Zines

And a mini-announcement

Hey, this is Josh Spilker with your weekly newsletter on writing, culture, creativity, and productivity. If you’re looking for something more about productivity, scroll down to the mini-announcement at the end. Meanwhile, let’s go…

Peter was this guy in my high school World History class.

He had amazing sideburns.

Peter liked hardcore and punk music. His backpack was full of patches and pins like this:

Peter was into bands like Choking Victim and Operation Ivy that blended punk, hardcore, and ska with activism.

I loved punk too, but mine was different — more pop punk with a Christian bent.

But Pete had something I wasn’t familiar with: zines.

If you aren’t familiar, zines are very much an 80s/90s thing that came into vogue when Kinko’s were on every street corner. You could make a “collage” of photos and scraps of text and lay them out on an 8.5 x 11 page, and photocopy to make it all one.

Then you would make several copies of this, sometimes over and over to make a small magazine, and pass it out to your friends or sell them for a few dollars (usually not successfully).

Zines look something like this:

Source: https://www.opb.org/article/2023/06/22/starting-a-riot-zines-help-launch-riot-grrrl-movement/

Other zines were hand-written letters photocopied over and over, sometimes personal drawings — but I always preferred the collage method.

Zines were super exciting to me.

I was on the school newspaper and the school literary magazine and I even did a “church youth group” newsletter where I interviewed some of my favorite Christian punk rock bands. (That wasn’t a zine per se— my friend Allison had Pagemaker for the layout!). When Peter showed me a few examples, I was hooked and quickly tried to find ones on my own.

Later on in college, I was editor of our campus magazine which was more like a cross between an alt-weekly and culture magazine.

I never got into zine culture as much as I probably wanted to (or could have). I always feel like an imposter and an outsider instead of giving myself permission (psycho-analysis for another day!).

But I always appreciated the culture.

At a journalism conference in college, I found a zine fest at American University in DC and it blew my mind.

My guiding influences were things like Punk Planet, the SlingShot Punk Rock Planner (productive punks!) and Slacker 66, this crazy Christian zine / music distributor out of Birmingham who later started this music festival I was able to attend back in September.

And it’s so good to see that Microcosm Publishing is still going strong, I had no idea.

They really influenced a lot of my writing today, and even the ethos of “just publish” — which is something I use in my day job and probably why I’ve never been great at waiting for all the branding/design elements to catch up to my content.

Josh, Why Are You Talking About Zines?

Good question.

1. My daughter started making small comics and she said she wanted them to become a book. This made me think of zines.

2. And then when I went to McNally Jackson, a bookstore in Brooklyn, they had this small little book on a table and it brought me back.
   
   I bought it for my daughter, who flipped through it a little and then handed it back to me. Ok, so I bought it for myself.

It’s a small book about what zines are, how to make one, and how to even sew the bindings together. It’s a little text-heavy, but she’ll get there!

Here are some more photos:

Any other reason you’re talking about zines?

• Yes! I’m halfway through this memoir, Stay True by Hua Hsu and he also did a bunch of zines in the late 90s when he was in college. It seemed to be a big part of his identity and it’s nice to remember that time, the zine heyday I dare to say.

• And you know what? Writing on Substack is way different but I can see the through-line to zine culture in a small way. It’s a way to express yourself to others, even in small bits and pieces.

• Substack seems more personal than a few of the other platforms, that’s not true for all Substack newsletters, but it seems that way on the little ecosystem I’ve created within Substack.

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More Things

• Another shout-out for Stay True. This book is not only about zines, but is primarily about the Asian-American experience in Berkeley and San Francisco in the late 90s and the nuances to that. And then it’s about loss and grief and coping with tragedy, which is most of the second half of the book where I’m just entering into. It won a Pulitzer in 2022, and I can see why.

• “What Was Literary Fiction? “ At The Nation.

• “The Dead Internet to Come” at The New Atlantis.

• Quick Note-Taking Cheat Sheet and Template for Writers. By me at Medium.

• “In Defense of Meaningless Goals” by Sean Kernan at Medium.

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Productivity Tips for Writers (A Mini-Announcement)

I’ve had more new followers in recent days who have seen my productivity / note-taking content on Medium and I’ve decided to do another newsletter/email list focused on that.

If you’ve signed up for my templates/note-taking cheat sheet on Gumroad, you’ll be hearing from me more often. If you want to be on that new list, hit “Yes” to this email and I’ll add you.

However, this Substack isn’t going anywhere. I’ll keep doing this once a week with a few bonuses here and there.

I love writing this type of newsletter that touches on creativity, culture, writing, literature and yes, zines.

Let me know what you think.

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“When I expect to achieve nothing, ideas come. Putting two things together that are unrelated gives me an idea. I make lots of little works instead of undertaking a big one. I will never be done with literature.”― Édouard Levé, Autoportrait

• Get my quick note-taking cheat sheet and you’ll be signed up for my new productivity tips for writers email list.

Keep going,

-Josh Spilker