What, you may ask, is a zine?
Well, I made a zine to answer that question.
But if you’re reading this blog, you probably don’t have my zine about zines in your possession, so I shall tell you all about them.
A zine is a marvelous thing.
Anyone who wants to say something can make one. Zines are self-made, copied, stapled (or folded or sewn) booklets that you circulate as gifts, surprises, payback, flexing, or whatever you want. Most important is that zines are free, traded, or at least very, very cheap.
They come from a tradition of underground print (read: not institutionally supported nor well-funded). Anarchists and punks in the Pacific Northwest would write and copy their wild political ideas or rants; these were ideas no publishing company would touch (and no editor would look at). Punks and Riotgrrrls would make concert reviews, music, DIY, or F*%$# the Man zines, and then they would photocopy them for as cheaply as possible by making copies at work or stealing copies. With their stack of copied zines, they’d go to shows, bars, record stores, coffee shops, the mall, school, and hand out or trade their zines.
You could make the argument that zines began long before the 1970’s punk scenes in Great Britain and the US; you could say they started with science fiction fanzines in
the 1920’s, or even the radical abolitionist David Walker in the 1800s, who printed his “Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America” and then sewed it into the coats of sailors to take across the Atlantic and to the West Indies.
But if we’re looking for a starting point for zines as they are recognizable now, I’d say the punk movement of the 70’s is ground zero.
A train-hopping vegan named Sean who I met when I lived in the Big White House in my Reno college days introduced to zines. He’s all the way to the left in this picture from Halloween 2008.
He gave me his zine “There is a danger:sketches and manifestos of crime, passion and decadence” and told me the number one rule was to always trade or gift your zine. "If you really want you can sell it, but for no more than a few bucks" I remember him shaking three of his tan, bike-riding fingers at me: three dollars max.
Sean’s zine was a perzine, or a personal zine, and I loved reading about his adventures being a “freegan” or hitchhiking in semis or biking on insane highways.
I made my first zine a few months later and the rest is history.
I make a perzine called Breeze, and it’s always involved variations of my favorite things:
Lists
Recipes
Poetry
Stories
Images
Collages
Updates on my life
My first typewriter was a beautiful 1930s Royal manual that I bought for dirt cheap at an antique store; this was back in the “old days” of 2007, when the price of antique stuff hadn’t been driven high by hipsters. I wrote my first zine on my typewriter and instantly fell in love with the aggressive physicality of punching each key; the RAT TAT TAT TAT RAT of the keys striking the paper was pure satisfaction.
My first zine, made in 2009, was called “Observations and Literary Persuasions.” The earliest copies had no title, just the name Breeze. Since then, I’ve made the following volumes
Volume Name
2 Falling
3 The Antithesis of Listless!
4 Endless, Endless April
5 Beacon
6 Home
7 Palimpsest
8 Fairy Dust Tiger Thrust and the Stuff of Strong
9 City and Country and the Dreams in Between
I've been trading and buying zines since I started making my own. Now, I have a pretty voluminous collection.
Writing zines is a way for me to be creative and control every bit of the content that I produce as well as every step of the production process. Composing zines heals me and helps me understand myself; creating physical and visual narratives solidify my life and my thoughts. Things become memorialized or, conversely, they become less frightening when they are brought out into the open and frozen in text.
And of course, I LOVE sending and receiving mail.
These are some of the zines I’ve received in my most recent trades of Breeze vol. 10
Email me if you want a copy of Breeze :) I’ll probably ask for a letter, mix CD, or a pony in return.
Great zine resources: