The other day I finished reading Katie's zine, The House You Grew Up In. I am almost ashamed to admit that it is the first zine I have ever read. One of the things that impressed me most was the uncanny union of the content and the vehicle of conveyance. What I mean is that if one were to put together an anthology of zines you would have to do it in facsimile, because something essential would be lost if you just had the text and not the text as it appeared in the zine.There's plenty worth quoting, but I don't want to be a spoiler so I'll confine myself to just two snippets.
First, there's Amber Farthing's dry observation: "I never felt any connection with Dad. He was some man with a big beard that hung around sometimes.
He left for work before I got out of bed in the mornings, and sometimes didn't come home for days on end.I remember him muttering something along the lines of 'fuck this,' grabbing his jacket from the coatrack and walking out the door."
Then there's Jennafur Lee Parks' "The Beautiful Battlefield: "I grew up with constant reminders of being unwanted. My mum was the only one who took care of me and helped me grow up into what I would become. She made my house a home as best she could. ... I was growing up faster than I was supposed to thanks to my father who stole all the good inside me, leaving me empty. It would be years until I learned the truth about what happened to me and why I never wanted to go to my dad's house overnight."
The zine only costs a couple of bucks. Buy a copy. You won't be disappointed - and it seems to me this is a hell of lot more cutting edge than most of what you'll find on the NYT's best-seller list.
Thank you so much for this review, Frank. I'm happy that you've enjoyed the zine. I also really appreciate your thoughtful comments about the form of the zine being an important aspect of its content. You hit the nail on the head, though I only discovered how true this is for myself by MAKING zines. Each time I set about making a new one I find, increasingly, that the way I think about what I'll write (or anthologize) is inseparable from the visual aspect of the physical object—the construction of the book, the way the words will look on the page, the size and shape of the finished product. In this medium, for me, these things are inseparable from the writing itself.
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