Welcome to Flourish Fellows Forum, where BCSP speaks with current and former members of our Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship Program about their experiences. Please note these interviews describe the experiences and perspectives of our fellows and do not necessarily reflect the views of BCSP.
Q&A with Hillary Brenhouse
Hillary Brenhouse is a Montreal-based writer and an editor of books and magazines. She was previously the editor-in-chief of Guernica magazine, the editorial director of Bold Type Books, and a senior editor for The Guardian. Much of her editorial career has been focused on promoting work that challenges power via extraordinary uses of language and by breaking form. Her writing, which is focused on reproductive health and broken capitalism, has appeared in The New Yorker online, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has undergraduate degrees in philosophy and religious studies and a master’s degree in cultural journalism.
BCSP
What first sparked your interest in psychedelic research?
Hillary Brenhouse
I first began to do psychedelic research in earnest several years ago, as a journalist specialized in maternal health. I embarked on a project related to how little information is available to pregnant and postpartum women who consume marijuana, and soon after started considering psychedelic substances in this context; ketamine, for instance, is increasingly being used to treat postpartum depression, but ethical concerns and taboos have stalled research. At the same time, I’ve developed a deep interest in psychedelic culture, as I’ve come to the realization that “psychedelic art” is such a narrow and cartoonish classification in the popular imagination. As a reader and an editor, I’ve been regularly immersed in writing that explodes preconceived notions around narrative perspective. I started to wonder if this kind of literature could be called “psychedelic,” and more generally what I could do to help demonstrate that “psychedelia” is such a rich, expansive category.
What might modern psychedelic design look like? How might a subtler psychedelic experience—in which everything is pretty much ordinary, only slightly, weirdly, off—translate into artwork?
BCSP
Why do you think the field of psychedelics is especially meaningful or valuable now?
Hillary Brenhouse
I think that the field of psychedelics has always been valuable. What is especially significant, in this moment, is to see the domain becoming increasingly multidisciplinary. Not very long ago, the field was entirely focused on psychedelics in the context of medicine and therapy, and it seems now to have opened itself to the sum of the humanities. The psychedelic experience is so wildly multifaceted; it comes as no surprise to me that the most meaningful conversations I’ve witnessed have taken place between scholars of philosophy and religion, visual and performance artists, writers, medical professionals, therapists, and historians. The more people in the room, the better. The more wide-ranging the dialogue, the better. It makes good sense, given the nature of these substances, that the field has escaped the limiting container we’d assigned to it.
BCSP
Tell us about your Flourish Fellowship project. What inspired your specific research focus?
Hillary Brenhouse
Elastic is a biannual print magazine of psychedelic art and literature, which is to say that we’ll publish art and writing that’s genre- and time- and perspective-bending, that blurs waking and dreaming life, that interrogates power by breaking form, and that acts to expand the mind and the possibilities of narrative. The first psychedelic era was a time of radical artistic innovation, and yet, for most, “psychedelia” refers to little more than Day-Glo mandalas and contorted mushrooms. Also, as cultural critic Emily Lordi points out in “The Radical Experimentation of Black Psychedelia” (T: The New York Times Style Magazine), historians have largely and wrongly assumed that all of psychedelic culture’s most important actors have been the same few white men. Elastic will assemble a truly diverse body of contemporary work and at the same time pay tribute to an overlooked archive, much of which was authored by artists and thinkers of color.
BCSP
What do you hope your project contributes to our understanding of psychedelics’ role in society?
Hillary Brenhouse
Our team has had to make decisions around what constitutes psychedelic art to put this first magazine issue together, but we do not want to act as gatekeepers. On the contrary, our hope is that the project will become a starting point for continued inquiry in this direction. In other words, we’re seeking to start a dialogue about what psychedelic art is and might be in 2025, and to urge readers, through the work we publish, to consider that psychedelia is a diverse and extremely vast category. We hope, also, that Elastic will demonstrate that psychedelics have had such a profound impact on modern art and culture. The language of psychedelics—the reconception of time and space that is a hallmark of the psychedelic experience, for instance—is so ubiquitous that it shows up even in the work of artists and writers who don’t have a personal connection to these substances.
BCSP
How does your work engage with or challenge traditional views on psychedelics?
Hillary Brenhouse
Elastic primarily challenges traditional views on psychedelic art. These views dictate that psychedelic art can look one of two ways: either we’re referring to the curvy Art Nouveau-inspired shapes, optical-color vibrations, bold hand-lettering, and flowing lines that distinguish psychedelic design from the sixties and seventies, or we’re referring to pieces that essentially act as trip reports by depicting the intense fractals and fluorescence characteristic of a particularly potent psychedelic experience. But what might modern psychedelic design look like? How might a subtler psychedelic experience—in which everything is pretty much ordinary, only slightly, weirdly, off—translate into artwork? I frequently go to electronic music festivals featuring makeshift galleries of psychedelic art, and all of it looks the same to me. I think that psychedelic culture should be as expansive, inventive, and unrestrained as the journeying mind.
BCSP
What unique challenges or insights have you encountered in studying psychedelics within diverse cultural contexts?
Hillary Brenhouse
As we’ve explored both contemporary psychedelic art and underrecognized psychedelia by artists from historically marginalized communities, we’re constantly registering the political stakes of this work. The art in these pages may not seem, at first glance, political in nature. In so many ways, though, it aims to challenge dominant and inequitable systems. It actively resists the shapes that the art and publishing industries are constantly trying to press creators into. It plays with time and space in order to subvert colonial story structures, capture alternate histories, and demonstrate the circularity of trauma and desire. And also, vitally, it exists on its own terms, allows itself to be elusive, and does not adhere to the expectation that artists plumb their own identities. This is the insight we’ve encountered: that the work in our pages really is an expression of freedom and self-determination.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.