Zine Club MHC

Diaspora Drama is a zine celebrating creative and offbeat people of colour in cyber space. The theme for issue 02 is DIAL-UP: nostalgia, childhood and early internet memories.

The issue includes: interviews of filmmaker Damani Baker, black women punk band Big Joanie, commissioned digital art by Zarina Muhammad, Sara Foryame, Mohini Hewa, Mexican American Publication, writing by Kevin Le and many others. Cover art by Ayqa Khan.

Read the issue here or download here. Check out our ‘Decolonizing Zayn’ Playlist

Hey, folks!

In honor of International Zine Month, we want to tell you about something really cool that’s in store – Mount Holyoke’s very own zine collection!

What’s a zine?

For those who are new to zines, the basic idea is pretty simple. A zine (pronounced “zeen”, as in magazine!) is an independent, often self-published work. They range from black and white on one folded sheet of paper, to multimedia, sewn, typeset works. Most of them aren’t too long, so that they can be easily copied and printed by the creator or a small independent press, but they still have the potential to hold a LOT of content. 

That content can be whatever the creator so chooses! The beauty of zines is their flexibility in terms of subject matter, art, writing, poetry, photography, collage, you name it. As such, they are often platforms for activism, social issues, and artists, all of which may have difficulty finding places to get published by larger companies or without censorship. The fact that they are so self-published also means that the creator has whatever level of control they would like about the distribution and production of their media.

Want to know more? Check out this PDF of “Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine?” There are tons of cool resources online for this!

A little history of the collection–

Currently, most of the collection is made up of zines collected by the Mount Holyoke Zine Club, an unofficial org on campus, who have generously donated their Zine Library (containing over 350 items) to LITS, in the hope that the zines will be made accessible to both researchers, students, and other visitors of the Mount Holyoke library. The zines are now held by the MHC Archives & Special Collections, although the Zine Club remains involved with making, acquiring, cataloguing, and spreading the news about zines. 

Both Zine Club and ASC aim towards expanding the collection over time. It is likely that the collection will be geared toward certain topics which complement Mount Holyoke students and culture, as well as the existing items in the collection.

What are these zines about?

Some of our zines are made by MHC students, and include topics like women’s health, race & class at the college, nature, and college history are just a few of the things you might find. Other, non-MHC zines also vary widely. They include but are not limited to LGBTQ issues, gender & sexuality, mental health and mental illness, comics, fiction, history, feminism, anarchy, and so on.

So, how can I read the zines?

A small number of the zines in the Mount Holyoke zine collection will soon have copies made available for public reading within the library. They will be located on the 4th floor, north side, next to the New Books section and the Ask LITS board. Much like periodicals, they will not circulate, but anyone can take them off the shelf to read and enjoy them!

Not all of the zines in the collection will be on display, due to copyright and creator permissions. For those that aren’t, students and visitors are welcome to come down to the Archives & Special Collections (bottom floor of Dwight Hall, open M-F from 9:30am-12pm and 1-4:30pm!). The zines here in ASC are the originals and main basis of the zine library, and may be freely read and used within the Archives space.

Want to check whether we have a specific zine, or kind of zine, before making the trip? No problem–there will soon be a public spreadsheet that includes the titles, authors, place of publication, and content/topic tags of all our zines.

Stuck in an academic institution? Sick of being blatantly lied to, gaslit, and disregarded? Tired of dealing with sadistic, self-righteous, and incompetent authority figures? Feel like you’re trapped in a car on a long road trip with the most horrifying and frustrating people imaginable?

Achieve some degree of catharsis by submitting your exaggerated stories, communist rants, amateur photography, web art, melodramatic poetry, or just about anything else that can exist in a static form on a printed page to this thematically appropriate zine. 

Page dimensions are 5.5in by 8.5in. Please keep written submissions to no more than a few pages in length. Be sure to indicate how you’d like to be credited with your submission.

Submissions accepted until July 1.

The IndieGoGo campaign for my book is live!

At long last, Cometbus has some competition in the punk writing realm. -Dakota Floyd, The Wild (in a review of Reckless Chants #19)

[Rust Belt Jessie is] my favorite Zine Chronicler of the Current True-Life Punk Rock Experience -Adam Gnade, The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad

I’m (Rust Belt) Jessie Lynn McMains, fka Jessica Disobedience (and about ten other pen names/stage names/punk rock names). I’ve been making zines and writing about punk for 20 years, now, and I think it’s about time I publish a book.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Punk is a collection of some of my writings about punk - both non-fiction and fiction - spanning nearly fifteen years. It’s a look at my little corner of the punk scene, and everything punk has meant to me. From love affairs to getting wasted, from self-destruction to survival, from the death of old friends and heroes to hearing that one perfect song, from wanting to quit punk to realizing I never can - it’s all in here.

I’m not a punk band, and this isn’t a record, but you could consider these my songs. These are the songs where I make fun of punk, and the songs where I eulogize it. These are my anthems.

Funding & Perks

I need to raise $2100 for the first print run of What We Talk About. Some of the money will go toward paying Emma Thacker to design and draw the cover art (the image I’m using for the campaign card and video overlay is my own mock-up of what the cover will look like, Emma’s a great artist and I can’t wait to see what she’ll come up with!). Another portion will go toward paying someone to proofread the manuscript and do some minor editing. The rest will go towards purchasing the copies - 300 in total for the first print run, getting a .pdf version made for those who prefer their books digital, mailing out the preorders that I receive through this campaign, and promotion: getting posters made, sending out review copies, and transportation costs so I can do readings, etc. If there is any tiny amount of extra money left over, it will be put toward a second printing.

But I’m not asking for something for nothing - anyone who contributes over $10 gets a .pdf copy of the book, and the perks get better the more you contribute - signed copies of the book, poster prints of the cover art, and more.

If I don’t reach my goal, I still plan on publishing the book. What not reaching my goal would mean is that I wouldn’t be able to make the initial print run as big, but the book would still get printed. If the goal is not reached, I will put any funds I receive toward doing as big a print run as possible. However, it will take me longer to get it printed and mailed out if I don’t reach the goal, so if you’d like your copy sooner rather than later, try and get the word out about my campaign and help me reach my funding goal.

DIY? Because I Gotta.

I suppose I could try to get this book published in a more traditional way, but at this point in my life, I don’t have the patience. I’d have to spend months researching publishers that might be the right fit, then several more months mailing out cover letters, pitches, and sample chapters. Then several more waiting to hear back from all of them, and then even if by some miracle one of the publishers wanted to publish it, it could take years to actually get published! I know Sue Grafton says that self-publishing is a shortcut, but I’ve never read any Grafton and also…

Yes, it is a shortcut. I’m nearly 33, I’ve been building this body of work since I was 18, and I want it out in the world. Not to mention, I had some success with more traditional publishing when I was younger, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. There was a lot of editing and cutting not only of extraneous things but of things that were intrinsic to the message of my writing. A lot of talk of certain things being unpublishable, either because of the risk of censorship, or because of market trends and what would sell. Well. I hate censorship and I don’t care about market trends. In the case of What We Talk About  - I’m a punk, I write for punks.

Self-publishing may be a shortcut on the one hand, but on the other hand it takes a whole lot of hard work. It means that I have ultimate control over the book, but also that I have ultimate responsibility. It means that I am responsible for finding an artist and an editor. It means that I am responsible for doing the layout, paying for printing and shipping, and for promotion. It won’t be easy, but as I have been self-publishing and self-promoting my zines for 20 years, now, I think I’m up to the challenge.

Etc.

PLEASE if you are in WMASS/Mass in general, get involved with Flywheel and our Zine Committee! We do cool things and want to do cool things with you too! 

"¿Qué es la normalidad y quién puede habitarla? ¿Quién puede decirse a sí mismo, “yo soy normal, yo soy la norma? ¿Quién puede asegurarlo y sostenerlo? Nadie, ninguna persona. La normalidad es inhabitable. Una tensión constante en algo que debes ser, pero nunca llegas a serlo o nunca terminas de ser. Como la hombría, sea lo que sea que eso signifique, no puedes llorar, no muestres tus sentimientos, tienes que ser fuerte, siempre con el riesgo de que si no lo haces, no eres hombre o no lo suficiente. Nunca se puede ser, siempre estamos en una constante lucha, entre el ser, el deber ser y el no ser.  Un paradigma, un espejismo, es ese oasis que crees estar viendo mientras con sigilo, con la boca seca, con el cuerpo pesado, vas dejando pasos en el desierto, vas recorriéndolo; sigues caminando, la sed es insoportable, deseas, desesperadamente deseas beber esa agua, por fin, te acercas, descubres que es un engaño, una mentira, es pura arena.

La norma, como su nombre lo indica, es la regla, la regla es el patrón, no son las excepciones sino las constantes. Nos pensamos normales. Aseguramos que poseemos la normalidad, que somos hombres y mujeres, que somos heterosexuales, homosexuales, bisexuales, pansexuales. Estas categorías construyen modos de actuar, modos de pensar, de desear, reglas, hacen normalidad. Vivimos en ficciones normalizantes denominadas género, nacionalidad, identidad, amor, etc.

Entonces si nadie es normal, todxs somos anormales. Todxs somos diferentes, diversos, raros, intangibles, líquidos, los patrones nunca se ajustará a nosotrxs. Sí y no, la anormalidad no es diversidad, categoría fagocitada por el liberalismo. La anormalidad, no es la diferencia, sino aquello que incomoda a la regla. No sólo que la incomoda, también que la cuestiona. Es aquello que quiebra la ficción, la pastilla roja para salir de la matrix.”