At the beginning of Christmas break, I sent my favorite high school teacher an email asking if I could come in to visit his class. He replied, to my excitement, with an enthusiastic yes, followed by a request to "Bring zines!" A few days later, I walked into his classroom with a tote bag full of my own zines and ones I had acquired from various conventions and campus organizations. I greeted my teacher and a few students I knew from years of class together and unceremoniously dumped the contents of my bag onto the front table for them to come and look through.
To backpedal a little, "zine" is short for "magazine" (technically, for "fanzine," a magazine created for the fanbase of a certain interest) and refers to any self-published work of text and images, usually in the form of a leaflet or pamphlet. Zines have evolved over time, from a necessary form of communication and information sharing that relied on photocopiers to a sort of self-indulgent type of art narrowly focused on a message that the creator or creators would like to broadcast.
I found out about zines through social media as they recently came back into vogue, worked on a few with my photography class in high school and signed up for the class at UNC as soon as I saw it was an option.
The zines I'd made this semester were fairly personal, but I'd found that this was a format through which I didn't feel embarrassed to share nerdy facts about my favorite pieces of media or to write an autobiographical comic about the difficulty I'd had coming to terms with my queer identity. The class itself, even though it met late in the evening, was a cathartic reprieve from the rest of my stressful week, complete with people that I enjoyed and trusted with an authentic version of myself.
Still, I wasn't sure how I felt about my work outside that space, especially in a place where I historically hadn't been comfortable expressing myself. From a design standpoint, I knew the composition held up, but I didn't want my younger peers to read what I'd scrawled alongside my illustrations and question what I could possibly mean about the inherent spirituality of being in a queer relationship and having to identify yourself to people as "other", or scoff at my admiration for certain public figures, or laugh about my unabashed love for Pokemon Go (granted, I would definitely understand that one, but it would still sting a little). It went well, though, with everyone expressing praise or at least general approval by the end of the block, and in the end, I'm glad that I shared that part of myself with people.
Some of the students also told me that although their class had put together a zine to showcase their photography work, they hadn't known that it was a legitimate art form outside of class assignments, so I'm happy to have in some way introduced them to what I now believe to be my favorite method of making art.
