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Week One: What are Perzines?

What are zines?
Zines are handmade d.i.y. publications, typically reproduced via a copy machine (but not always!) They are non-commercial, and are created for a variety of reasons: to build communities, share one’s work or musings, spread ideas. They can pretty much be about any subject and they feature words, pictures, rants, ravings, facts, fictions … the skies the limit on what you can share in your zine! Some zines are assembled by hand, cut-n-paste’d, collaged, or handwritten, while others are made using computer software like Photoshop or Canva. (And some folks — like me! — use all of these tools when making zines.) Zinesters (people who make zines) do it all: write, illustrate, publish, and distribute.

What are perzines?
Short for “personal zine”, perzines are zines that feature someone’s personal stories, experiences, memories, observations. They’re typically confessional in nature, and written in a first-person style. I think that some of the best perzines read like a letter written from a friend, or a diary entry filled with scribbled notes and secrets.

An abridged history of perzines
For as long as there have been printing presses, people have been self-publishing their words, works, and opinions, finding d.i.y. ways to share their art and activism. Even before the term “zine” existed, there were folks self-publishing magazines, journals, and broadsheets to bypass traditional publishing gatekeepers, for example: The American Anti-Slavery association’s abolitionist pamphlets (1835), artist and occultist Pamela Colman Smith’s “tiny magazine” The Green Sheaf (1903), anarchist Emma Goldman’s self-published Mother Earth journal (1906), and the literary journal Fire!! (1926) that was created by the Black artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1940, the word “fanzine” entered the lexicon when sci-fi enthusiast Russ Chauvenet coined the term to describe his self-published magazine Detours. Over time, “fanzine” would be shortened colloquially to “zine” and would come to mean any self-published d.i.y. non-commercial magazine, not just those created to share sci-fi fanfiction. That being said, the term “perzine” is also derived from sci-fi fandom cultures: one of the earliest (if not the first) usages of the term was in issue 3 of Star Trek fanzine Masiform D from September of 1973. In the editor’s note of that zine, writer Devra Langsam recommends the “science fiction/math/education minimag” Tabebuian and describes it as a “personalzine” or “perzine”. By the late 80s and early 90s, perzines became a staple in d.i.y. punk culture and the Riot Grrrl scene thanks to zinesters like Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hannah (both of the band Bikini Kill, and of zines Jigsaw and Bikini Kill respectively) and Aaron Cometbus (of the band Crimpshrine and the Cometbus perzine).

Take a look inside some perzines + get inspired

Scrabble Brainstorm
It can be hard to start writing a zine without knowing where you’re going. I find this brainstorm exercise helps me kickstart my creative process and hone in on topics that would make for an interesting zine. Randomly choose a letter; you can do this by drawing a scrabble tile out of a bag, opening a book to a random page and using the tenth letter in the first sentence. Then, set a timer for 2 minutes and jot down any and all words that come to mind that start with that letter. Don’t get perfect or over think it, just let the words (or doodles!) flow out of you, scribble and jot. Once the timer goes off, you’ll choose the one word that you find the most compelling.
(For example, if I have “B”, I might list out black coffee, bikes, baking bread, riding the bus, and my cat Coco Bean.)

Now, set the timer for 5 minutes and consider the sensory experience surrounding that word. What tastes, sights, sounds, and smells does it bring up for you? What does it feel like, in a tactile sense? Describe the experience. These should be tangible descriptions. (For example, if I chose “bikes”, I could talk about the wind in my hair as I fly down a hill, or the way the air smells on bike rides down Cliff Drive, the loamy floral smell of spring.)

Once the timer goes off, reset it. Another 5 minutes. This time, focus on feelings. How did the experiences from the last prompt make you feel? (For example, riding my bike flying dow a hill makes me feel brave, empowered, but also a little nervous around all the car drivers.)

Use this brainstorm to kickstart your zine writing. We’ll take the topics you explored here and expand them into full zines in the next two classes.

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Week Two: Writing Your Zine

Like a Letter from a Friend
To me, great perzines read like letters from a friend. Set a timer for ten minutes and write a letter to somebody: a friend, an elder who mentored you, your childhood stuffed animal, a past neighbor, a pet, an artist you admire. It can be anyone, and often times, the first person who comes to mind is a great person to write to: they popped into your mind for a reason. What do you need to tell them?

This isn’t a letter you have to send or share (although, if the person is still alive [and if they are a person at all], why not have fun with snail mail and share it with them?!) This letter can be as raw, honest, and from the heart as you wish, and will serve as a way of greasing your writing wheels and getting you going. Writing with an audience in mind — even if that’s just an audience of one — can be the key to unlocking a zine topic.

Structure Possibilities
During this workshop, we are creating an 8-page zine. Here are some structural ideas that you can use to outline your writing for the 8 pages:

• Tell the Story: share a moment or memory that affected you. Page 1 could serve as an introduction, pages 2 – 4 set the scene (go back to our Week 1 brainstorm and revisit the sights/smells/sounds and what you touched/tasted when recalling the memory), and pages 5 – 7 express how the moment affected you: what stuck with you from that memory? Page 8 gives you the space to conclude your thoughts.

• Picture It!: You don’t have to be limited to writing. In zines like Ayun Halliday‘s East Village Inky, infographic images are used to bring the reader closer to a topic. For instance, in her “Fashion” issue, she drew her favorite outfit and annotated what each item of clothing was and the story behind it. You can start the zine with an annotated illustration, and then use the remaining pages to draw the reader into the small unseen details, telling the stories behind the image.

• List Zine: Start your zine with a list on a topic. Maybe it’s “all the hair dyes I’ve used since sixth grade” or “all the books I’m reading lately” or “every movie I’ve given a 1-star rating on Letterboxd.” Make a list, and then use pages 2 – 7 to expand on 6 different topics from that list, one per page. You can use page 8 to talk about the connective tissue that strings all of these seemingly disparate stories togtether.

• Word Map Letter Zine: An alternate version of the list zine, use the word map from our Week 1 Scrabble Brainstorm. Share your list of words on page 1, and then extrapolate on 6 topics from the list over the course of the next 6 pages. Maybe the cover is just the image of the scrabble tile?

• Song: And, for one last version of the list zine, start the zine with a playlist and then respond, song-by-song, sharing stories of memories connected to each song, like a soundtrack for your life. I used this tactic when writing catmothcrow 3, responding to the playlist that became the centerfold of the zine through my writing.

Gathering Feedback
After you’ve written the first draft, or even just the first few paragraphs, of the “meat” of your zine — the words that will bring it to life — I often times find that it helps me to share it with a close friend. I’ll ask them what parts of my writing left them curious, what do they want to know more about? This helps me know what parts of my zine need to be fleshed out, and what to focus my pages on. It can also show you what needs to be edited out: ask your friend if anything confused them (and then edit for clarity) or if anything bored them (chop it out!)

A few more prompts to get you started