catmothcrow chronicle – august 2026

Every month, for over a year now, I’ve written a newsletter-style perzine that I share with subscribers, penpals, and friends. Creating each issue has become one of my favorite monthly rituals, and I’ve expanded the practice into creating a monthly minizine, too. Working on those has honestly been a bit of a mixed bag: at the start of this year, I decided that each monthly mini I wrote would feature a movie review of a flick that I loved as a kid or teen, films due for a rewatch… but that project got really boring really quick.

It turns out that I hadn’t rewatched many of the flicks I chose for the zine because, for the most part, they’re all just okay, 3-star, sorta forgettable films. There’s a reason that I left them behind to time. Writing introspective perzine reviews about a bunch of decent movies started to become bland and repetitive, and I started to dread having to do it.

So I’m officially abandoning that little personal project. It doesn’t serve me to spend my time working on art or writing projects that don’t fulfill me creatively. From now on, the monthly minizines will be on whatever topic strikes my fancy, and all of this is just a longwinded way of introducing my newest minizine: “How to Start a Club in Real Life”. Since 2023, I’ve been facilitating a monthly Zine Club here in KC, and just like my newsletter, it has become a favorite part of each month. Often times, when I tell other zinesters about the club, they’ll tell me they wish they had something like it in their hometown… to which my answer is always “why not start your own?” Starting a club can be easier than you might think, so why not DIY? This mini is my little guide to doing just that: the why and how behind starting a monthly club IRL.

And speaking of zine clubs, I’ll be speaking on the Zine Club panel at this year’s Paper Plains Zine Fest, in addition to tabling the vendor fair! The full schedule isn’t out yet, so times are TBD, but the panel will be on Saturday, September 5th and the vendor fair will be on Sunday the 6th. If you’re in or around Lawrence, Kansas, come on by and check it out.

I plan on trying to film a vlog of the fest and moments from that weekend in Lawrence for my subscribers. While I’ll occasionally post a vlog to the big, public ‘Tubes (Youtube and Peertube), most of my vlogging is paywalled and lives in the subscriber portal of my aforementioned zine subscription service. I currently have 8 “chatty vlogs” posted there, and am trying to post one every month or so. I’ve found that Margaret Killjoy’s approach of keeping about half of my posts (like this one!) free and publicly accessible, while posting more personal stuff (like vlogs) just for subscribers has made the art of being on camera feel a lot less scary to me. So, if getting a more behind-the-scenes, vloggy look at my life is interesting to you, consider becoming a zine subscriber (and you’ll get zine mail each month!)

A lot of this post has been about stuff behind a paywall, but I have some public posts for the blog brewing, too. In addition to a new ‘Tube video (all about zines and community), expect posts about what writing a monthly newsletter has taught me, more zine reviews, and a diy mini zine rack tutorial all coming soon. And if you have any strong feelings about which of those I should prioritize, lemme know about it down in the comments.