Worms x Runway
Editor's Letter
Welcome to Issue 50: Correspondence. For this issue, we decided to curate a collaboration between Runway Journal and Worms. This collaboration brings together Runway’s Correspondence issue and Worms 11: Faith & Worship through a shared interest in writing as an act of reaching outward, across distance, difference, and belief. Emerging from an ongoing dialogue between our editorial and digital teams, the project extends Worms’ printed supplement into Runway’s digital space, allowing the works to circulate within a new context and readership. Linking London and Australia, print and online publishing, the collaboration reflects a mutual commitment to exchange as a creative method: correspondence not only as a theme, but as a practice of connection, translation, and collective inquiry. What follows is Worms’ editor’s letter, which introduces the constellation of ideas and writers that shaped this meeting between our two platforms.
From Worms 11: Faith & Worship
Released December 2025
The theme for each issue of Worms tends to emerge steadily as gathering clouds. Often there is a nebulous sense of something that we want to explore, unripe fruits plucked from things we have read and heard and pocketed without much thought for later examination. It’s only when our pockets grow heavy, when ideas amass into something worthy of a second glance, that we start to name them. In the case of this one, the eleventh issue of Worms, its theme has its roots in the previous. The Love Issue—released in July 2025—explored love in all its guises: radical, complex, beautiful, violent. But in our study of the heart’s infinite mysteries there lurked an undercurrent of something else. Faith, close to love, was a persistent reoccurrence. Devotion, strength, clarity, refuge – these emerged as dimensions of love that can also be mapped across a search for something beyond the material. Worms 11: Faith & Worship began here.
For this collaboration with Runway Journal’s Correspondence Issue—first found as a supplement in Worms 11: Faith & Worship—we come together to explore the intersections of two expansive, unwieldy themes. This cross-cultural exchange is itself a correspondence, between London and Melbourne; an exchange of practices between our imprints, spanning timezones and several oceans, linking the printed medium to a digital platform. Together we consider the overlaps and interstices between Faith & Worship and Correspondence: the ways that faith is lived and written, and how we might reach toward each other across geographies, time, and memory. The pieces that we have selected to appear here, in the digital pages of Runway, were selected by Worms because they begin to bridge gaps between these two themes; because what is correspondence if not the act of bridging gaps? Here we reach between the material and the spiritual, the past and the present, this life and the next.
Writer and translator Alaa Alqaisi writes across two distinct horizons, from Gaza to Dublin she reflects on the books that have held her through displacement and despair. RZ Baschir takes us on a surreal journey through a funerary rite, where, as generations collapse into one another, questions of memory, inheritance, and guilt surface through incantatory voices and otherworldly spirits. Sarah Burgoyne excavates a girlhood diary and its shadow, exploring how we travel from the selves we once were into parts unknown. Giulia De Vita transports us to a dying planet where three aging women tend to a multiplying flock in the ruins of a world built by absent men. Finally, Phoenix Yemi communes with mystic philosopher Simone Weil and a polyphony of other voices in a lament that explores prayer, the erotic, and the dissolution of the I. These texts deal in faith, in forms of worship, and the spaces in between.