how did you get involved in zines/d.i.y. publishing?

I'd been cooking and baking a lot since high school (where I had a few zinester friends), especially after I left for college and became vegan. One of my friends liked my dessert recipes so much that s/he told me "you should write a cookbook", so I did.

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?

I really enjoy the act of physically creating my zines and computer-based design is nowhere near as satisfying to me as paper and pen. While the internet is useful for sharing information, there is something charming about the zine as an art object/artifact, something personal that most websites and blogs lack. Also, for cookbooks in particular I like to have something that can be set down beside the mixing bowl for easy reference, that can get dirty and dog-eared, and that can be flipped through casually before dinnertime. Finally, not everyone has or wants a computer or internet access, and insofar as zines carry the connotation of independent and anti-establishment works they have to be able to exist outside of such an increasingly commercial medium.

The internet does provide an easy alternative for people who aren't necessarily committed to the physical layout, printing, and distribution process, and can be used to supplement and distribute paper zines. To that end I periodically update my own cookblog (www.iwasateenagevegancook.blog.com), where I add/illustrate/extrapolate recipes and provide a paperless download option for my printed work.

what is your writing/editing/layout process like?

I usually carry around a little notebook to record ideas as they come to me, which, in the case of my cookzines, could be anything from potential flavor combinations or recipes, cookbook themes and titles, pithy anecdotes, other peoples' comments on my work, or graphic design ideas, as well as the ingredients and results of my cooking/baking experiments. Once I feel like I have a good amount of workable recipes and a coherent theme I'll start doing the actual design, first by settling on a graphical style, then sketching a rough draft of the cover and a storyboard-style layout of the interior pages. After I've finalized the recipes and accompanying text I fold a bunch of paper into facing pages, plot out all of the margins and guidelines, lightly pencil in the text and illustrations, then ink everything in. Finally, I scan the whole thing and make any final edits or corrections in photoshop, save the pages as .pdf files, and print them out.

how do you think the zine community or the process of making zines has changed since you've been involved?

I don't know too much about the zine community, being something of a curmudgeonly hermit myself, but just based on the audience that my own work has found I'd say that it has gotten larger recently thanks to the internet, if not necessarily more mainstream. As for the zine-making process, I think people are using computer technology more frequently as it has become more readily available, especially in combination with older-school layout and design methods like screen-printing, hand-drawing, photo-copying, and type-writering.

are you "out" to people in your life as a zinester? how do you explain it to people who don't understand?

I don't go out of my way to keep my zines a secret, though I usually only mention them to people if I think they'll be interested. Most people can understand the idea of cookbooks all right, so I'll sometimes just leave it at that and let them figure out the whole anti-capitalist/queer/post-modern comic book/cultural commentary angle themselves.

what do you like best about the zine world? what do you like least?

I like that the zine world still exists as an independent/underground scene. Reading zines is a good way to find out what some other possibly like-minded people in the world are doing and thinking about, and the level of artistry some people bring to their work can be inspiring, too. I dislike that zinesters can be overly self-involved sometimes, but that's true of people in general, so whatever.

do zines play a political role in your life? are you involved in other d.i.y. projects? do they play a political role?

Zines are definitely political for me; veganism is a polarizing subject in its own right, and I'm not above slipping subversive non sequiturs into the margins of my recipes as well. The most political aspect of my work, though, is probably just that I'm trying to create and share something outside of the larger capitalist marketplace, thereby taking a personal stand against commodification. I would say that my occasional work as an independent musician and writer is political in the same way.

what advice might you have for someone who is new to the zine community?

The community is as important as you make it, and you shouldn't be turned off from making zines out of concern that you might not be hip enough to hang with all of us cool kids. The work itself is the important thing, so write in isolation if you have to, then share it with as much or as little of the world as you want. Read some other peoples' work while you're at it and that's your zine community right there.

what role do you think distros can/should play in the zine community?

Distros should make it easier for people writing zines to share their work, expanding their potential audience and allowing authors to see what others are writing about. They also can serve as filters, as the people running them can decide which zines to carry in their inventory based on quality or content considerations. I think the best distros are the ones that have personality and politics of their own.

are there changes you'd like to see in the zine community or your own zine creation?

My own work has become increasingly illustrated, to the point where it is almost as much a graphic novel as a cookbook. If and when I make another volume I'd like to see how much further the boundary between the two can be blurred while still producing something useful and entertaining. I should probably learn how to draw.

you can get max's zines, "i was a teenage vegan cookbook", through the distro.