A Letter from Your Editors
Photograph by John Divola, "X-Files," 2002
No beds! No beds, no bedrooms, no boudoirs: that was the first rule we made when we began Issue 3. Our theme was interiors, and our subject was interiorities, and though like all our themes this was left open to interpretation, all we didn’t want was beds. We love lying down, sleeping, and the unsubtle expectation that the bed is where fucking may happen. But how much more can be said?
Instead, we wanted to think of the places that hold our days, lives, thoughts, and moods, whether those are fleeting or routine.
The title of this issue is “Rooms with a View,” and we drew up walls and set a ceiling, then stepped back, peeking in the keyhole to see behind closed doors.
We were wrong, of course, to avoid the bed, as our contributors make clear. Nell Whittaker uncovers an entire cultural history of beds featured in The World of Interiors, a magazine we admire for its celebration of the intimacy of space, and which we are honored to partner with for our respective Fall 2026 issues. We’re also excited to feature the popular game show Interior Motives, hosted by Ben Mora, that asks whether you can tell who someone is from a photograph of their bedroom. As participants zoom in on bedside tables and debate the identities that can be read through blinds versus curtains, Mora turns the game on images submitted by Feeld members.
Our contributors did take the theme to the limits of interpretation. Jo Livingstone’s essay “Contemptus Mundi” explores the late-medieval conception of the cell as an enclosure entered voluntarily for total isolation. In poetry, interiority is expressed through its opposite: the vast expanse of the sky (Katie Ford, Joe Dunthorne); the wide-open spaces of the “interior states” of the USA (Tom Sleigh); and the natural world that intrudes upon Sandra Lim’s urban postcoital poems. The character in Gemma Sieff’s story “Blank Tile” lives inside a memory of romantic disappointment, and Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Size-wise” is a story about a woman, a man, and an apartment to rent. We are thrilled to publish an excerpt from David O’Neill’s novel Abreaction, a text-image fiction that screens the claustrophobia of Zoom therapy.
Where one lives is often seen as a refuge, and our conversations reveal how this is both true and false. Siri Hustvedt shows Sheila Heti around the home she shared with her husband, the late Paul Auster, to tell the story of their life together; Tracy Rosenthal spends a day with Hasan Piker, the political influencer who broadcasts on Twitch for hours most days from his home, quite literally inviting anyone and everyone to look inside.
With our third issue, we have four covers, each one chosen because of its deeply felt relationship to shelter. Nicole Eisenman’s paintings appear twice in this issue: on the cover is It Is So (2014), a portrait of a couple alone together, and inside is an original painting accompanying Sarah Nicole Prickett’s essay on Todd Haynes’s Safe, in which Prickett reads the story of the film like a landscape beyond sight. Photographer Kobe Wagstaff met the philosopher Amia Srinivasan at her temporary beach home in California, where she was writing and surfing while on sabbatical. In “Home, Sick,” Srinivasan reflects on the pleasures and pains of letting another person peer inside our mind. Kees de Klein photographed architect and artist Marf Summers’s London home and studio, where their practice explores “queer domesticity,” for a portfolio of their work included here. At home in upstate New York, the iconic queer filmmaker James Ivory was photographed in bed by his long-time friend Seth David Rubin. Ivory writes his third essay for AFM, about a fateful prop from one of his films that now hangs in his guest room. More than that, he is the source of our issue’s title: In 1985, he directed the breathtaking A Room with a View, the archetypal Merchant Ivory film about the depths of substance reaching below style.
We once heard that interior design is always about answering a question: How does what we bring into our homes reflect the choices we make about what protects, comforts, excites, and nourishes us? We’d add that four walls and a roof ask more than a couch can answer. Who do we let in? Who do we keep out? Which doors stay closed, and for whom do they open? Perhaps that’s why the bed never strayed far from these pages, which include everything we’ve listed above and so much more. The questions in Issue 3 are the kind you should sleep on.
Get home safe,
The Editors
