A bulwark against “executive presence” if nothing else.

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One fabulous side effect of accidentally professionalizing in media via DIY zine culture is a healthy spiritual detachment from one’s “real” career. Whatever publication employs you, your mind’s eye will always see it sliced up with an X-Acto blade and rubber cemented back together as a bratty social-commentary collage. Sure, maybe you’ll do some good and interesting work while you’re there. And/or maybe you’ll be ousted after accusing management of “creating a soft, absorbent pad for the bloody crimes of empire.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  It’s fine; your presence on the masthead was always something of a gonzo exercise. Je ne regrette rien.

I’ve produced zines on and off for most of my life, with many photocopied outbursts now archived, for better or worse, in the Barnard Zine Library, Hampshire College Zine Collection, Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, Zine and Small Press Collection at the University of Montana, Sarah Dyer Zine Collection at Duke University, Kathy Moseley Zine Collection at DePaul University, Minneapolis Community and Technical College Zine Library, University of Montana Mansfield Library Zine and Small Press Collection, Denver Zine Library, and scores of damp storage boxes in people’s basements.  

I still make zines because it keeps ye olde senses tingIing with the publishing-related pursuits I most enjoy, i.e. not “leveraging advanced tools to conduct deep-dive audience segmentation and performance analysis, ensuring content strategy aligns with core business directives” or whatever my beleaguered, broken colleagues are saying on LinkedIn these days. To create outside the strictures of labor and capital—particularly for anyone in a chimeric “creative” profession—is to live. They’ll never have all of you.