We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Riley Green a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Riley, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

While I love working on a magazine and it drives me passionately as I learn all of the facets of it… I’m not entirely sure that the world is moving in a direction where physical publications are popular or widely ingested by large groups. I hope that’s not true, but the scariest thought to me is the waning relevance of physical magazines with everyone shoving their faces in their phones or needing instant gratification. It’s almost becoming a game of, how can I grip these people in as few words as possible so that they WILL then decide to come take ten to twenty minutes to read a review or a story. In simpler words, the biggest challenge would have to be staying relevant in this chronically technological world.

Riley, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Forum Obscura didn’t start with me, my Uncle Jason started it up and he ran it by himself for a while until he realized it was just too much work for one person and tasked a friend to help him out. That guy didn’t last long, he was helping for a while when I joined up to write since that’s pretty much my strong suit and neither of them really felt too confident in their writing. So pretty quickly it became me and my uncle right after Issue 1 released and I started writing everything for the website and magazine. Issue 2 will actually be mostly written by me and designed by my Uncle while I learn how to design a little better. As far as how I got into writing in general, because this is literally the first magazine I’ve ever written for, I’ve always written stuff. Whether it was for school, wooing some chick, or just for fun I always found myself writing and playing with words in a creative way- it was always fun for me to write. Then probably a mix of teenage angst and addictions clouded those paths for me a bit while I was “finding myself” in my early 20’s and just completely lost the practice unfortunately. Without going into too gritty detail about that, because it just doesn’t really have anything to do with writing. I got addicted to heroin and hitch hiked in California for a really long time, I actually didn’t start writing again until after I got myself home to Texas and started to sweat it all out while I wrote some of the first poems I had done in years probably. So then the recovery journey happened, it’s easy to write when you’re in a dark place but that’s what fueled the beginning of the habit again. That was years ago though, I’m bad with specific dates and all that but I know it was more than a few years ago at this point and I’ve been working on building my portfolio via Forum Obscura for probably the last 5 or 6 months. Really it started in January or February as far as my work is involved and since then my uncle and I have really started to expand it well beyond what two people probably should. Between his design skill and my writing talent we are able to make some pretty sweet designs and websites so as far as services we hope to eventually have a Forum Design sector that helps to refine people’s images online and otherwise. Me personally, I make spoken word and when I’m not writing for Forum Obscura I’m thinking of song lyrics, story ideas, and more so I’d love to help people come up with content in that way I just haven’t been able to find a specific method for that.
What really makes Forum Obscura different from other magazines is that we aren’t ever going to specialize. It’s more of a generalization of art and music lovers and truly it’s a good collection of what me and my uncle love bringing it to a wide audience and hoping other people love it to. I guess we’re not ones to bend over backwards and try to impress? We’re here, we’re offering content, and we hope people enjoy it. I think what I’m proudest of would have to be the fact that we’re not chasing super popular bands and hassling them for stories just so we can get followers, nor are we going online and buying them via those stupid fake follow accounts. We’re trying to grow this thing as organically as possible and I can already see it taking root and blossoming into this beautiful little thing that has no bullshit and is just 100% authentic. We’re not trying to emulate anyone else and that’s what really makes me proud about the magazine, not only that but also how much I’ve been able to learn and see where my writing can be applied to in ways I probably wouldn’t have thought of a few years ago.
Right now we offer a free website that gets most of our content and a physical quarterly magazine that is around 20 bucks and packed full of absolutely great page designs and killer writing. Anyone that hasn’t heard of Forum Obscura, we’re just trying to cover the guys that kinda fall under the radar but should have notice. There’s talent everywhere and we shouldn’t just have to focus on the people who had extra money for P.R. As far as my writing goes, I’d love to offer my skills and ideas to anyone and everyone who wants to collaborate and put something out into the world.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I mentioned being addicted to heroin in my previous response and shrugged it off but this applies. So when I was like 21 or so I decided I wanted to trim pot but I wasn’t sure where or how. I did have some friends though who I met at a music festival and i’ll just leave them anonymous for now, but I sold everything I could get rid of and got myself a plane ticket to Las Vegas and managed to situate a few rides, literally my first night in Vegas I got hooked and it was kind of downhill from there. We travelled from Vegas, to California and in Cali we stayed in Oakland for a while and trimmed pot in this totally illegal grow op in this little section of Oakland (Kind of hard to remember location, I was always high) Anyways, obviously I was trying to get trimming work done so we would smoke speed to trim faster to make more money to do more dope, eventually I was spending 40 bucks a day to get high and after watching people just either die, waste away. or fuck me over because I was incoherent I just couldn’t really handle it anymore. I linked up with an organization called Homeward Bound and got myself home, I actually ended up quitting the day before leaving and I had heart complications in the bus station on the Greyhound right home from Cali in San Antonio. It felt like I was gonna die, I had to lay down on this bench and just rubbed my chest while all of these families stared at me. It was wild. I obviously got home and was eventually fine, but getting home wasn’t easy by any means.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Grammarly. Plain and simple, I don’t use it to format anything for me and I’ll never use A.I generated text but my edits come along so much quicker when a computer can edit simple syntax or punctuation you miss in the heat on the moment. Honestly, if I had known about it earlier I could have like twice as much work done just not having to run such a fine tooth comb over everything.

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Contact Info:

• Website: ForumObscura.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rileygreenwriting/
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/forumobscura/

Image Credits
Design work is done by Jason Herrin, I mainly do all the writing.