The Zine and the Zeitgeist

Discovering a whole world in eight paper panels

Zines, along with other analog tools and practices and artifacts, are having a moment right now.

Optimistically, this could be because folks are rediscovering their own humanity…seeking out the handmade instead of the mass produced…craving community and connection rather than isolation…slowing down when everything around them is speeding up.

Pessimistically, this is just another hipster/new-agey/relentless self-optimization fad.

(But because I don’t see myself as falling into the latter category, I’m going to go with the first explanation.)

WTH are “zines”?

There is thriving zine community here on Substack, which I found by using the handy-dandy search bar.¹ But you may know what a zine is even if you’ve never heard the term. Also, maybe because of the Moment zines are having, seems like lots of other types of initiatives are calling themselves zines when they are really not zines. Yet at the same time, there is a wide range of things that can be “properly” called zine so maybe those non-zine things are, in fact, zines.

So it’s confusing, maybe.

But basically, think of zines using the following word association:

• DIY (do-it-yourself)

• counter-culture

• marginalized communities

• micro-, guerrilla-, indie-, self-publishing

• self-expression

• non-commercial/ad-free

• hand-to-hand distribution

That’s enough of a list right now to hopefully give you the gist. I won’t attempt any kind of “formal” definition because I’m definitely no expert. Plus, if you’re not already knowledgable about zines I think it would be more fun for you to poke around and go down all sorts of interesting rabbit holes exploring the concept yourself. Bottom line: zines have a long and fascinating history and though they may have been more prevalent in the past, they never truly went away.

Zines and Me

I don’t have any clear memories of when I first knew about zines or saw one. But I think I’ve been aware of them since childhood. During my young childhood days in the 70s, my parents were hippie-adjacent²: my father—a clinical psychology grad student + my mother—a teacher and musician = me…and a childhood that I thought was normal for folks my age until I got to be older and learned otherwise. My sister and I accompanied our parents on all manner of outings like arts festivals and past lives regression workshops and encounter group long weekends and musical adaptations of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. So maybe my first exposure to zines was in some of these spaces.

For sure as a child I used to make little booklets with my artwork and writing using sheets of paper and a stapler. (Side bar: as a child my greatest aspiration was having a grown-up job where I would have unlimited access to office supplies.) I’m sure I must have given these magazine-type things away to family members and friends, but I definitely didn’t call my little offerings zines.

70s era Yvette (the tall lanky gal) with family (photo courtesy Andrea Lacy Perry)

Or maybe I was first formally introduced to zines as a college student in the 80s. I was constantly being handed flyers and magazines and newspapers and booklets cutting through Harvard Yard on my way to class (Lesley College, not Harvard) or just hanging out around town. All over metro Boston and all over the places along the Atlantic coast I visited there were street vendors hawking handmade jewelry and incense and tapes and revolutionary tracts…and self-published booklets.

I actually remember a couple of these…but I didn’t save them long term or anything. And I certainly didn’t know they were called zines.

Fast Forward to Now

When I first decided to start this Substack, I had in inkling in the back of my mind that I would also try producing hard copy zines. At first, my thinking was that I’d just create versions of some of my poems on paper with a few lines or stanzas on each page, add a QR code to my Substack podcast post of me reading the poem, and send them out to a few folks via happy mail.

And I did that, making each zine/card a one-off with glued-on elements and a print of one of my photographs on the cover.

Images from my prototype poem zine (photos by Yvette Perry)

Then I thought that I would try a zine that included a poem as one element, but also included more photography than just the cover, as well as art projects and other writing.

Another change: Instead of each zine being a one-off, I schlepped my original master with all the glued on dried flowers and washi tape and other collage stuff and original photos to my local Kinko’s/FedEx Office and used the self-service photocopier to produce flat, non-3D copies for distribution.

I also decided to try to follow what a former colleague of mine used to call the 5-B Rule: “Be brief, brother, be brief.” For these two zine efforts I folded a single-sheet of 11-in by 17-in paper in a way that resulted in a booklet with eight pages or panels. I wanted to force myself to think intentionally about what to include in the zines and not overdo it. My aim for these was not to write a novel or dissertation—just something that someone could read/look at in a couple of minutes.

I am very pleased with the results:

Master copies of Margin\Release\Zine—issue #1: Hidden and issue #2: Suscitare, 2025 (photo by Yvette Perry)

A Perfect Project for My Current Moment

In the case of both issues of the zine, I started out with a very simple idea and explored it in a focused way.

For the first issue, I gave myself a writing prompt. I challenged myself to find 7-10 photos of myself and write a poem or a line or stanza of a poem that was inspired by each photo. This was a LOT harder than I imagined. First, I am not really a “selfie” person and do not pose often for pictures so have very few photos of just myself. Second, the photo essay poem that I created forced me to be incredibly and surprisingly vulnerable—another rarity for me.

The second zine issue was more along the lines of my poem zine prototype. I explored a single concept at multiple levels—me personally, a healthcare provider, nationally—through a couple mini-collages and a poem that I wrote for The Good Listening Project.

Detail from Margin\Release\Zine issue #1: Hidden (photo by Yvette Perry)

This experiment has been just what I needed at this moment in my life.

I created something physical that was outside of my comfort zone. I had to resist making and re-making the zines a hundred times in order to get the spreads to look “perfect”—part of the ethos of zines is that they are supposed to look as if they were made by a single human’s hands and not mass produced by a team of graphic designers and other professionals. I problem solved many aspects of the making process and made really fun design decisions as I went along.

I’m currently in the process of mailing out physical copies of these first two issues to subscribers of Margin\Release. Human-to-human connection is also part of the zine ethos, and driving to one of my local United States Post Office locations, standing in line with my neighbors, selecting and buying postage stamps, and mailing envelopes stuffed with my zines is a journey that cannot be recreated by clicking “submit” on a Substack post.

I learned so much about myself as a person and as a maker through this process. I don’t know if there will be an issue 3 of the zine. And if there is, there is no telling right now when it will come out and what it will be about.

But I’m glad that I made these two at least. I feel like I fed that little girl with the afro puff earnestly making little booklets with her hand-me-down stapler.

1. There is also a large zine community on YouTube. One of my current favorite YouTube zine content creators is https://www.youtube.com/@brattyxbre.

2. My sister just calls them “hippies.” Granted, besides their occupations they displayed many other hippie characteristics. But I chalk those things up mainly to us living on a college campus in the 70s and not full-on flower-child, living in a commune, driving around in hand-painted VW van hippies.