- Emily Larned

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Monica
Lauren
Shari
Amy
Nicole
Kristin
Lesley
Sasha & Tara Emelye
Emily
Cindy
Yumi
Fran
Elissa
Eleanor
Sarah
Sara
Anne & Jenna
Sara
Teri
Marina
Muffie
Ellen
Jeff
Abby
Keight
Lauren
Sandi
Marissa
Ciara
Erin
Menghsin
Sara
Amy
Claire
Nicole
Molly
STS
Bea Bea
Miel
Aberration
Arrowed
Baa I’m a Sheep
Babykins
Beri-Beri
Bomb
Butter Beetle
Cupsize
Daffodil
Doris
External Text
Grit
Hope
Indulgence
In Morning Clouds
Kusp
Loud as Hell
Manifixation
Melt the snow
Miss Mary Mack
My new gun
Noisemaker
Otaku
Pearl Tongue
Pink Tea
Quantify
Raspberry
Red Hooded Sweatshirt
A Renegade’s Handbook to Love & Sabotage
Ritalin
Sidetracked
Sourpuss
Southern Fried Darling
Spunk
To Win Your Heart in Chess & Cards
Tyger Voyage
Way Down Low
Y is for Yuck
Ziplocked
You know, I didn’t necessarily build
super tight relationships with people
that I only knew through trading
zines, but getting those letters and
zines in the mail made me feel like I
had a community, a crew, even if
a loose-knit one — which was really
what I felt lacking in my later high
school years.
— Sara Manifixation
Zines were extremely important to
me... I didn’t have quite as isolated
a high school experience as many
people did, having lived in a fairly big
city as a teen, but being able to communicate directly with like-minded
others, in this very personal and
intense way which incorporated art
and creativity, was a lifesaver to me
as a teen. I feel like I made many deep,
lasting relationships and was able to
make those fairly quickly because the
personal nature of zines allowed us to
sort of sidestep all of the small-talkgetting-to-know-you part of meeting
a person, and delve right into the important stuff. All of the people I traded
regularly with are still doing amazing, inspirational things with their
lives and I feel lucky to know them!
— Nicole To Win Your Heart in Chess ...
As a young adult living in Maine,
which was a pretty isolated state,
zines were really my mainstay as
far as connecting socially with other
young people that shared similar
politics, musical and artistic tastes
and identities to me. I treasured that
aspect of the zine trading culture and
when I met up with other zinesters
I felt more comfortable with them
than with people I had known for a
longtime in Maine. In my early 20’s
when I moved to Portland and then
NYC zines served as my introduction
to a whole community of people that I
could actually be friends in “real life”
with. The connections I made with
zine makers brought me longtime
friendships, a roommate of 7 years,
and a career path as an arts educator and advocate. While now I look at
them as more as something in my
past that has shaped my present and
something I will always come back
to — I started making a zine partly
because I love writing and still do love
writing and still plan to be a published author — I feel like zines have
had an immeasurable impact on
my life and for that I will always be
grateful.
— Eleanor Indulgence
Although I wasn’t entirely alienated
in high school, trading zines provided
an incredible outlet for my need to
*make stuff* and share it. It also gave
this awesome network of like-minded
people, especially young women, that
had a similar need / passion for making stuff. Opening that mailbox and
finding beautifully hand-addressed
packages was the absolute highlight
of my day. It definitely gave me a feeling of belonging, something I think
most teenagers (or people in general)
want.
— Amy Babykins
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designed & curated by Emily Larned, www.redcharming.com
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CURATOR’S NOTE
Immediately preceding the popularization of the
internet, in the 1990s, self-publishing experienced
a major renaissance in the form of zines. The word
“zine,” denoting a self-published, photocopied, amateur
magazine, is derived from its “fanzine” predecessors of
the 1930s sci-fi and 1970s punk rock subcultures. By
the early 90s, thousands of zines on hundreds of topics
were published by people who freely exchanged their
work via the US Postal Service. Opposed to mainstream
culture and market principles, zine culture fostered in
its makers a sense of collective community as well as
individual self-actualization. The ubiquitous practices of
trades and reviews — almost every zine traded with and
reviewed other zines — fostered a mutually supportive
network of makers.
This exhibition provides a glimpse of a zine network
from this period, 1992–2002. Each of these zines traded
with me, as well as with at least two other included
zines. Due to constraints of time and space, the depicted
network is incomplete. The featured zines also traded
with dozens or in some cases hundreds of other zines
not pictured — and, no doubt, some of the included
zines traded with each other without leaving a trail I
could detect. Regardless of its shortcomings, I hope this
exhibition provides you with a snapshot of our little
corner of the 90s zine network. It was a great place to
grow up.
— Emily Muffin Bones
Memorytown USA
Parfait
The social aspect of zine-making was
crucial to me as a shy teenager, in
addition to the literary, artistic, and
political aspects. I can go so far as
to say that the connections I made
through zines a decade or more ago
have shaped the course my life in
some very substantial ways. The most
obvious is that I met my first boyfriend through zines, and moved to
Canada to be with him; I’ve been here
for almost 10 years now.
In any case, there was always something I found lovely and powerful
in this idea of a web of connections
branching out from bedrooms across
the country (countries!), each of us
working on our zines, sending letters,
receiving letters. Certainly there is
something romantic about this
exchange of idea and sentiment by
way of hand-written or –typed letters,
a whole culture of epistolary friendship and community.
There was a great article a while
back on Pitchfork, the music website,
about the history of twee music, and I
thought it touched on a lot of relevant
ideas — in the context of making
“cute” music as a kind of response to
a compelling but sometimes alienating punk rock culture, but also about
a similar compulsion to create and
distribute zines. Zines were a really
practical venue for shy or alienated
kids before the advent of the internet, but I think with a touching and
visceral hand-made quality that lent
an even more intimate character to
these connections. We knew each
other’s handwriting before we knew
each other’s faces and last names, if
in fact we ever did.
— Molly Tyger Voyage