Rad Dad #18: Sex & Love

After a promising introduction I was ready to absorb the essays that lay before me in Rad Dad #18: Sex & Love, a short zine concerning radical parenting with narratives exploring issues of sex and love. Needless to say, this zine made me feel a range of emotions: offended, entertained, informed, and bored. Some of these essays do not concern love or sex or are only very loosely related to the topics in an abstract way. Rad Dad himself falls flat in his own personal essay.

Zinester's Guide to New York City

I love Ayun Halliday's writing voice. It balances a small, healthy dose of making fun of oneself with a snarky and sassy perspective of the world. Her world is New York City, which she describes so well in her adventures with her husband and kids in her zine, The East Village Inky. So I knew I was in for a treat when I saw that Ms.

A Guide to Picking Locks, Number Two

Full disclosure here: I have never, ever picked a lock. I suppose it would be kind of neat to know how to bust into a door with a wafer tumbler lock, but I just never have really experienced the need. An excellent parlor trick, perhaps? A desire to emulate Houdini in a daring escape from the chains of certain death?

How to Make Soap Without Burning Your Face Off

The ever-present danger of burning one’s face off is, in fact, one of the reasons I have hesitated to take up the hobby of soap making. Raleigh Briggs’s How to Make Soap zine helped to make the process seem less daunting and intimidating. While the zine is relatively short, at ten pages, it is chalk full of useful tips and information for beginners. The overall tone is lighthearted and fun, with a sprinkling of sarcasm and a wee bit of sass. Briggs does a wonderful job maintaining the cheery air, yet is still able to stress the importance of following all safety precautions and explaining some potential dangers of working with lye. Lye is a key ingredient in soap making, and if not handled with respect and caution, can be quite harmful.

Scam: The First Four Issues!

Is it punk to drink when you’re flat broke? Is selling plasma or sniffing glue revolutionary? Is throwing shit off a Macy’s rooftop ever cool? Nearly twenty years after his zine was released in a series of diatribes about scamming the system and living on the edge of society, Erick Lyle’s writings as zinester Iggy Scam have been edited and bound for the masses.

This – A Literary Webzine

Early this year, I began writing for Elevate Difference. Over the past few months, I have written more prolifically; built relationships with a handful of supportive, feminist artists; and above all, gained greater insight into my own writing through feedback from editors and readers. This – A Literary Webzine is another example of a space on the Internet that provides a forum for writers to produce and publish while joining a community of their peers. Created by Hollis University graduate Lacey N. Dunham, a former Elevate Difference contributor, This zine employs a volunteer group of editors and seeks submissions from a variety of genres.

Surviving the Witch-Hunt: Battle Notes from Portland’s 82nd Avenue, 2007-2010

Surviving the Witch-Hunt is collection of artifacts and commentary from 2007 to the present and catalogues the community forces that emerged after the City of Portland removed its controversial Prostitution Free Zones (PFZ). These zones had allowed the police to issue exclusion orders for those who had been arrested for sex work, even if they had never been charged.

Brainscan #24 and #25

Putting one’s life on display is, in essence, quite a courageous act. Yet in this time of reality television, it is becoming more of a norm, infused with a sense of banality. Thank goodness for zines, where our need to know intimate details of strangers’ lives is a collaboration of intelligence between people who actually think about stuff, write with a purpose, and use their experiences to connect, grow, and reach out to their community. Brainscan is an extremely personal zine.

I Have a Song for You

I am so excited to be reviewing a zine this month! My love of little magazines and homegrown self-publishing began as soon as my level of dexterity allowed for scissors, paste, and a stapler to be wielded with semi-precision. This love of writing, crafting, and publishing blossomed into a passionate obsession during my first year of college, when I edited the school literary journal and stayed up all night making chapbooks.

Trees Zine #4

A quarter page booklet of photocopied text with one off-center staple and as much profundity as you can cram in that meager space—how else would you present yourself to the world? I thought that zines went out with the twentieth century, at least in the sense of personal confessionals, and journaling went out traded out for online diaries, journals, and social networks. These days even the formal blog seems to be winnowing down to its base denominator: trading out contemplation for a sound bite, reflection for a terse witticism.

Brainscan #23

This second printing of Brainscan #23 was released in September 2008, but don’t worry about it being outdated. While the events in this zine happened between 1995 and 2003, none of Alex Wrekk’s narratives has an expiration date. Wrekk’s travel-themed vignettes are entertaining stories, told the way a friend would talk about the wild things that have happened to her. Not only is this zine an amusing way to kill some time while riding public transit or sitting in a waiting room, it also allows the reader to experience bits of one woman’s life.

The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities

The Revolution Starts At Home is not your usual zine. At 111 pages, it qualifies as a book, and I’m excited to say the editors are looking for a publisher. Pending publication*, it will soon be available on the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence website. Don’t be turned off by the bulk; this is an important zine that needs to be read by all activists of any sort. Contributors include Alexis Pauline Gumbs of UBUNTU, collective members of Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Vanessa Huang, Gina de Vries, and a collection of women from the Mango Tribe.

I Hate This Part of Texas #7/Keep Loving Keep Fighting #7

Though you may not know from reading it I Hate This Part of Texas #7/Keep Loving Keep Fighting #7 is a split zine.

Brainscan #22

As a lesbian with an incredibly regular menstrual cycle, I generally don’t ever really think about birth control. It’s not something that affects my life, and other than the random conversations about birth control that I have with my friends and loved ones who do use it, I don’t usually find literature on the topic particularly interesting.