Queer Zine Fest, Dec 8th @ Space Station 65

 

Go. It’s very soon. And fingers crossed, I’ll be messing about with lino.

https://www.facebook.com/lgbtqzinefestlondon

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Truth At Hand

Last week I asked everyone to bring a poem they thought needed a lot of work. They swapped among themselves, spent the week writing feedback, and then, yesterday, presented their thoughts and improvements to the rest of the group. Almost everything I do is coloured by a book I fell in love with over the summer, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Friere, specifically the sections about giving up power. A zine I was reading put it especially well: in a piece entitled “Queers Kissing and Accountability” Shannon Perez-Derby states:

“Often we get power without asking for it and giving away power can feel counter intuitive because it’s something we’re not taught to do, and have almost no models for.”

ZineMakingForAllTheFamily.

The week before last we made zines. I decided to run the workshop because I think zine making is liberating. I distributed my first set of poems via a zine called “Kids Who Die In Cupboards”. Not the most uplifting title I could have chosen, but it came out of a conversation I had with a friend, and the story stuck with me for so long, that I couldn’t think of anything else.

Anyway, the point was to make something I could be proud of, and distribute for free (or very, very little money). I was enamored by the whole zine culture in the first place because anyone could participate, you didn’t have to go through an editor, there was virtually no negative criticism of the kind you find in literary magazines, and people would support you as you grew. So that’s the kind of culture I’m trying to instigate here at NUS. Let’s hope it works. Funnily enough, as I can’t sleep, I’ve been reading Greenzine by Cristy C. Road. She’s giving me all kinds of ideas for my Graphic Poetry exhibition – I want everyone who visits to leave with a zine – in lieu of the standard catalogue – that achieves a fraction of her awesomeness.

Zine Workshop / Embrace your inner creep, yo.

I often wonder whether the things I think about are really so strange, niche and eccentric – and the answer, which is a resounding yes, is answered in places like USP where many students look at you in mild amusement when you tell them you write poems for a living. Thankfully, this was not the case this evening. I brought along my (much diminished) collection of zines that I’ve gathered since leaving the UK and we spent nearly three hours cutting shit up, to make a mini-zine of our poems.

OFFCUFF / Substation

I went to Publish and Be Damned in Hackney yesterday. It’s a huge zine / magazine fair which aims to help distribute underground material. There were some very impressive books on sale, including a french publication which was mostly obscene woodcuts and a tiny, almost edible little book which said in various languages ‘my heart is a book’. I bought a CD zine called ’1Km2 Audio Guide’ which came with a CD (w00t!) The guy who made it went around the square mile of St. Martin’s in the field and Charing Cross, interviewing homeless people. There were others – one with primary school kids and another with market traders. Listening to it now, it’s interesting, and is probably the only zine I saw which was more about content than presentation. The fair was very art school. Some painfully fashionable people were there selling their painfully conceptual work. One thing that infuriates me – and will cause me to put the book down immediately – is the tendency to fill dozens of pages with scrappy (‘naive’) drawings. One woman had a book which collected the work of several artists who usually worked with sculpture. There was absolutely nothing in it which suggested that the artists had any talent for anything else: about 60 glossy images of fluorescent squares. Dull, dull, dull.

S. and I have decided to get a stall next year. We went to Leon and talked about how we would really like to see the small publication that is going in a new and interesting direction. I *want* to be impressed by these things, but so often it’s navel gazery, with not the slightest sense of urgency.