I’ve been having a rough few weeks here to be quite honest. Those with a keen sense of time might have guessed this since I skipped last week’s Free Zine Friday… although four weeks probably isn’t quite enough to get people hooked yet. I’ve been feeling simultaneously overwhelmed by my commitments, exhausted about the prospect of accepting new opportunities that keep arising, and guilty that I’m feeling all this when I’m not even studying or working, really. I think it’s really important for me to do Free Zine Friday though. I really missed it last week. I’ve already seen how happy it makes the zine creators to have their work mentioned, and it makes me happy to be building this list that I can share with people. It feels like something I’m supposed to do.
In the vein of feeling exhausted, I thought it’d be nice to share a few audio zines, for those times when you just want to be carried away by someone’s voice! These are readings of zines originally made on paper, each read by the creator. Recording zine readings is something I’ve wanted to do with my own work, though I want to come up with a way to describe and integrate the images in my zines into the recordings without distracting from the text. Another project for someday-Wesley!
Bound
by Bethany Fortner
This is such a special zine. It’s a beautiful fairytale about a unicorn, a late bloomer named Philomena who desperately wishes for her horn to grow in, and seeks help from a wizard in the woods. It’s about shame and feeling vulnerable and the status quo and loneliness. You can hear in the author’s voice just how deep and personal the story is–like the best fairytales, it is so intensely familiar and relatable that it gives you lessons you didn’t know you needed.
17 minutes. Physical copies available
The Sisterhood of the Living Dead
by Maggie Grimason
CW for grief, descriptions of sex, & animal and human death.
“The desert is dust, and so am I.” This zine is intense but really moving. It’s like a collage of memories linked together by the central theme of life and death. Maggie shares deep dark stories of seeing ghosts, fascination with bones, grieving her dad, empty relationships, and finding herself in the deserts of the southwest. I admit I had to tune out for a little while since all of it hit so strong (as a fellow member of the Dead Dad club). It is poetic and beautiful, a winding trail of thoughts and lives past.
29 minutes. More of Maggie’s writing here.
The F Word
by Nyx
Let’s lighten up here with a big fun zine all about “fuck”, our favorite swear word! Nyx analyzes what it is about the word “fuck” that makes it so satisfying and versatile. Learn about the history, grammatical flexibility, and capacity for emphasizing, and more that makes fuck such a great fucking swear. Warning: swearing.
12 minutes.
See you next week!
–Wesley