#6: zine fest, three imperfect poems
delighting in zines and other expressive arts
Hi creative friends,
I’ve spent most of July and August in “summer hermit mode” — a mode of writing and creating, alternatively sweating in the heat and cooling down to the artificial cold of the air conditioner. But racks of school supplies, the start of football season, and a raft of autumn-themed foods all remind me that the rest of the world is moving onto fall, and eventually, I’ll have to leave my cave.
Since my last note:
- I went to the Grand Rapids Zine Fest and left with more zines than I could carry and so much inspiration to go out and make new things
- I've been working slowly on my two long-term projects — a poetry chapbook and a novel set in the world of figure skating
I’m still figuring out a good format for these letters. Thanks for bearing with me as every letter turns out to be slightly different! Also, if you would like to comment on this newsletter, just hit reply and send me an email. I’ll write back!
Reading: Zines from Grand Rapids Zine Fest
A couple weeks ago I attended the Grand Rapids Zine Fest, and I’m still reading through all the zines I brought home with me!
“Zines” (rhymes with “teens”) are small, handmade magazines or pamphlets, usually with a short print run. The point of zines isn’t production at scale but self-expression and community building. As early as the the 1930s, readers of popular science fiction magazines created zines to find and communicate with other readers about the published work they’d been reading. In the 1970s, punk musicians and artists used zines to share and celebrate music overlooked by traditional gatekeepers. And zines provided a path for feminist writers to claim a voice for themselves and their experiences in a publishing environment that would otherwise ignore their stories.
I first learned about zines in college, when I worked at the University of Iowa Libraries and Special Collections, which holds an extensive collection of zines and fan works. I loved everything about working in Special Collections, and attending zine fests conjures that same magic for me—zines, like archives, are portals to surprise, delight, and wonder.
The GR zine fest was no different. My good friend drove up from Chicago to meet me in GR, and we were giddy looking at so much inventive art and writing.
It’s hard to choose a favorite, but one that especially stood out to me was a zine called “Monday Morning,” written by Mel Dempsey and illustrated by Sean Dempsey. It’s a zine about the moment just before your alarm goes off on a Monday morning. The cover of the zine is actually an envelope. The die-cut window blinds, over a gradient of blue and yellow, evoke the feeling of sunlight streaming into a window—setting the scene before you’ve read a word of text. It inspires me to imagine ways that form of a book-object can help communicate or reinforce its content.
I also loved Leslie Perrine’s zine, The Disappearing Years. It’s a series of comics she made documenting the year she moved to Minnesota—which was also the year of the pandemic, a year when the past seemed unreachable, the future obliterated, and all anyone could do was persist through an endless present.
Sharing: Three imperfect poems
I wanted to share three poems that I wrote in 2022 and 2023. I posted them on my website earlier this month:
- “Christmas Magic” is a poem about keeping secrets in different forms, in response to an exercise developed by the writer Jeannine Ouellette.
- “Edward Hopper's Automat, 1927” is an ekphrastic poem in response to Automat, a beautiful, lonely painting.
- And “About My Desires” is a poem inspired by the
dignity-destroyingcharacter-building task of clearing a foot of snow off your car in the dead of a Midwest winter.
It’s so fun to see these poems, which had been mildewing on my computer, spruced up and given some actual pride of place. Yet I’m finding it astonishingly difficult to write a letter inviting you to come and read them! My instinct is always to hide my work away until I know “enough” to get it “right,” to get it perfect. But perfection, I keep reminding myself, is not a prerequisite for writing—or any creative work—to exist. Here’s to all our imperfect art taking up space in the world.
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I hope your Labor Day weekend is restful, energizing, creative—whatever you most need it to be.
Take such good care,
Catherine