Hi friends! I finally finished a zine, and I’m very proud of it.

It’s the culmination of several months of work — writing, obviously, but also learning how to do linocut printing, teaching myself some basic zine layout, and then printing, stamping, and sewing the book together. While all creative projects are labors of love, this one is maybe especially so. I’m including an excerpt below, but the full zine is available here in print and digital format: https://ko-fi.com/ninocipri/shop

Sometime in 2008, I was in a classroom in Olympia, WA, listening to a scholar and activist talk about efforts to revive the Squamish language. He talked about practices of naming places, how they connected geography to places and stories, relationships, history, as well practical descriptors.

This scholar, whose name is unfortunately lost to my memories, invited us up to a map of the Pacific northwest with a stack of post-its, to imagine how we might make personal and relational names for places. I still remember the name I stuck to a corner of Vancouver Island: They cut my hair and I cried. I mostly remember it because the scholar (who had beautiful, long hair) asked me for the story behind it, and I immediately panicked.

I struggled a lot with my hair in those years. I could rarely afford to pay for haircuts, rarer that those stylists would cut my hair the way I wanted. Truthfully, I didn’t know what that was. It was impossible to articulate what I wanted to look like, and why every haircut disappointed or offended me. I’d taken to asking friends to cut my hair, in true punk rock style. If my reflection was going to alienate me, I’d only pay my friends for the privilege, usually in beer or reciprocal favors.

In 2007, though, a friend invited me to go to an anarchist queer punk gathering called Queeruption. I had no idea what to expect, and did my usual zero research about it before I jumped into a Craigslist rideshare headed north, crossing over into Canada via ferry.

Queeruption took place over a long weekend on a secluded wooded area of Vancouver Island. For a 20-something still figuring themself out, it was paradise. There were workshops and performances and free food and sex parties, and tons of hot, weird queers.

One of the workshops I attended was simply named Queer Haircuts. Two people set up shop with folding metal chairs. Anyone who wanted to could get in line to get their hair chopped off. I sat down immediately.

The haircuts my friends gave me varied widely in quality. My ex’s ex gave me an incredible haircut while we got stoned on her porch. My sister buzzed my head with the clippers we used on our pet dog. (My hair smelled doggy for days.) I’d borrow classroom scissors and have friends cut chunks out of my hair on the school lawn between classes. I felt fearless about my appearance, which I only realized later was because of dysphoria. If you cut off feeling to something, you can do pretty much whatever you want to it.

So you can imagine my confusion when the scissor-wielding self-identified faggot finished and showed me what I looked like in the mirror, I cried.

That’s all for now. To read the full thing, you can find it here: https://ko-fi.com/ninocipri/shop