Back in the early 2000s, when I was a stay-at-home mum with two young children, one of the things I most valued was the people I connected with on LiveJournal, which was a fabulous place to find your tribe, ruined when it was sold in 2007, and to a large extent now replaced with other social media platforms that were then in their infancy (though none of them has the charm LiveJournal had back in the day; or perhaps we’re just much more jaded these days).

Anyway, one of the things I most liked about LiveJournal was the ability to connect with zine makers. The traditional zine is “a noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter” according to the dry entry in Merriam-Webster, but they were, and are,  so much more than that. The thing with zines is that anyone can make them; they can be as rough and ready as you like; about anything, about nothing; text-heavy or image-heavy; personal, political, or a purely creative endeavour.

Image source: https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/30999/1/mark-perry-tracing-the-beginnings-of-the-punk-fanzine

What I loved about zines was that the maker was in control from start to finish. Zines existed before 1976, but it’s Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue fanzine that really opened up the notion that anyone could put together a zine, using whatever materials they had to hand. I’m just about too young to remember that first exciting leap into cultural DIY, but I have very fond memories of zines produced in the mid-1980s and after, some of them relatively sophisticated (What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen 17, which came with a vinyl record), some of them very basic Xerox and staple-in-the-corner jobs put together by fans of particular bands such as REM.

Image source: https://www.musicstack.com/my/item.cgi?item=4793756&seller=1549&find=r

Digital media changed everything, but I’m glad to see there are still people putting out homemade zines, often using very appealing Risograph printing.

I was lucky to have had my poetry and novels published by professional publishers, but now that my publisher Louise Walters has sadly but understandably decided to call time on her small press, I’ve decided to embrace the DIY ethos. I’ve no desire to jump through any more agent/publisher hoops, and the thought of writing another novel (unless it’s really, really short!) fills me with horror. I want to be in full control of what I do now that I’m old enough to have no illusions about fame and/or fortune. I just want to make good work and to share it with people who appreciate it, simple as that.

In the early 2000s I completed two or three handmade zines, but it was hard to know what to do with them, and they were really just very small-scale vanity projects. Fun to put together, but ultimately most of them disappeared into a box somewhere in the garage.

With all that in mind, I decided to combine some of my own poetry with collage art to create a zine that was still basically a DIY job, but which could be a little more sophisticated, and have a wider reach, than my earlier efforts.

Front cover of my first art & poetry zine

I decided to keep things relatively simple and started with pieces of A5 300gsm card. I used a glue stick to make the collages. Usually I embrace wrinkles when making my collages, but for this project I wanted a different look, and I particularly wanted the art to scan well for printing on a silk-finish paper. I was also mindful of the fact that I was going to have them professionally printed, so I needed to be aware of things like bleed and quiet zone.

It was a steep learning curve and there are things I will do differently next time (but will inevitably just make different ‘mistakes’, because mistakes are part and parcel of both mixed media art and making zines, and neither would be what they are without a few mistakes!) but I’m pleased with the end result.

I feel like I’ve travelled right back to my roots, to the make-it-happen ethos that excited me about small press poetry magazines back when I first started trying to find homes for my creative work. Of course you can’t step in the same river twice, and so it’s not really the same. For a start, I’m not the same person I was then; my outlook on life is quite different as a 58-year-old than it was when I was an all-the-world-before-me person in my 20s and 30s. My work is very much connected with the person I was then, but also reflects all the changes that have happened in my life since my poetry pamphlet Seeing’s Believing was nominated for the Forward First Collection Prize in 1992. (No, I didn’t win!)

Seeing’s Believing, poetry collection published by Scratch, York, 1992

But that’s not a bad thing. To travel in a complete circle would be pointless. As we get older, we accumulate baggage (emotional and physical), a little wisdom if we’re lucky, a greater knowledge of the world and of ourselves, but we remain imperfectly ourselves. That is something which I hope my imperfect but heartfelt zine reflects.

(NB The zine can be purchased from my Etsy shop.)