Karen Ponzio Photos
Making zines at The New Haven Zine Club.
Tiny Ghosts Haunting Small Things, The Band Plays in Front of a Big Audience, and Cars Go Too Fast (and our road design encourages it) are not titles you might find on the bestseller list or at your local news stand. But you can find them in the zine library making its way through the city as part of the New Haven Zine Scene, a group of creatives that meet up once a month to make, read, and talk about zines and share everything and anything zine related. This past Saturday, the group met for the first time at Possible Futures on Edgewood Avenue, where it will continue to trade off monthly meeting dates with Witch Bitch Black Box on Whitney.
Alice Prael folding free zines from Magik Press.
Organizer Alice Prael began their zine journey in 2016 with “silly little flower drawings that all had little jokes with them,” they said. They decided they wanted to collect them into one place. They had also just learned about the eightfold zine — an eight-page zine that can be made by folding one piece of paper a certain way and making one cut with scissors — and thought “I can totally do this, this is a manageable amount of work.”
Prael had always wanted to be a writer but found longer forms “very intimidating.” They found that creating zines gave them “manageable pieces” to work with.
“I like that I can do it entirely myself and bring it into the world, and also make progress that I can share without having to have the whole thing done all at once,” they said.
That journey also led to a series of zine making workshops held at a couple of different locations in the city. Through those Prael found that many people were also interested in reading zines and learning about them, including the basics of what a zine is.
Prael described a zine as a “fairly small book or magazine sort of format, self or independently published.… It’s a radical form of publishing that allows people to take more control and agency over the product that they’re creating. There’s no gatekeeper. You can just print it off and just leave them places.”
The Zine Library is Prael’s collection of zines that they have purchased over the years and is a prominent feature of each club meet up. Anyone who comes that day is welcome to read them. Prael also brings a selection of paper, markers, pencils, pens, stickers, scissors, and glue sticks, as well as old magazines and catalogs that people can use for collage work. Other attendees bring supplies to share as well, and many bring their own zines that they have previously made. Prael is often found guiding someone in their first zine making, as are other attendees with zine experience, which is in line with their hope that a “community of practice” develops where everyone who attends can share knowledge.
Karen Ponzio Photo
The Zine Library.
“I’m hoping that in developing more of a community, we have to figure out less entirely on our own and can identify the tools that are available,” Prael said, noting that there are free and open-source tech tools already out there. “Maybe if we can bring folks together, we can figure it out together.”
That includes those who want to show up and peruse the zines instead of making them. “Even just reading zines and looking at other people’s is part of the creative process,” Prael said. “You don’t have to make a thing if you don’t want to. Just be into zines, that’s cool.”
Prael’s work in digital preservation has given them insight into how zines have become more popular over the past few years — how there is both the desire and need for something more tangible.
“I think there’s more of a recognition of how ephemeral digital works are, and so I think there’s a real grasping for more tactile things, being able to create art and writing and bring it entirely to fruition and have the physical thing. There’s a very real pride to that,” Prael said.
On this Saturday there were anywhere from six to 12 people at a time, of all ages, finding their way through making an eight-fold zine with assistance, checking out the offerings of the zine library, or working on their own zines from materials that they had brought with them. Some had just happened upon the event while visiting the store, and some were regular attendees.
Paul Noel had brought copies of his zine with him, called Punks on the Beach: Sand in Your Suit, an issue from a series that is also included in Prael’s library. He said his black and white zines are “more like a comic book” and that he mostly “passes them out to his friends.”
Founder of Divine zine JiJi Wong, who was helping others make their own eight-fold zines along with Prael, brought a few copies of the latest issue, titled “Heaven and Hell.” They said the zine “explores the perspectives” of those who are “religious and spiritual” and includes poetry, visual art, essays, and photography. Wong also commented on the zine club saying it gave people a chance to “spread the love” and “participate.” While here, Wong added, they may have “spontaneous thought, but it doesn’t just sit there. This motivates them into action.”
The two zines brought in by Wong and Noel.
The variety of what many were creating, as well as what already existed in the library, was a fine example of this participation and love. Some were more civic minded or based in world issues, like Prael’s aforementioned Cars Go Too Fast and a Free Palestine-themed zine published by Magik Press. Some were more visual art based, like a collection called Drawings for Music by artist Ben Cannan. And then there was a poetry chapbook-type zine by writer and musician Brian Ember that gathered earlier pieces of his writings from 1990 to 1993. Some were the size of a typical newsstand magazine and some you could easily fit in your pocket, but each one was unique and stood on its own as a piece of art.
Possible Futures owner Lauren Anderson was joyous, and supportive throughout the event. The club meeting was one of many creative events the store is accustomed to providing a safe and welcoming space for.
“I love zines,” she said. “I love how inclusive they are. I love that they take so many different formats and they cover so many different topics. They seem radically democratic, so in some way I want to figure out, can we have a place in this store where we could have a collection of them?” noting that the store currently only carried a couple of zines made by community members.
She was “really thrilled” when Prael got in touch asking to have the club meet there as well.
“I think its really lovely to have people gather. People gather here a lot for creative stuff ‚and it always makes me happy when folks come forward with an idea.”
She was also thrilled that there were friends from the neighborhood who came in for something else and found the zine club.
“If you put it out for people, people find it, and cool things happen organically,” she said. “I love that.”
This reporter, who had attended one of Prael’s workshops earlier this year, loved having another chance to try her hand at an eight-fold zine, riffing on last week’s assignment in East Rock and making a wee nature journal to be used another time. I was also able to gather a couple of free copies of zines that they were offering to everyone, as well as one of a series of booklets Prael made from an about-to-be-thrown-away Baroque architecture book that I was hoping to add a poem to at a later date (work comes first, after all).
The beginnings of something...
Everyone was helpful, and those who needed more help than others were more than happily obliged. It was yet another creative gathering of like-minded individuals who enjoy creating and being in the company of others while doing so — a simple thing that many of us took for granted when we were all sequestered away for a couple of years. Prael emphasized that the club is also for the beginner who has never made a zine before and wants to see what the buzz is about.
“It’s definitely all levels of people interested in learning about zines and participating in whatever this is,” they said with a laugh. “Whatever this ends up being, whoever shows up gets to decide.”
More information about New Haven Zine Scene, including monthly meetup dates and times, can be found on Alice Prael, Possible Futures, and Witch Bitch Black Box’s Instagram pages.
