Don’t Call Me Cupcake 5 and… Something New?

Don't Call Me Cupcake Title

Today was an absolute miseryguts kind of day with grey skies and a lot of rain. What’s one to do on such a day? Work on zine projects, of course.

Don't Call Me Cupcake ToC

Or do what you can to clean up mistakes. This is what happens when I get ahead of myself and print off the table of contents labels and then decide to rejig the actual interior of the zines.

Waste not, want not. Thank goodness for short print runs so it doesn’t take long to take care of these sorts of things.

But for some folding and sewing, Don’t Call Me Cupcake 5 is done!

Not one to stop while I still have ideas, I also took advantage of the dreary day by starting another zine project that I’ve had in mind for a long time. More details to come soon, but for now, just a peek…

New Zine Project

On Reviewing Zines

Festival of the Photocopier Haul

My friend Fishspit emailed me recently and asked that I review some different topics in zines. Reading that, I realised that, yes, I do tend to stick mostly in a certain arena. Part of that is because poetry and I have a relationship that consists of awkwardly staring at each other in complete silence. Another part of it is that I know very little about any sort of music scene. The rest is a bit of a jumbled mess.

Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking about reviews in general and how I haven’t really visited the topic since that one (and only) time I made a podcast on the subject. While I’m not quite in the space to make another podcast, I thought I’d write a bit about what’s going on in my head in regards to reviews.

My Reviewing Rules

*Only positive reviews… and neutral ones. True, sometimes a zine doesn’t exactly hit all the right spots for me, but I’m not here to simply trash anyone’s work. If I really don’t like it, I won’t review it.
*I won’t post street addresses. The more I think about it, the more I’m leaning towards posting post boxes in with reviews. But I’m still firmly a ‘no’ on the street addresses. I am biased by having been stalked in the past.
*I’m so-so about interior pictures. For me, it’s about length of zine. If I think a zine is short enough where a lot of the content will be ‘given away’ by revealing a picture, I won’t do it. I’m also a bit hesitant in general because that’s someone else’s art and/or words, but I have started to make the occasional exception.
*Requests for certain zine topics and such are totally okay! It’s all good so long as everyone understands that I can’t just drop everything and grab a zine on that topic. I’m limited by zine cost, postage cost, so on and so forth. But I will keep track of all requests.

Ideal Review Happy Mail

I’ve only been sent a few zines to review at this point. Most of what I put up still comes from my own stock with a small percentage of that being trades and such. Even so, I’ve come to appreciate certain things

*Telling me it’s for review/it’s okay to review. Even if we’re doing a trade, saying, “Hey, I’d love it if you reviewed this” is perfectly good. It lets me know that I should probably move it a smidge further up in the queue instead of sticking it behind my own stock.
*The date. This just makes my life easier and makes it a little less likely that the sender will have to wait months for a review.
*Contact details to share. I will mention it if these details aren’t in the zine itself, but it’s really nice to have them in one place rather than needing to go hunting them down. (Hunting for further information is fun. Hunting for basic details… not so much.)
*Your identifying pronoun. This is a bit of a new one to me, but I do want this to be a positive space. I read an article a while back about a zinemaker whose pronoun is ‘they’ was listed as ‘she’, and they were very upset about it. You know me – I don’t want to upset anyone. So if your name points a person to an assumption that is wrong, please mention your preference.
*When in doubt, type. I love a handwritten letter, but if it’s difficult to read the handwriting, mistakes are easily made. When it comes to the things listed above, I’d rather not make mistakes.

I’m sure there’ll be other things that I think of here and there in the future, but that well and truly covers it for now. I’m happy to be where I am, doing what I’m doing in a way that lets other people know about zines. Any requests that aren’t to do with reviewing are also welcome. 🙂

Call for Submissions: Zine of the Hill

Zine of the Hill Extended

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: ZINE OF THE HILL (better title tbd)

Did anyone else cry when Netflix took down King of the Hill?

Looking for fan art/fiction, conspiracy theories, love poems, short essays, memes, and good memories about one of the greatest shows of all time, King of the Hill. The show went off the air six years ago after thirteen seasons, and is gone (from Netflix) but not forgotten.

Hit me up @ queeranxietybabiezdistro@gmail if you have any questions! Please share with your networks or anyone you think may be interested ^_^

Call For Submissions: Gaali Gang Zine

gaali gang

Calling all badnaami babes, ‪#‎curryscentedcreatives‬, and rule-breaking desis of all tangled subcontinent identities – the very first edition of gaali gang zine is seeking submissions!

We accept any sort of art or writing, including prose, essays, poetry, reviews, drawings/doodles, short stories, photography, critiques, interviews, or anything else you can think of! Submissions are open to anyone who identifies as Desi or South Asian, in any sort of way possible. It doesn’t matter where you were born or what languages you do (or don’t) speak. This zine is an inclusive space for individuals regardless of age, gender identity, sexuality, religion, color, or background.

Please submit pieces for consideration to gaaligang@gmail.com by August 31 at midnight. Feel free to email us if you have any questions or share and spread the word!

gaali gang is a radical zine focused on sharing the experiences of diasporic South Asian identities, no matter how non-traditional or rebellious they may be. Our first issue will be available in fall 2016.

Follow us @ gaaligang.tumblr.com

Call for Submissions: All in Your Head

All in Your Head is a traditional cut-and-paste style zine with a focus on LGBTQIA neurodivergent and disabled activists, zinesters, artists, and authors. Our zine operates on the following *principles: 1.) social inequality and injustice exists [racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, cissexism to name a few]; 2.) disability, neurodiversity can be understood as a viable form of human difference that intersects with/is shaped by systems of dominance; 3.) claims that there is a “normal” bodymind can have damaging and harmful effects (physically/emotionally/spiritually) and are partly shaped by current social/cultural values and white western colonial histories; 4.) neuroatypical people and people with disabilities must navigate cultural taboos, move among complex institutions and systems of care and negotiate conflicting ideas of “wellness/illness,“ “silence/disclosure,” “visibility/invisibility;” “dis/ability” and more 5.) most importantly, our stories matter. (*this list is by no means exhaustive)

For the Fall 2016 edition of All in Your Head, we invite you to share first person narratives, essays, rants, poems, doodles, drawings, photography, collages (and more!) that address the concept of “cure.” We are seeking pieces that explore the theme “cures” as it relates to disabled bodyminds and ways that queer neurodivergent, disabled folks encounter and resist cultural stigma and self-authorize our existence.

We are seeking topics that address the following themes (and others):

§ “Cure culture” (Eli Clare) as a homogenizing/coercive force

§ Critiques of health, well-being, and wholeness as it is informed by white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, racism, colorism, ableism, classism, homo/bi/transphobia and other forms of oppression;

§ “Curing” queerness, disability, and neurodiversity manifesting as state and institutional violence;

§ Interconnections among racism, white supremacy, ableism, and state/institutional violence particularly in light of police violence and state surveillance;

§ Queering cures and cure culture;

§ Trans and queer sick/neurodivergent/disabled narratives and grappling with the concept of “cure;”

§ Radically performing illness/sickness and other forms of resistance to “cure culture;”

§ Artist/Activist projects related to queerness, disability, and neurodivergence for our activist spotlight section.

§ Have an idea not listed here? Submit anyway!

Send your submissions to allinyourheadzine@gmail.com before September 1st, 2016. Please send your submissions via email. For written submissions, please use Microsoft word and submit your writing in .doc or .docx format. Please try to limit submissions to 1500 words. (We are flexible. Let us know if you need a little extra space.) For artwork, please attach high resolution .jpg images to your email. Please include a title for your artwork and any information you would like readers to know about your piece (medium, location, tools used etc). Contributors have the option of sharing a short bio or publishing their work anonymously.

IMPORTANT: Contributors should be willing to have their work displayed in another, accessible form of media alongside the traditional paper zine. Contributors should anticipate that their work may be read and translated/captioned in a video via youtube or vimeo or another internet venue. More details on this element to come. Email us with any questions. Coordinators of All in Your Head reserve the right to reject any pieces that violate our basic feminist/queer values. We explicitly seek to interrupt racism, sizeism, sexism, ableism, classism, trans/bi/homophobia, and all other forms of oppression in our work and submissions that violate these principles will be automatically rejected. All submissions should provide content/trigger warnings where appropriate. Coordinators reserve the right to add trigger/content warnings if necessary.

Zine Review: Death Bring Me Freedom From My Heart For I Am Enslaved

Death Bring Me Freedom Zine

Death Bring Me Freedom From My Heart For I Am Enslaved
Jenn Suxx
Guest Page by Shannon Knox
fucktheface@riseup.net
http://wemakezines.ning.com/profile/JennSuxx

I feel like it’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed any sort of comic zine. What a zine to get back into the swing of comic things with!

Death Bring Me Freedom From My Heart For I Am Enslaved is a perzine-ish tale of love and emotional abuse told in comic format.

Jenn’s art style is engaging (to my tastes). Everything is clearly detailed, but not crowded. This zine is the first time in a long time (first time ever in zine comic form) that I’ve seen sex in a comic, and it was well done. Everything suited what she was saying, and what she was saying read as completely open and not at all shy about what she’d gone through.

At first, I found it an intriguing juxtaposition to get such ‘young’ vulnerability from Jenn while at the same time reading a comic clearly set with adult situations. However, when she followed things with a bit of her childhood background, all of that made a lot of sense. Even in comic form, even in an image that clearly demonstrated the situation but left the serious blows to implications, it was hard to see how another child had been left to neglect. And the impacts of that.

The story does jump here just a smidge, leaving questions that you’re really not sure if you want to ask. In the end, though, none of them really distract from the bigger story, and all I wanted to do is casually ask if she wanted to go out for a coffee sometime.

This is definitely not a ‘light’ zine by any means. I know that the abuse I lived through certainly influenced my reading of this, but I think your empathy would have to be pretty low to not pick up on the emotions in this comic.

Jenn ends the zine on a positive but realistic note, which is all any of us can really do when processing any sort of abuse. That she has the strength and frame of mind to remind people who have dealt with similar situations that they are not alone is a lovely thing to see.

Zine Review: BDSM FAQ: Your Anitidote to Fifty Shades of Grey

BDSM FAQ Zine

BDSM FAQ: Your Anitidote to Fifty Shades of Grey
Faith G Harper, PhD, LPC-S
FaithGHarper.com
https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/6590/

There are so many things this zine represents for the zine community. Zines can be any topic (someone taking on what bad things 50 Shades did to the BDSM community), they can be educational, and zines can (and are) written by people from so many walks of life (even PhD walks of life!).

Talk about a good start.

While the heart-shaped handcuffs on the front and back covers may give you a giggle, BDSM FAQ is serious when it comes to educating people about the basics of BDSM. In the brief introduction, Dr Harper talks about the increase in people wanting to talk to her in a professional capacity about the whole ‘BDSM thing’. This zine was born of the questions most asked in a BDSM class she taught.

I was not in personal need of an FAQ or introduction to BDSM because I was fortunate enough to know a very kind D/s couple who taught me a lot about the lifestyle. I picked up this zine anyway because I was curious about how Dr Harper would handle the subject. The whole subject reminded me a little of 7th ‘reproductive studies’ class with a large smattering if misrepresentation thanks to one set of books.

BDSM FAQ is exactly what you would want as a resource to learn about the subject. Dr Harper gives it the seriousness that any lifestyle choice deserves and treats the reader like the adult they should be if they’re wanting to learn about this. The zine also includes the best simple representation I’ve seen about what the letters actually stand for:

BDSM FAQ by Dr Faith G Harper

While the title might suggest otherwise, time is not wasted venting about 50 Shades; it’s directed where it should be: answering questions. From the words of the lifestyle you should know to how to approach things no matter what kind of relationship dynamic you have.

I highly recommend this zine if you’re merely curious, if you’re looking to start, or anything in between. The zine even ends with a positive true-life experience of a submissive to let you know that there are positive things to be found in BDSM if that is what you are looking for. And not all of those things have to include sex.

If you’re interested, Dr Harper has an assortment of educational zines about all sorts of things including anxiety, anger, adulting, coping, and more. You can check them out here.

On another note not related to Dr Harper but related to 50 Shades of Grey, here is a video from Film Theory about how Christian Grey actually uses cult indoctrination tactics (rather than BDSM practices) on Anastasia.

Happy Mail!

Oh, there’s nothing like beautiful mail on a beautiful day to make me feel at peace with the world. <3

Happy Mail From Zindelo

This arrival came from a group swap on Swap-Bot, which I’ve mentioned before. A group member just so happened to grant my wish of adorable mini-zines. And they’re meant to be coloured in as well! Here’s where I get so envious of those with artistic talent.

Happy Mail From Idle Emma

This lovely bit of mail comes all the way from Emma in Ireland, the very talented Emma of Puddle Side Musings!

I had the pleasure of sending Emma her very first zine, and she not only wrote me back but sent a gorgeous handmade notebook that I love. (No, you definitely can’t have too many notebooks!)

By the way, Emma has some of the nicest handwriting I’ve ever seen. I need to practice. 😛

I Know Nothing…

20150505_131140

I spent this evening finishing up my answers for Zine Nation‘s interview, and I’m feeling a little underqualified to answer some of the questions. Am I enthusiastic? Yes. Am I well-versed on the history of zines? Not so much.

Ah, well.

It’s pretty much my normal swing of things to be really focused and passionate about something and then try to undermine myself.

In other news, the first print run of Dear Anonymous 5 is hot off the press and ready for folding. All I need to do is wrap up and print Don’t Call Me Cupcake 5, and I’ll move on to an entirely new zine series that I’ve had in mind for quite a while now.

As you may have been able to tell, I’m blathering on a little, but it’s a wandering kind of day today.

More to come soon.