to the borderless thing, I don’t want to limit imagination through categories or borders or genres in this project from the start. 

LS: Since definitions of success and failure came up so much in our conversation, I want to turn the question back on you. In an imaginative space with no limits, what is your pie in the sky dream for celium? What does success look like here?

CS: For celium, success doesn’t look that different from failure, in that, ideally, they’re both about learning. They’re about coming to understand things that we didn’t understand before and being able to communicate that through conversation with people, who then would read smoke and mold or a book from celium and come and check us out and not be disappointed, not feel betrayed by the way that we operate. Beyond even that, they would feel welcome to take part in some aspect. That could look like a lot of things. That could look like literally coming in to collaborate, whether on smoke and mold or celium itself, or it could look like inspiring them to start their own thing and think beyond the borders of their own imagination. In a very non-material way, that is the idea of success that I would hope for celium. 

For celium, success doesn’t look that different from failure, in that, ideally, they’re both about learning. […] That’s kind of vague, but it’s important sometimes to be vague. The kind of success where you have something that you’re striving for so concretely is the kind of success that I’m not interested in.

On a more material level, I would like to be able to look back on however many years of books we make with intention and with as much contact with other people and the impossible as we possibly can, and to find something to be proud of in that. And also to build relationships with and make a space for those writers who feel like they don’t have anywhere to go right now, that they’re being shut out of everywhere, from big, mainstream publishing to mid-sized publishing, that they have a place to go where they could be heard. That’s kind of vague, but it’s important sometimes to be vague. The kind of success where you have something that you’re striving for so concretely is the kind of success that I’m not interested in. I’m interested in a much more amorphous success that is more of a feeling than a defined goal or projection. I will only really know what that is when I’m living it and hearing it from other people.