We’re so thrilled to announce… we have a date, and a space, for the 2015 NYC Feminist Zinefest!
The place: Barnard College, New York
The date: Sunday March 8, 2015 * Note correction!!! Saturday, March 7 ! *
The zinefest is a few months away, so keep checking back here for more updates as we get closer.
Hope you’re as excited as we are, and we look forward to reading…more feminist zines! 🙂
! Happy to announce that the Black Lesbian DIY Fest is happening on October 18 !
Check out more info on their website – http://blacklesbiansdiyfest.wordpress.com/
This DIY Fest sounds pretty cool – besides just tabling, there will be a raffle, workshops & skillshares, and a tour of the Lesbian Herstory Archives!
The ‘fest starts at 11am and goes ’till 6pm, so there is plenty of time to check out all the awesome zines!
* Also – you can still apply to table! Check out their site for more details! *
The Lesbian Herstory Archives is “the world’s largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities,” and is located in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at 484 14th Street. The building is wheelchair accessible, as well as nearby to subway and bus lines.
(This year is also the 40th Anniversary of the LHA, find out more here (scroll down the page for an events listing) – http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/40thanniversary.html)
Woo! Hooray Black Lesbian DIY Fest, and hope to see you there! 🙂
Ooh, what’s that – another feminist zinefest coming up soon??
Yes! In the city of Hamilton, in the great Canadian province of Ontario… on November 15 of this year – feminists of all stripes will congregate to share, sell, & swap their zines to the public!
Get more info here –
http://takebackthenighthamilton.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/hamilton-feminist-zine-fair/
(And if you’re considering writing a feminist zine, but not quite sure how or what to write about . . . check out the above link for a handy list of ideas!)
Applications to table are open starting *now!*
More basic info:
“When: Saturday, November 15th from 10am to 5pm
Where: YWCA Hamilton – 75 MacNab Street South, Hamilton ON
Accessibility: The space is accessible, including washrooms. More information about accessibility and safe(r) spaces coming soon!”
The ‘fest is organized by SACHA, “a feminist, non-profit, community-based organization of women guided by anti-racist and anti-oppressive values.”
Yay!
Mark yr calendars, everyone!
The magical and exciting Philly Feminist Zinefest is BACK, and will happen on June 28 (tabling) and June 29 (workshops)!
Applications are open NOW until May 17, so get yours in today! (http://www.phillyfeministzinefest.com/registration.html)
This year it will be held at the Neighborhood House
Always mucho exciting to see another feminist zinefest pop up…we hope to see you there!! 🙂
Thanks to our awesome volunteer photographer, Ayelet Pearl, we can proudly present…photos of this year’s zinefest!
Here are just a few of the lovely shots Ayelet captured, bringing back the excitement & spirit of the day 🙂
Look for more photos soon to be posted under our Photos tab!
Kindly give us a short description of yourself and the work you do (from mission/about us)
For the Birds is a NYC-based feminist collective working to combat social inequality and challenge all forms of oppression through an intersectional feminist analysis of power both within our collective and in our larger society.
As a collective we value collaboration, shared knowledge, self-expression, and meaningful communication. We seek to combat transphobia, sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, capitalism and other forms of oppression, and to reflect on our own privileges. Our activism emphasizes the need for accessibility, safer spaces, and support within our communities.
WHAT WE DO:
How did you get introduced to zines? Were you influenced by anyone?
Many of us have experience in zine making and zine collecting. We’ve been inspired and empowered in our own feminism by many great feminist zines: Brainscan, Doris, Learning Good Consent, Hot Pantz, Moshtrogen, etc. All of the people behind these zines found a way to make their voice heard and disseminate a feminist analysis of the world or their own lives in a way that others could share and build on. We think that that kind of dialogue is what feminism is all about!
What does it mean to do “feminist zine-making”? Does feminism appear in your work (explicitly or implicitly)?
Our feminist distro is carefully reviewed by all members of the collective to ensure content is feminist and inclusive. Our distro includes titles that address issues important to us: sexual assault, consent and sexual health, mental and physical health, queer and trans narratives, stories from feminists within the punk scene and other alternative communities, and any narratives addressing how we can struggle productively against racism, homophobia, classism, ableism, capitalism and all other forms of oppression.
What is your favorite zine or piece of mail art? Do you like any specific style/part of a zine?
We wrote a zine, So You Want to Start a Feminist Collective, to describe our collective process, encourage others to start their own collectives, and share the knowledge we’ve gained together. In this zine, we answers questions about how we started and how we continue to operate as a group. We address problems we’ve faced, how we’ve negotiated those issues, the vital importance of communication, and more. The zine is both about our own collective process and a guide to starting similar projects in your own community. It’s our way of sharing the knowledge we’ve gained together.
If you could sum up your zinester life in a kitchen appliance, what appliance would it be?
A stand mixer. Bringing together ‘ingredients’ of feminism to make something wonderful!
Wow! After a crazy-quick 6 week buildup to the event, the zinefest came along…and was awesome!!!
Here’s a little photo of us organizers at the event:
<<<< photo credit: Ayelet Pearl >>>
Many thanks go out to everyone who tabled, bringing their enthusiasm & colorful zines…if you’re curious to see the list of who was there, or forgot the name of some sweet zinester, check our list of 2014 tablers here
Also many thanks to…Barnard College! For their support with this event, and a gigantic space
In case you want to re-live the fun times, we will soon be posting PHOTOS!
And here is one person’s recap of the event:
http://librarymanifesto.com/2014/03/defying-meanies-and-the-status-quo/
Bet you didn’t know we were going to have a live DJ at the Feminist Zine Fest this year! Kyara Andrade, a.k.a. DJ Troy Frost is an amazing artist and currently works at the Barnard Zine Library with one of our organizers, Jenna Freedman. Check out what she has to say in this special interview:
1. Give us a short description of yourself and the work you do (including any zine samples if you have them!)
My name is DJ Troy Frost. I identify as a prata*, DJ, oil painter, Hip Hop enthusiast, and a feminist supastar. When creating and engaging with art, my intention is to heal.
2. How did you come to make music and art? Do you have the same process for every type of media?
My mother and I would go to an art class offered at my high school every Wednesday and in that space I engaged with visual art in a comfortable, accessible way. Painting has been a way for me to process my feelings and experiences, while expressing things I don’t want to put words to. I was raised on hip hop music. I talk about it, critique it, and listen to it all the time. DJing is allowing me to contribute to the culture in a way that’s new, challenging, and fun for me! A part of my artistic process that is consistent is approaching each medium with humility, commitment and a willingness to connect with the people and the things around me.
3. What does it mean to do “feminist art/music-making”? Does feminism appear in your work (explicitly or implicitly)?
Doing what you love in the face of doubt, systems of oppression that actively work against you and your people, and just your everyday haters is feminist as fuck because you are writing your own narrative and sending the message to those around you that they can too.
As a black woman living below the poverty line, being financially secure is important to me. Sometime I doubt that I can fulfill that need and be an artist. Creating anyway, believing in myself anyway, fueling what I love anyway is a way that feminism appears in my life, having family and friends that love, encourage, and invest in me is a way that feminism appears in my life, and knowing that my and my peoples’ identities and unrefined narratives (pleasant or traumatic) deserve to be at the center rather than the margins is a way that feminism appears in my work. I hope that living my life this way will encourage those around me to invest in what they love, be apart of supportive communities, and explore the depth of their identity.
4. What is your favorite zine or piece of mail art? Did you have a seminal “zine moment”?
As of now my favorite zine is “Shotgun Seamstress” by Osa Atoe. The content is empowering and meaningful. I know very little about punk rock music/culture and SS has been an awesome starting point for me. Aesthetically, it’s AMAZING; I love the cut-and-paste element, the layouts, and the images. SS is the inspiration for a zine I’m currently working on that will explore the intersection of Hip Hop, Identity and Feminism (be on the look out <3). SS has made me think more critically about capitalism, consumerism, and blackness without leaving me lost in theory or ideas far-removed from my lived experience.
5. If you could sum up your creative life in a kitchen appliance, what appliance would it be?
Uh, wow this is hard. I would sum up my creative life in a pilon, which is a little bowl with a stick used to crush herbs, seasonings and other tasty ingredient that add the flavor, texture, excitement to my grandma’s dishes in the way that I add the flavor, excitement and style to the art forms that I explore and engage with. Hopefully that wasn’t too corny. 🙂
Ps: I am ecstatic about DJing for all the dope people that will be present on Saturday. See ya there!
* Prata means black girl in Cape Verdean Creole
China Martens – creator of The Future Generation and co-author of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind – talks to us about her mother’s influence, anarcha-feminism, and waffle irons, among many other things. Read her interview here:
Photo credit: Jenna B.
1. Kindly give us a short description of yourself and the work you do.
I’m an almost 48-year-old zinester (zines 4 life) that has had the idea of putting out a new issue of my zine, The Future Generation ever since Atomic Books issued the Revenge of Print challenge in 2011. I wonder how long you can go without putting out zines and call yourself a zinester? However I have put out zines more recently than the last issue of TFG, I tried to start up a literary zine called Catbird and put out three issues of that, and I was part of creating a zine (on ways to support children and parents) to hand out to the organizers at the Allied Media Conference; and I also put together a zine for the Kidz City Model. I find that I think in the form of a zine. I had to lay out the model, to see what it would look like. (And when I felt stumped I glued an outline on different colored construction paper to show my collective to get their input) I can’t just submit text without laying it out. How things fit on the page, with some images, will influence how I edit the words to fit. However I don’t make zines the way I used to, ”back in the day” when you had a hook up at kinkos and the world has changed so I actually don’t zerox a whole lot. I have been moving more and more in the direction of small press, since my first book came out in 2007 – The Future Generation: The Zine-book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others (Atomic Book Company) – which was a “best of” compilation of my zine that started in 1990. I like having others publish me, and also creating zines that others can zerox. It’s really wonderful to have someone else do that work. And now I work on other aspects that it takes to distribute that work, like getting the word out about it, which is also a practical hands on thing, like zeroxing. Its good to do stuff hands on. But I will always make zines, I think, although I make them less and less. My goal is to make the “middle age” issue of TFG for the zine fair! I still haven’t got started so I have a little more than a week. Wish me luck.
2. How did you get introduced to zines? Were you influenced by anyone?
Political underground zines in the punk and especially anarchist scene, and seeing a library of zines in the Processed World office in a warehouse I lived in for a few months called the Cave, (in 1985, SF) as well as self-published poetry chapbooks such as the ones by Damon Norko (Submensas, a DC band) when he walked around with “Poems 4 Sale” pinned to the back of his black trench coat on the U. of MD campus in the early 80s (where I attended two classes at the age of 15, in 1981 after I dropped out of high school), impressed me a lot. But I would say it started with my mother cutting and pasting a few handmade books for me as a child, out of notebook paper put in cardboard report covers, with glued in images cut from magazines and playful big bold subtitles. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were all seamstresses with materials, patterns, and pins (my mother was especially bad at that and it was usually my brother who would step on them) lying around the house. Perhaps that influenced me as well. All the different ways they created and were creative, artistic, generally pragmatic women.
3. What does it mean to do “feminist zine-making”? Does feminism appear in your work (explicitly or implicitly)?
I identify more as an anarcha-feminist and find it more interesting to talk about anarchism and zines, for some reason. Perhaps because I feel like my zine making came out of an underground scene that was anarchist, political, cultural, and subversive (including artistic, sometimes nihilistic, and gender non-conforming, border smashing, aesthetics) which included strong women (as well as gentle, weird, resilient, etc.) in all aspects as almost everything does. To me, as an ideal, anarchism is about liberation from all oppressions which would include sexism as well as racism, classism, capitalism, homophobia, colonialism, capitalism, and so on. Although it’s important to address issues directly as there is one thing about an ism and another thing about a practice; and I generally really like concentrating on specifics; as well as their intersections. I’m very obsessed with race and class issues – I feel like it’s so core to everything. Gender comes along with everything I do, and with the subject of parenting you would think so especially yet somehow I have sometimes felt pushed out by feminism in the late 80s and 90s – as a radical single welfare mom – that my concerns were not valued and my writing was not accepted. (That said I did often feel inspired by radical feminist writings in the 70s – which included more about children and mothering in them – as I searched for info.) On the other hand the most rad person or project in the world can identify as feminist. I take it as a case by case basic. I don’t get all caught up in labels very much. Although I still identify as an anarchist (even though white anarchists have issues with being racist, just the way that white feminists do, which is why whiteness needs direct attention on it; and in a similar way sexism would need direct attention on it, etc.) after all this time, but I make it my own way, do my own thing, define it however I like, and hay, we do need to use words or it would be hard to communicate at all. But I think a lot of folks would say my works have been explicitly feminist, I think you can say that. I don’t worry about it too much. Feminism is as feminism does.
4. What is your favorite zine or piece of mail art? Do you like any specific style/part of a zine?
I’m pretty attached to content. I like all different kinds of things and I like zines that are art-full as long as the words are important and not byproducts. That said I would not be against a heavily visual zine or whatever, different creative ways of making something. Whatever communicates to me, that’s the important thing. I value communication and especially that kind of communication that one person can make there own and put out in the world, no matter what anyone else tells them that it can’t be done or something about them or the way they communicate isn’t good enough to do what they do – they can do it. I love the informal and safer feeling of zines, which open up to endless possibilities for expression and creation. It’s kind of in the tradition of letter writing and other ways that marginalized groups use to communicate. I see them being very women friendly, like all the best things, I love women. I used to be a very mama-centric person. Now-as a post-empty nest single mama- I don’t know what I am. (Perhaps me-centric?) And what I like about zines is the diversity of voices that can express themselves which would not be welcomed in the mainstream. As a radical low-income single mother in the late 80s to 2K, my experiences, and my voice, along with my creative and irregular grammar, was not welcomed in the mainstream media as it would now (I don’t know how mainstream I am, but I’m up a level in small press and verging on mainstream that there are possibilities anyone would print me at all). What I love about zines is the power for a greater diversity of voices to take control and seize the power of the press.
5. If you could sum up your zinester life in a kitchen appliance, what appliance would it be?
I would say a waffle iron because its most like a zerox machine in that you open and close the lid and make many copies that are similar to each other, and its kind of hard to use and you have mishaps and people may be waiting for you but its going to take a while to make a stack, but they are extremely yummy. Disclaimer: I have rarely ever used a waffle iron but I do have a sandwich maker. Maybe I should have said that, but I find it less glamorous as well as less similar to my life as a zinester.
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NYC Feminist Zinefest 