Paper Plains Zine Fest 2023

When Gabe from Oy Sauce approached my table at Paper Plains Zine Fest, he saw my Coco Zine and asked me if I'd be up for making a trade; his "Easy Meals for Hard Times" also features a cat, a tortie named Chef Crouton. A recipe zine with a cat for a mascot? That sounds great... count me in!

The zine finds Chef Crouton accompanied by lovingly-painted watercolor illustrations of easy-to-make meals that won't break the bank, plus some ways to "dress it up, if you have the ingredients and energy." For instance, their egg drop soup only takes 5 ingredients (stock, ginger, soy sauce, cornstarch, eggs), but if you're feeling fancy, they suggest adding mushrooms, spinach, tofu, scallions, tomato, shrimp, or chicken. This flexibility makes "Easy Meals for Hard Times" a terrific zine for apprehensive or newbie chefs: the recipes are approachable and adaptable. As they state in the zine's introduction, sometimes cooking feels like an insurmountable task, but these recipes will "help you get those little victories — simple meals that will be enough to get you going." This is a well thought-out collection, featuring the sort of staple recipes you're sure to visit again and again.

And oh yea, did I mention how dang cute Chef Crouton is? They are ADORABLE! Chef Crouton can teach me how to cook anytime.

My friend Nash always comes up with the coolest ideas. They celebrate their own "peculiar" holidays (today is the start of the Hoodie Festival!), and created a modular, musical typewriter that allows you to craft tunes in a text editor. Needless to say, they've got a true knack for marrying whimsy and invention.

This talent is on full display in their latest zine: "Cosmic Brownimancy" - a how-to guide on using Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies as a divination tool. As a tarot-reading witch, I was totally transfixed by this new method for divining truth and wisdom. The zine explains how to "read" the brownie, dividing it into quadrants connoting internal and external quandaries, represented by a cadre of symbols (hollows, elks, owls, moths, mist, raccoons). There's even a colormancy guide for reading the various candy chips.

I've gotta say, for a divination method built on junk food, the readings go surprisingly deep. The symbols, questions, and prompts Nash has created for brownimancy are both poetic and insightful — they make it easy for your mind to wander down paths of exploration and contemplation. It just goes to show that, just like tarot, the true magic and power of any divination tool comes from within, the tools simply acting as a mirror for you to observe your self and your psyche.

Sometimes reality is just too much — it feels like we're experiencing one giant global systems failure. We dream of a world free from war, poverty, pandemic, exploitation. We crave escape. Heather found such escape in the sci-fi classic "The Matrix". In her fanzine of the same name (which also feels an awful lot like a perzine, in the very best way possible), she recounts how seeing the flick back in 1999 awakened her mind to new possibilities, and inspired her dreams of a post-capitalist future and a world where anything is possible. This zine is short and to-the-point, and the text is accompanied by some fantastic illustrations of key moments from the films. Whether you're a fan of the film, or you're just burnt out by this reality we're living in, "The Matrix: a Fanzine" is worth a read.