self publishing

Brainscan #24 and #25

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

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. Its author, Alex Wrekk, is a zine superstar, and rightly so. Author of the popular how-to guide of zine-making, Stolen Sharpie Revolution, over fifteen years of zine-making under her belt, and the most intimate details of her life photocopied, stapled, and mailed around the world, this is a woman committed to taking her experiences in life and putting them on display in a way that is not for ratings or profit. Rather, she does it for the love of writing, creating, and sharing.

The most recent issues of Brainscan, #24 and #25, (which come as a set when ordered from Alex’s site Small World Buttons) are quite different from each other yet enjoyable in their own ways.

Brainscan #24 is a small collection of vignettes containing snippets from Wrekk’s life, such as her love for good beer and why her zine is called Brainscan. They are musings that give a good overview of Wrekk’s thoughts and attitudes without delving very deeply into any particular subject, making it a quick read and a nice sneak peak into someone else’s brain.

Brainscan #25, on the other hand, is much weightier, and concentrates on the story of Wrekk finding her way back to her true love, Paul, after being in an abusive marriage and growing exponentially as a person. Issue #21 of Brainscan is widely known throughout the zine community as it detailed the breakup of Wrekk’s marriage and is celebrated as a courageous story of overcoming abuse. This current issue touches on some of those subjects but is more of a celebration of finding the strength to love and being true to your heart.

The zine sometimes gets a bit painfully intimate to read, bordering on too much information, but it leaves you breathless with its honesty. It is constructed nicely, both visually and thematically, with flashbacks of Wrekk’s early relationship with Paul interspersed through a chronological telling of the dissolution of her marriage, and journey through learning to love herself and other people in new and radical ways.

Grammar and spell-check go out the window, on par with the zine making genre which rebels in both content and construction to mainstream publishing norms. Reading Brainscan is like you have gone into Wrekk’s house, sat on her bed, and read her diary, but she invites this intimacy, keeping no secrets. This style of writing is extremely feminist as it takes subjects women are told to keep hidden and be ashamed of and puts them out into the world, with a sense of acknowledgment and pride in personal growth, and the sharing of stories, in turn facilitating community dialogue.

Written by: Jyoti Roy, June 3rd 2010

Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Alison Piepmeier

New York University Press

In Girl Zines, Alison Piepmeier elegantly chronicles the emergence in the early 1990s of zines: a complex, multifaceted phenomenon aligned with third wave feminism, and a powerful and unruly articulation of the same cultural moment that produced riot grrrls. It may also have been the last gasp of the manuscript culture—since, some would say, eclipsed by the blogosphere and electronic media—as a pervasive form of underground radical expression. This study skillfully employs post-structuralist feminist theory, along with the implicit collaboration of the author’s students—generations of whom have been rediscovering the excitement and raw force of these documents, adding their own interpretive spin, and reproducing the zine in their own cultural moments.

She traces the rough avant-garde artistry of Tobi Vail in her work on Jigsaw through well-established magazines like Bitch and the literally thousands of feminist blogs that have established themselves in cyberspace. She traces the origins of such zines as Sarah Dyer’s Action Girl Newsletter back through the mimeographed feminist manifestos of the mid-twentieth-century, and even back through women’s scrapbooks made in the nineteenth century and preserved as a deceptively rich collage of women’s interactions with their cultural milieu.

Girl Zines conveys the brazenness of the zines, their “rhetorical excess and flamboyance” still outrageous and shockingly liberating. A wonderful example, “The Splendiferous Oath of Riot Grrrls Outer Space,” illustrates the tone: “I riotously swear to rage in glorious anger against everything that even slightly pisses me off. I swear to be loud, vulgar, obnoxious, illogical, and emotional whenever I damn please. As an Outer Space Riot Grrrl I will dream of impossible utopias, make up wild political theories, laugh at people who oppose me, and as much as I can, be full of supreme confidence and hellacious egotism.” The loud ripping sounds you hear are conventional gender expectations and forms of institutional oppression being torn to shreds.

Significantly, Piepmeier emphasizes the importance of the materiality of these artistic/political forms. Their textuality—the rebelliously crude printing and the hand-drawn visuals—conveys meaning. They are ephemeral—they share that feature with almost all newspapers and magazines from the time of their invention—but they are nonetheless tangible artifacts capable of being preserved, handed down, revisited, and revitalized. This materiality differentiates them from the creative work being done in the blogosphere, and it is a feature that still appeals to students newly introduced to them as physical representations of a spirit linking generations of women.

One wonders what these radical artists would make of finding themselves within the fairly conventional confines of a scholarly/academic history. And yet, clearly, they have generously supplied both material and narrative to the author, as she inscribes a thoroughly researched, tightly written, and highly respectful account of this phenomenon that needs to be a living part of a developing feminist legacy.

Written by: Rick Taylor, February 28th 2010

Make A Zine!: When Words and Graphics Collide!

admin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:01:00 +0000

By Bill Brent, Joe Biel

Microcosm Publishing

Remember when self-publishing didn't mean having a blog? Remember when you spent time proofreading your random scraps of writing and rearranging clips, when you felt like you had time with your work instead of longing for the compulsive, furtive click of the "publish" button? In a time when ubiquitous technology is rapidly replacing print media as we’ve known it, spending six months on a themed booklet of your own musings might seem odd. Yet maybe it is exactly the return to simplicity that we need.

Longtime zine makers and self-publishing enthusiasts Bill Brent and Joe Biel are the perfect folks to make a case for their media. The combined expertise of the authors and contributors—mostly notable zinesters who also happen to be friends with Brent and Biel—makes this one of the most useful compendiums I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Originally published in 1997, the second printing of Make a Zine!: When Words and Graphics Collide! is heavily revised and updated to include more examples of long-functioning and successful zines, tips on budgeting your projects, and a lovely resource section in the back that is full of zine distributors (often known as distros), zine reviewers, and zine libraries.

Quite frankly, after living with an angsty zinester as an undergrad, I was pretty disillusioned by what I thought the medium and the community has the potential to be. Only recently beginning to explore zines with real interest, this book has restored my faith in self-publishing and provided me with newfound hope. It pushed forward my backburner ideas onto the main hot plate. I’m proud to say my first zine is in the works, in large part because of the solidly helpful, inspiring advice of Make a Zine!

Like some zines, Make a Zine! contains a few spelling errors and mistaken URLs in the reference section (like, ahem, the one for this very blog). I actually don’t say this as a criticism, though. Like a zine, this book isn’t perfect, and you shouldn’t expect it to be. It remains a tremendous, well-researched and enjoyable resource.

Make a Zine! is an inspiring, easy, and digestible read for anyone, whether you’re already immersed in a cut-and-paste world, a graphic designer with a penchant for radical thought, or a newbie trying to find the best way to make yourself and your ideas known. You'll gain insight into your practice, find some new ideas, or get the motivation for which you’ve been waiting. Seeing your words instantly published on the screen can making blogging an appealing prospect for many, but if you’re someone who wants to hold the tangible results of your work in your hands, grab this small publishing manual to get started. The thing you'll need most are ideas and time.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, December 8th 2008