The dumbest thing I used to tell myself was that I had ~missed out on making a zine, like there's a brief window in your teenage years or early twenties where if you're going to do something like that you get it out of your system and then age gracefully into the next phase of your craft, whatever that means for you. Obviously that's a frame riddled with self-defeating expectations and I failed to make anything on my own terms for years, even though I spent just as much time writing alienated, rage-fueled poetry about the beauty of the world as working on my social work degree. In fact, I wrote alienated, rage-fueled poetry about the beauty of the world to cope with the cognitive dissonance involved in getting a social work degree. They were different ways of expressing both an infinite optimism of what people are capable of being, for and with each other, and the deep disgust of seeing that potential desecrated in new and imaginative ways every day- anguish born of an enduring love that can only be alleviated by creating something. I desperately wanted the academic writing and graphic prose I poured myself into to balance each other out, but they just externalized the parts of myself fighting for control. Everything I took on was intense to an arguably manic extent, and either rigidly structured or passionately unhinged. But I never saw all of myself at the same time. Looking back, the sticking power of the zine for me is the way it bridges those extremes: you can't really make a dispassionate zine (there are faster, cheaper, more convenient methods to share your content if really want to) and it's not possible to get it done without at least some discipline to counterweight (how many hours will you stay after work to agonize over kerning? Enough to get wrapped up in it until it's never good enough and can never be finished? Tough call.)
But I never saw myself in the zine culture of the 90s/2000s either. I struggled with gender in a way that made it overwhelming and painful to place myself in the context of media made for and by women. I didn't know if I was lying more to myself or everyone else, and nothing about that elicited content I wanted to share. Riot Grrl mainstays like Bratmobile, Bikini Kill, and Sleater Kinney informed my taste growing up in rural Pennsylvania (and before the ubiquity of the internet they were precious, hard-won discoveries that felt deeply personal) but they represented an image I felt like I could never live up to. It seemed wrong to let people project a strength onto me that I hadn't earned, and it felt traitorous to suggest the gendered strength they were fighting tooth and nail to assert could include me. I simply could not imagine myself, without hope and looking for ways to give up, alongside women who were performing the literal magic of creating space. On a good day it's easy to take for granted the wisdom that you can't find your voice without embracing your vulnerability, but that lesson took years of trial and error, and it seemed like I was lost for way longer than a person would be lost if they actually have something to find.
Around the middle of 2019 though I got sick of giving myself bullshit about something I was simultaneously too embarrassed and too proud to commit to. I worked at the library and touched daily an incredible range of topics set down in ink: a zine of practical tips for squatting in Pittsburgh, a children's book explaining the Stonewall riots, an unpublished script from Tim Heidecker. They all struck unexpected chords of memory and identity that re-ignited my vain curiosity about what it would look like if I made something physical out of the unique combination of experiences and dreams in my head. It would be useless and self-indulgent, but so what? Even people who hate prog rock love to hate prog rock, so in that respect, you're welcome. Anyway in January I decided I could no longer resist the urge to try.
The trick seems to be not outgrowing myself faster than I can get the words out. I sifted through eight years of prose that I had deftly used to blame and then forgive myself, and managed to rehome the most vivid and coherent lines into a little eight page zine. The words that survived that harrowing (melodramatic) editing process projected a heaviness as though finality was the first thing I ever gave myself permission to speak on with authority, beckoning some vague apocalypse that never comes.
The editing was maddening for all the stereotypical reasons. I lost count of the hours I spent fine-tuning the font and line breaks because of how I thought someone might read in clusters of words on the small page size, printed and copied it, patted myself on the back, and then found a typo in the only title (the rest of the poems are not named) on the way home from the first print. But I'll never forget the feeling of holding the little thing in my palm, seeing my own words in a state of permanence even while I wasn't actively breathing life into them.
You can request a copy free of charge by emailing your mailing address to jayden.isadore.mu@gmail.com
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