I’m pretty new to the zine world, but I feel right at home there. It turns out people make zines for a lot of the same reasons that people blog or use social media. If you’re passionate about something, or have a story to share, the zine community is a place where you can find like-minded folk to share it with.
I came to the zine world in a kind of roundabout way. I’ve been seeking online community since my family got a computer when I was 13 and I made some email penpals that petered out after a few exchanges. Since then I’ve made lasting friendships on bulletin board communities, and I used to have an online diary back in the day (you know, the early 2000s). Now I have two blogs and I tweet, and I find people with similar interests that way. I knew about zines from my days in an undergraduate Women’s Studies program, but I didn’t find zine-making until I met some zine librarians while I was in library school.
I <3 the Anchor Archive Zine Library in Halifax. I’m a regular volunteer there: it’s where I go to get my geek on and do some cataloguing when I’m in the mood. We had our annual 24-Hour Zine Challenge this past weekend, and it was the first time I was able to participate. There was cake and midnight nachos. There was dancing in the backyard under a leaky yet respectable tarp. And there was lots of people buzzing around working on their zines. I made one about my love for snail mail:
At one point, someone who dropped in to see what was going on asked me “wouldn’t it be better to just have a blog? That way you wouldn’t waste paper.”
I suppose you could look at that way, but I don’t. Blogs might not use up paper (you’re not printing out my blog, are you? That is called Doing It Wrong), but creating, hosting, and accessing a blog uses electricity, and computer hardware is not exactly environmentally friendly. (Sidenote: My site is hosted by Taproot Hosting: they use wind-powered electricity and they plant a tree for every new client who signs up. They’re also super quick at replying to customer service emails.) But that’s not my only justification for zine-making. There’s something really satisfying about making something with your hands, about considering the layout of your pages before you photocopy, cutting and pasting in a non-metaphorical way.
One of my guidelines that helps me survive in an information overloaded world is to make my own communications that I put out into the world as meaningful as possible. The comparatively laborious process of zinemaking is a perfect medium for this, because so much effort goes into what I’m working on that I take special care with what I produce.
The atmosophere during the challenge reminded me of what I like about online commnities. People read each other’s works in progress, offered feedback and encouragement, learned new things and connected with people who had similar interests. I met another mail geek and we traded zines. I felt a similar sense of connectedness and pride when I noticed people taking my zine from the swap box as I do when I’m looking at blog traffic or comments. I rarely experience places like that offline, where the accidents of geography and temporality make it harder to meet up with people interested in your niche. The folks at Anchor Archive put a lot of work into creating and maintaining that unique community space. The zine I made was meaningful because of the people I could share it with, both during the event and afterwards through the mail. That’s ultimately what I want out of bloging and tweeting: meaningful connections with like-minded folk.
