Why Make Zines?

Why Make ZInes?

I’ve been asked many times to talk about how & why I started making zines, so here’s the abridged version of my journey ♡

I was raised in queer punk & leftist + anarchist spaces; zines were a part of the cultural landscape. During my years as an undergraduate student at University of Maryland, I worked on our annual Disorientation Guide, an annual zine that “aims to provide a critical perspective to how the university operates and offer resources and candid reflections to help students engage in issues of identity, justice, solidarity, and organizing.”

It wasn’t until 2016 that I wrote & published my first zine. Femme Filth #1 was a perzine grounded in themes of radical vulnerability, living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), queer femme identity, rituals, healing, & gossip as a site of resistance. In the introduction, I wrote:

“I am self-conscious & afraid but I need to (begin to) tell my story because I have been silent, been silenced, for far too long. I let my trauma, my fear & my ghosts control me. I thought shutting down was being brave. But the type of bravery I am interested in practicing isn’t putting up walls & pushing people away; it’s tearing those walls down, it’s making friends & lovers & community, it’s #radical vulnerability.

This zine is an exercise in that practice.'“

I needed a place to process & share my story on my own terms; self-publishing zines was the medium that made the most sense. I wrote about the trauma I’d survived & all the intense, overwhelming, feelings that came with it - & through that practice of radical vulnerability, zines connected me to a community of fellow survivors, folks who supported me during a period of profound isolation. Creating zines gave me a way to express myself, creatively channeling my thoughts & feelings & experiences into something that felt scary but safe.

I began to think of my artistic practice as a type of creative composting: I used the crap I’ve experienced & transformed it into zines, containers for healing that were inspiring, colorful, empowering, cute, & hopeful. My art became a rich soil that nourished not just me but people like me, who were hurting & trying their best to survive.

In the following years, I opened an Etsy shop to share my work with a wider audience. Since then, I’ve published 30+ zines that have reached thousands of folks & are held by institutions ranging from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to the the Spinnboden Lesbian Archive and Library in Berlin.

I now teach zine workshops, including train-the-trainer style workshops, to share the power of zines with more people, & continue to create new zines about radical self-love, healing, & affirmations for survivors.