how did you get involved in zines/d.i.y. publishing?
I grew up in a small terrible military town and the first I ever heard of zines was through Sassy magazine, like most people who grew up in small terrible towns. So I kind of knew what they were but it didn't occur to me that a zine was something I could actually make until I was 20 or 21. My friend Clyde was doing all kinds of amazing projects and was starting his zine In Your Room and I think we actually had a conversation where I asked him if he thought I could make a zine, and he said, "Uh, yeah, it's not that hard." It seemed very daunting to me for some reason. So that was how I started. The first issue of Glossolalia is pretty embarrassing.

why do you continue making paper zines in the age of the internet? how do you think the internet has affected the world of paper zines?
It would never occur to me to make a zine any other way. I don't really like computers or the internet. Obviously they are quite useful but I don't like reading things on the internet and I don't even like zines that have been laid out on a computer most of the time. I grew up without the internet; I didn't have email until I was 19 or 20, I don't think I even realized you could do things besides check your email with the internet until a few years after that, so it's still very alien and dehumanizing and impersonal and just basically not interesting to me. I like things that people have made with their hands and I like to make things with my hands, I like being able to smell the ink and look at the bindings and think about who made what I'm holding, what their story is. I love books, I like old things, and I like obsolete technologies. I have loved books my whole life, and there is a historicity to tactile objects that I love as well. I like rereading things, I like just looking at my books and zines and knowing they are there. Some of my books I've had since I was very small. It's actually kind of ridiculous, I've moved pretty much every year or two of my adult life, and I have somewhere around fifteen boxes of books, and sometimes I think about getting rid of them but I can't do it.

I am getting a website for my letterpress printing, as part of my process of attempting to pass as an "emerging artist," I think that is what they call it when you are a scrappy little urchin trying to make it big, "emerging artist." It's a little weird. I'm not opposed to the internet, I guess, I just don't like it.

what is your writing/editing/layout process like?
It's been different for every zine I've done. For both of my bike trip zines I kept a journal and the zine is more or less a heavily edited version of what I wrote while I was traveling. I tend to work on one thing for a long time; I'll put it down and not think about it for a few months and then come back and fuss over it some more. I am not, unfortunately, a particularly disciplined person, and I also usually have about sixty projects going at any given time, so it tends to take me a while. I am working right now on a zine about sexual assault and it is taking fucking forever, I literally write three or four sentences a month, because it's hard to think about and harder to write about. I want to do a good job. I have been leaning more toward doing collaborative projects too, which is a different process altogether.

how do you think the zine community or the process of making zines has changed since you've been involved?
It's hard for me to say, I don't really consider myself part of a zine community so I don't know how it might have changed. I also haven't been making zines for that long, just six or seven years. It seems like there are tons and tons of zine libraries now, which is so great, because one of the drawbacks of zines are that they are so ephemeral and produced in such limited amounts that is impossible to find a lot of them. I think that computers have changed everything, and larger distros have changed everything, more and more zines look like regular books, people do their layouts on computers, things like that. I try to be open-minded but I am a horrible curmudgeon, I don't like the aesthetics of a lot of those changes. But I guess there are a million terribly laid-out and ugly cut and paste zines too, so maybe I should stop being so fussy about it.

are you "out" to people in your life as a zinester? how do you explain it to people who don't understand?
All my friends have read my zine, and they're all really amazing and creative so there is no explaining involved. I'm not "out" to my family; they are good people, but they are also extremely conservative and I don't share much of my personal life with them. I don't talk about making zines very much because it's really not a huge part of my life in the way that other things I do are, like printing or bikes or, I don't know, revolutionary insurrection.

what do you like best about the zine world? what do you like least?
I get amazing, amazing letters from women who say "I read your zine and now I'm going to bike across the country," and it is just the most incredible feeling to be able to inspire that in people, or to be that little push that they needed. I never would have gotten letters like that if I had been writing for some glossy travel magazine. I love that I can read someone's zine and write them a letter about it, and they'll probably write me back, and if they ever come to my town we can go hang out and it's not weird and there is something so utterly great about that. It allows me to interact with people in a different way. In person I tend to be impossibly awkward and unapproachable so it is nice to have a different medium for exchange. I love too that there is a certain sense of safety, where I can write about being crazy and a survivor of sexual assault and struggling with my body image, all kinds of things, things that are very intensely personal experiences but also shared by a lot of women, and people are so open to it. And also the freedom in general, making something that is really for me but that seems to reach some other people too. As far as what I don't like, I think there are plenty of terrible zines, too, but I just don't read them.

do zines play a political role in your life? are you involved in other d.i.y. projects? do they play a political role?
I'm not sure if I would describe my zine as political. I would definitely identify myself as a very political person, and I think that tends to inform whatever I think about and write about. I've worked in domestic violence shelters off and on for most of my adult life and done a lot of community education around oppression and violence and racism, so I think of my political activism as being more direct. I don't really think of my politics as being especially radical. I work with women who have to go back to houses where they are getting the shit beaten out of them because their only other alternative is becoming homeless, often with their kids; they can't get work, because they can't afford childcare, and they can't get affordable housing, because there isn't any, and if they are dealing with substance abuse problems or medical problems they can't get treatment because they don't have health insurance, and I think that's pretty inexcusable in a country rich enough to spend billions of dollars every year bombing the shit out of civilians. I don't see what is in any way radical about pointing that out, it just seems like common sense to me. I think in a lot of ways art and my zine are more of a break for me, where I don't have to deal with those issues in as immediate or intense of a way, because that job is so heartbreaking and so hard that sometimes I just want to think about riding my bike around or making a poster that looks nice. We live in a pretty overwhelming world and I think the only way to survive is to learn to embrace beauty wherever you can find it. But everything I do is really informed by that anger, that sense of injustice; and so I guess everything I make is political in that sense.

I'm also a letterpress printer and I do shadow puppet shows with my housemates, which are not remotely political, but they are totally awesome. Right now we are working on a show about the French Revolution, which is all in French with subtitles, and there is a whole lot of guillotining and wine-drinking (by the puppets) and also a lot of cussing in French.

what advice might you have for someone who is new to the zine community?
If your zine sounds anything like Evasion please keep it to yourself.

what role do you think distros can/should play in the zine community?
I am not much of a self-promoter so distros are great for me in that sense, because my zine gets to people it would never get to otherwise. Learning to Leave a Paper Trail is actually the only distro that carries my zine. I don't really approach people or send it out or anything. There definitely seems to be a tendency toward a few distros getting really huge, and I think it is always problematic when a few people get to decide what a lot of people have access to. Capitalism is really the most genius system in the world; even in ostensibly radical circles we continue to replicate the same old thing. It's like The Man goes on vacation and we keep doing his job for him. I really understand the idea of wanting to get paid for what you do, I think the punk ethic of mandated voluntary poverty is kind of self-defeating, but there is also a really fine balance between making a living and making a living at the expense of other people. After a certain point a distro is no different than any other institutionalized media, regardless of what it's distributing, because anything that large is privileging certain people's voices and deciding what gets read and what doesn't. But I think it's also really great to see more and more zines getting into the hands of more and more people, because the more people who are inspired to tell their stories and make something beautiful the better.

are there changes you'd like to see in the zine community or your own zine creation?
I haven't put out an issue in over a year so maybe just making a zine would be a good start. I am more interested in book arts than in zines right now so whatever I do next will be influenced by that. I think it is always great to see new zines and book projects, thinks like the Mobilivre, or Booklyn. I think we should really take ourselves seriously as artists and make things that are beautiful and passionate and real.

pick up sarah's zine, "glossolalia" through the distro, & check out her letterpress projects on her website.