A bulwark against “executive presence” if nothing else.

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One terrific 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 at the fancy publication. 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 probably some damp storage boxes in people’s basements.  

I vow to always make zines because it keeps ye olde senses tingIing with the publishing-related pursuits I actually 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 colleagues are saying on LinkedIn these days. To create outside the strictures of monetized labor—particularly for anyone in a chimeric “creative” profession—is to live. They’ll never have all of you.