Tag: zinesters

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interviews with zinesters – katherine raz

Note – I am slowly going through and cleaning up my folders on our hard drive. I just came across a bunch of old interviews I did with people while I was a journalism student at Columbia College Chicago. I think this interview is from an article I was working on for a magazine writing class. I am not sure. I only vaguely remember working on this project. You can tell from my repeated questions that I had some thesis that I was trying to cover, but I can’t remember what it was specifically. I think they are from 1999. At that time, I was a dumb kid, so I probably didn’t appreciate the time that these people took to answer the questions. But I do now. Thank you very much to Andrew Scott, Dan Sinker, Matt Cordell, Karl Erickson, Gretchen Larsen, Julie Halpern and Katherine Raz. If you are one of the interviewees and want your interview taken down, please let me know. I am putting them here for posterity and nerdy archival reasons.

Katherine Raz – Apple Scruff and Retail Whore

What was the name of yr zine? What was its purpose? What was it about? How long did it last? Were you the only person working on it? Where was it based out of?

It was called Apple Scruff, and it was mostly about people who were overly-obsessed with celebrities. In the zine world I think there are a lot of people who have unhealthy crushes on famous people, so that’s what Apple Scruff celebrated – the sick celebrity obsession. It lasted for about a year, my senior year in high school. Based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While I had contributors, I was the only one doing lay-out, photocopying, mailing, etc.

Why did you start making yr zine? What were yr goals and did you meet any of them?

I started doing it after I’d been reading zines for about a year. I just wanted to do it myself. You can’t make a profit so that certainly wasn’t a goal. I was written up in Factsheet Five, and they liked it, so I guess that was pretty cool. Otherwise, just a broad base of subscribers and enough people to send sad letters when I said I wasn’t doing it anymore. It just gave me a lot of personal satisfaction to get my own stuff out. It was like therapy.

How large did your zine get? How widely read?

At its peak I think Apple Scruff had about 50 on the mailing list. Read as far and wide as New Zealand. People at my high school read it, too. Once it was written up in FS5 I had a lot of people writing in for single copies which were one dollar.

Do you still read zines? Do you feel like there’s a zine community in Chicago? is it strong or weak? Would you improve it?

Yes I still read zines. There are some particular ones I pick up whenever I go to Reckless or the Clubhouse. I think – yes, to a certain extent Chicago has a good zine community. There are a few organizations that actually are trying to collect zines for posterity here. One in particular is the Chicago Great Lakes Underground Press Collection (headed by Kathryn DeGraff). It’s a part of Depaul that is trying to collect zines from the Great Lakes area. You can go visit it whenever they’re open – I think they’re part of the library up there. Quimbys is a great place to pick up zines. So there’s no lack of support for zinesters. I think the improvements should come from the authors themselves. There needs to be more zines – and the people who write their own should continue to do so with more regularity. Because it’s getting kind of scarce out there since the downfall of FS5 two years ago. I think there needs to be more communication between zine writers – more of a community.

Were you happy with how yr zine turned out?

Yes, I was very happy. I didn’t expect it to get the strange cult following it did. After all, I was only 17 when I started it.

Why did you stop making yr zine? or did you? Were you fed up with it? Tired of it? Bored of it?

I stopped making it because I started to get really big into music, not celebrity crushes. I felt like I was reaching for things to write about. Like the guy who does Rock’n’Roll High School zine here in Chicago – he was an atheist and wrote about punk/hardcore. Then he “found Jesus” and had to change his zine. People’s tastes change. It takes all your passion and all your free time and a lot of your spending cash to do a zine and get it out there. If you’re no longer willing to dedicate all that time to it, it doesn’t work anymore. Also, because I moved to Chicago I couldn’t make copies for free at my job anymore. I didn’t have space in the apartment for layout, etc.

What zines did you read or do you read? What zines inspired you to do yr own zine? Or was there an event or something else that inspired you to do the zine?

I read anything I can get my hands on. I love to go to Quimbys and just sit there reading for an hour or so. I’m sure they hate me because I never buy anything. Same with Reckless. Right now I’m big into the local Chicago zines, music zines, and the zines about zines (Zine Guide is a great one). A few titles everyone should check out: Puberty Strike, Cometbus, Scaredy Kat Stalker (now defunct), and there was this one called 1544 West Grace that was all about this apartment buidling in Chicago.

Was yr zine a personal zine? Did you consider it a personal zine? Or something else?

It was personal, but all zines are. It dealt with a subject. It wasn’t about me, per se, but then it was my zine, so of course it was about me or whatever I wanted to talk about.

Did you have any horror story experiences making yr zine? What were they? Will you ever do any other zines? Or are you done forever?

My zine was about celebrity obsession but there was an article I did about someone who I was obsessed with in high school (an upper classman who had graduated). The article basically detailed all the stupid stalking techniques I had developed in order to see him more often, collect artifacts from his friends (pop cans, homework, etc.) and “drop in” on his classes, etc. It was basically done tongue-in-cheek, but later on I found out he moved to Chicago and went to Columbia College. Then I saw him at a party and he was like, Yeah, I read your zine… HORROR! Zines are so personal that doing them is very self-divulging. People who you don’t know can learn a lot about you and you just have to be willing to put yourself out there.

I will probably be involved in the zine community – I support it, I read zines, I still write for other people’s. But it’s something that I have put on the back-burner because, as you know, Columbia takes up a lot of time. I’m a real journalism student now, so I have to focus on getting my clips out to a more broad audience. I’m not done forever. Who knows, maybe I’ll do one from the nursing home when I retire.

What was yr step by step process from brainstorming to final product and distribution? Did you have any rituals for yr process? Like did you start by writing in a notebook or computer or did you just improvise straight to the zine page? How did you print yr zine? Xerox? Offset? How did you pay for the cost?

I took 10-20 sheets of blank computer paper and folded them in half. Then I cut and pasted computer-generated articles (and typewriter generated as well) onto the blank sheets. I used the copy machine at my dad’s office for free. The layout was a long process. The room at home where I did it was a disaster area (paper shreds, clippings, gluestick, stapler, address books, other zines). Rituals: CD player! Lots of music (probably how I started listening to music so much) – at the end of every zine I had a section called Audio Survival which said which CDs I’d been listening to while preparing that issue.

I came up with ideas for articles and wrote most of the articles during Pre-Calculus, American History, and Psychology class in my senior year of high school. Also at my job, which was at the periodicals desk at a library. When I had free time, I just wrote about whatever came to mind.

The cost of postage was covered by the one dollar people sent me to send it to them. Inmates got it for free, so a lot of prisoners read it. It actually was pretty cool because prisoners become very obsessed with celebrities. There’s not much else to do. But I never went into debt because of it.

What makes a zine good to you? What elements make a zine good to you?

Zines are good when they’re personal. When they have rants and raves, and they touch on the ever-human trials and tribulations that real life involves. Good writing is of upmost importance. You have to have a good, conversational writing style. Organization, while some zines are cut-and-paste and hard to read, the ones that have some sort of organizational flow to them are usually the most interesting. Diversity. Have a number of different writers and opinions.

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interviews with zinesters – matt cordell

Note – I am slowly going through and cleaning up my folders on our hard drive. I just came across a bunch of old interviews I did with people while I was a journalism student at Columbia College Chicago. I think this interview is from an article I was working on for a magazine writing class. I am not sure. I only vaguely remember working on this project. You can tell from my repeated questions that I had some thesis that I was trying to cover, but I can’t remember what it was specifically. I think they are from 1999. At that time, I was a dumb kid, so I probably didn’t appreciate the time that these people took to answer the questions. But I do now. Thank you very much to Andrew Scott, Dan Sinker, Matt Cordell, Karl Erickson, Gretchen Larsen, Julie Halpern and Katherine Raz. If you are one of the interviewees and want your interview taken down, please let me know. I am putting them here for posterity and nerdy archival reasons.

Matt Cordell – The Plan

What’s your zine making process? Do you start in a notebook and then move to the zine, do you write directly into the zine, what? How do you print? Do you xerox, do you actually print? Do you scam? Do you have connections or do you have to pay, like me? Do you have any advice on any of this?

I was writing everything, hand-writing everything, in a legal pad and on notebook paper and on backs of old photocopies and other scraps of paper, then editing all of it, over and over. Then when I was finally done, I would jump onto one of my old typewriters and start typing away. I typed on the pages, actual size (1/2 of a letter size sheet of paper), made some paste ups and on to the copies. Now I’m typing it on the computer. It’s easier for me that way, with all my editing time. I think I’ll still end up using my typewriter for final type. I have a formula for printing the zine. I pay for half of the ones I print, and the rest I, uh, acquire through other means. It’s all photocopied. I don’t have the money or the quantities to have it offset.

Once you start a zine, how do you keep the momentum going? How do you finish the issue? How do you keep making more issues? Any advice?

With me, it’s hard cause my zine isn’t my number one priority. Primarily I’m working on paintings. But I love to write, so I’m finding time to do both. The zine will be much less available than my paintings, but I’d like to think I’ll keep it going. I always have these ideas of things I want to put in it. The main thing, for me, is getting the stories down when I’m thinking of them, or soon after, or I’ll just forget. It’s hard to get started on doing anything like that, but once I’m started it rolls.

What makes a good zine to you? What are the elements that you look for in a zine?

I just like good stories.

Could you take us step by step into the process of making your zine, from beginning to end? Like, say you were giving a workshop or class on how to do your own zine or something for a bunch of people who have never done a zine.

Okay. I’m presently fucked up on an over-the-counter drug named Drixoral. And that’s not in a cool way, like, I didn’t buy it to get fucked up, it just sort of happened that way – by default – since nature picked this (2000) for the first year she’ll fuck me down with a springtime allergy problem. I don’t understand it. Maybe it means I’m getting old. At any rate, I went out on a limb and bought a box of this so-called Drixoral and it’s got me all the loopy. This person in a desk beside me, she just said David Duchovny. Indeed she did.

My process is very simple, and it goes a little like:

I write the stories. I pick 3 or four or however may make a meaty little magazine and I start jotting them down on pieces of paper or backs of pieces of paper and then edit. Oh the editing. The editing is a thing that I do not like, but it does tell of my problem with not being able to let a thing go. I edit til the cows do come home. Then I make it into a readable piece of thing. I.E., I start typing on some sort of machine. I like to stay away from the computer on most occasions, cause everyday at work I must bond myself to one of those. Computers. I used a typewriter (sans correction tape or ribbon or film) for issue one and it was a bitch. I might not do that anymore, but it does look nice. Then after I get it all typed up and ready to reproduce, I have to make a little mock up (about the size of a wallet sized photograph – that is, when the mock up has been folded) and figure out what page goes on what sheet or back of sheet (you have to do this thing with a saddle-stiched book). Once I get the idea of how it works, I make a master – a paste up. Then I figure out how to do it as cheaply as possible – meaning creative ways to acquire cheap if not free copies.

Soonafter, it’s money, money, money. The zine is on the shelves (oh, I distribute it to the few zine-y shops of Chicago, just before the whopping payback arrives). I take a bath in the paper moneys and bite all the coins to test that they’re real gold.