LA Zine Fest!
This year, LAZF was March 1st and 2nd. It was held at The Broad, but for Sunday, March 2nd, we all set up in the basement of a parking garage to avoid the rain and high winds. A lot of people had terrible service and had trouble using ubiquitous payment apps like Venmo and Paypal. My table assignment was right by the festival entrance, which felt like a plum location, and I had pretty good sales by my standards. At SD Zinefest 2024, I was located in a side room, very near the DJ, which I think meant less foot traffic and lower sales. (Table assignments are all up to chance, I'm not complaining.) Nobody is really in zinefests for the money. I could and should be more strategic about the "making connections" aspect of festivals, though... It feels good to meet people who share your values, at least regarding the importance of self-publishing and making your own weird art as a practice and lifestyle.
Recipe Card Zine
I put out a new zine I'm very excited about. It's the story of a 70s housewife's seduction by a female vampire, told through typed snippets pasted to recipe cards. I wanted to experiment with format and storytelling methods. The story was influenced by 1970s exploitation vampire films with sapphic undertones, or overtones. I incorporated the novella Carmilla and named a character Howard, after Anne Rice's birth name.The idea with the recipe card format is that this is her safe space: no one is monitoring her recipe book, so she can say what she wants in there. She still maintains a veneer of pleasantness, for her own emotional protection if nothing else.
I am absolutely obsessed with food photography from the 60s and 70s, so I figured this was a good way to include my take on it. I took a lot of pictures for this zine, which worked a creative muscle I've never really used, and splurged on semi-extravagant printing (the woman at the counter of my local print shop gave me a nice discount. You don't get that at FedEx).
Usually, my zines are much more text-centric and the design is absolutely an afterthought. For this zine, the format kind of determined what and how much I could write. I also typed all the text out on an actual typewriter, and I was surprised by how much that impacted the writing: I impulsively changed words or phrasing slightly as I typed. Not sure if that was a good or bad thing, but everything felt much more fluid.
I also used paper prong as the binding for the first time: I punched holes in every page and put these brad-like prongs through to keep it bound together. It looked cool and also you can switch out pages or reorder them if you want.
I liked the format so much I kind of want to do it again. I've been obsessed with epistolary storytelling and how I can exploit the tactile, tangible aspects of physical media to enhance a story. What can I do with a paper zine that isn't possible or doesn't have the same impact when displayed on a screen? I may as well take advantage of the unique qualities of print in a digital world. I still have a lot of exploring and work to do there, but I'm finally trying some things I've been thinking about for years.