I don't know if it counts as a zine, as it's a community magazine connecting three small towns and many tiny local village hall events (and therefore deeply uncool), but several years ago I founded MidBorder News and achieved a lifelong dream, having drawn and written tiny wee magazines as a child. I've just handed it over to a new editor in order to spend more time with my sanity (such as it is) and I am both hugely relieved and bereft.
Good memories of Learning How To Drown, which I'm sure I have filed away somewhere. The one pictured, certainly. I wrote a lot for fanzines in the 90s and early 00s, and it was a better training ground than any degree course. Hope you're well and thriving Dougald. x
Lovely to hear from you, Ian! Writing for zines was a kind of apprenticeship for our generation, I think. The Pick Me Up email-zine in 2004-6 was huge for me in that way. Oh, and some distant corner of memory is whispering that you may have been involved in an even earlier bit of proto-zine-making, back when we were kids - can that be true?
You may well be right, though I don't recall. People I grew up with often tell me of things that happened, which obviously registered with them but for me...it's gone. I'm always inclined to believe them. I was reading zines by 1991 and writing for them in 1993, and did about six issues of my own one for about a year around then - sold exclusively at the Arts Centre, if memory serves.
A lot of this was so quick it's easy to forget. A far cry from when I began to be invited to write for academic journals, where the whole process would take at least a year.
About 8 years earlier pre internet I tried to set loose a viral self editing anarchist street magazine called unimaginatively ‘news from nowhere’. The idea was that readers would pull its apart, cut paste comment add subtract - re-copy and send it back into the ether. A sort of self replicating samizdat - before the Berlin Wall, before the internet. Solzhenitsyn plus Dawkins . To my knowledge no 2nd edition was ever released. One of nature s dead ends - like me. But I have 4 kids now
I have a Doris zine on my bookshelf somewhere- Thankyou for this - it will be my prompt to rifle through that old pile of zines from c.2000 from when I was 18 and thought they were very cool!
There's something delicious and wonderful about zines being the thing that survive us. Some of mine were made for one night only, to be given away when I was DJing, or to sit alongside an exhibition that lasted a day or two. And now all my zines - the ones I have made and the ones I have collected - live in the archives at the University of Kent, as the Dan Thompson Collection. Never imagined that. https://www.kent.ac.uk/library/special-collections/theatre-and-performance-collections/dan-thompson
I don't know if it counts as a zine, as it's a community magazine connecting three small towns and many tiny local village hall events (and therefore deeply uncool), but several years ago I founded MidBorder News and achieved a lifelong dream, having drawn and written tiny wee magazines as a child. I've just handed it over to a new editor in order to spend more time with my sanity (such as it is) and I am both hugely relieved and bereft.
I guess Substack and its ilk is the modern version of a zine. It's all a bit too slick, though...
Yeah, I am definitely feeling the itch to make a paper zine again, after writing about this.
Good memories of Learning How To Drown, which I'm sure I have filed away somewhere. The one pictured, certainly. I wrote a lot for fanzines in the 90s and early 00s, and it was a better training ground than any degree course. Hope you're well and thriving Dougald. x
Lovely to hear from you, Ian! Writing for zines was a kind of apprenticeship for our generation, I think. The Pick Me Up email-zine in 2004-6 was huge for me in that way. Oh, and some distant corner of memory is whispering that you may have been involved in an even earlier bit of proto-zine-making, back when we were kids - can that be true?
You may well be right, though I don't recall. People I grew up with often tell me of things that happened, which obviously registered with them but for me...it's gone. I'm always inclined to believe them. I was reading zines by 1991 and writing for them in 1993, and did about six issues of my own one for about a year around then - sold exclusively at the Arts Centre, if memory serves.
A lot of this was so quick it's easy to forget. A far cry from when I began to be invited to write for academic journals, where the whole process would take at least a year.
I would love to read a Learning to Drown story 😀
About 8 years earlier pre internet I tried to set loose a viral self editing anarchist street magazine called unimaginatively ‘news from nowhere’. The idea was that readers would pull its apart, cut paste comment add subtract - re-copy and send it back into the ether. A sort of self replicating samizdat - before the Berlin Wall, before the internet. Solzhenitsyn plus Dawkins . To my knowledge no 2nd edition was ever released. One of nature s dead ends - like me. But I have 4 kids now
I have a Doris zine on my bookshelf somewhere- Thankyou for this - it will be my prompt to rifle through that old pile of zines from c.2000 from when I was 18 and thought they were very cool!
There's something delicious and wonderful about zines being the thing that survive us. Some of mine were made for one night only, to be given away when I was DJing, or to sit alongside an exhibition that lasted a day or two. And now all my zines - the ones I have made and the ones I have collected - live in the archives at the University of Kent, as the Dan Thompson Collection. Never imagined that. https://www.kent.ac.uk/library/special-collections/theatre-and-performance-collections/dan-thompson
Hurrah! And yes, these humble ephemera as the traces we leave in the record, that feels good to me.
Enjoyed this story. It seems summer is the season for play and expression. Cheers!