how did you get involved in zines/d.i.y. publishing?
i got into zines in much the same way as so many zine girls around my age. i bought a "sassy" magazine in early '91 & was captivated by the "zine of the month" column. that dovetailed with a period of time in which my parents were pretty involved in local music scenes in toledo, detroit, cleveland, chicago, etc. they had a lot of friends in bands, friends running d.i.y. record labels, contacts working at the regional independent music magazines, many of which fit under the umbrella concept of "zines". i taught myself how to read & write when i was two years old, & started making my own books around the same age. in elementary school, i won a few writing contests & got to go to children's writing conferences & meet real authors like steven kellogg (the guy who wrote the boa constrictor stories). i got a lot of encouragement from teachers, my parents, my parents' friends, to pursue writing, but i was only 12 years old in 1991--i knew there were no publishing deals on my immediate horizon. so the concrete example of these independent music zines combined with the knowledge that there are people self-publishing that are not writing about music inspired me to try it myself.

thanks in part to "sassy" & in part to my parents' hip friends, i found out about bands like bikini kill & babes in toyland. my family lived in rural isolation in northwest ohio, but my interest in these bands led to some pen pal relationships, & some of those pen pals were already writing zines. i started contributing to their publications (this was back in the day when that was totally standard, even for personal zines) & eventually i started my own zine in 1993 or 1994. i was really locked into the riot grrrl thing for the first few years, but eventually that dissipated & became more of a trend of personal zine-writing encompassing punks, travelers, anarchists…& here i am, almost sixteen years later, still at it.

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?
as i mentioned previously, i spent my formative years living three miles outside a tiny rural village in northwest ohio. it was a common occurrence for the electricity to go out; we didn't have access to the internet. i didn't have an e-mail address until 1998, when i started college. computers never held any appeal for me. i wouldn't even have a computer now if i wasn't running a zine distro, which in this day & age, necessitates a certain degree of technological savvy.

the internet has had a significant impact on the world of paper zines. i know people who were paper zine stalwarts, but now they confine their writings to the internet because it's just easier for them-no postage costs, no trips to the copy shop, no worries about stacks of mail taking over the apartment. writing on the internet offers the benefit of instant gratification, & sometimes it's easier to keep in touch with readers & friends through e-mail & blogs. but i find it all to be so impersonal, something of a necessary evil. as slow as i am with paper mail, as tedious as it is standing in line at the post office, it feels more meaningful to me, like i am maintaining a dying art form.

the internet makes it easier for people to learn about zines. there are messageboards, e-mail lists, resource websites, online distros, people are even talking about setting up online archives. the internet offers a simple way to consolidate a lot of disparate information & then it's available to anyone in the world with an internet connection. but it has a lot of toxic side effects: i get a lot less feedback on my zines than i did in the mid 90's. back then, i was pen pals with everyone who read my zine. now people i don't know paypal me $2 & i never hear from them again. people cobble zines together out of the writing on their blogs, & i maintain that most blog writing is not zine material by any stretch of the imagination. people who grew up with the internet have come to expect the same instantaneous transaction access from paper zines & mail as they do from the internet, which is unreasonable. i see zines being reduced a disposable commodity & i think the internet has a lot to do with it. i see the internet as a tool that needs to be used responsibly.

what is your writing/editing/layout process like?
slow. arduous. ridiculously arcane. i initially write everything on a word file on my computer. it's usually all brand-new writing no one has ever seen before, but sometimes i lift things from letters, e-mails, other places. i piece it together bit by bit, constructing really slowly, editing, cutting down, expanding. one of the best pieces of writing advice i ever received was, "write it all down, everything. & then pare it back to the barest necessities you need to tell the story." so i try to do that. i keep going until i have twenty or twenty-five pages, including intros, outros, book reviews, everything i want to include. then i start recruiting people to look it over. i have a few friends that know my style & have been reading my stuff for years, & i trust them to tell me if something is just not working. i explain what i am going for with each piece & give them some direction regarding certain passages i am concerned about. yhey look it over & get back to me with suggestions-things to change, things to cut, things to re-write, things that work. i start making the changes, which also goes slowly. when i finally have a draft i am happy with, i start with the layout. i am also constantly messing with the order of these pieces. i don't just throw shit willy-nilly into my zine wherever i have a blank page. the order of the writing is not necessarily chronological & it's not necessary to read it cover-to-cover, but i do design it to have a certain emotional impact.

so then i start with the layout. i do everything by hand. i have a typewriter i got from a pawn shop in corpus christi. i use that & my own handwriting. i'm not much of an artist, but i draw a few things, borders & titles, little comics. the layout is a long process because it's just me, a pair of scissors, a jar or rubber cement, maybe some alphabet stencils…i don't see pre-fabricated clip art, nothing from computers at all. i have seen plenty of zines i enjoyed that have a clean computer layout, but it's not at all what i want for my own projects, & it's not what i prefer if left to my own devices. i really enjoy the process of making a flat, taking it to the copy shop, collating…using a computer would make the process too fast & less personal. i edit as i lay out the writing, making everything fit within the spatial boundaries of the paper. sometimes i have to cut stuff, sometimes i have to add stuff. i don't suffer white space, but i won't fill it with random bullshit either. if i am only averaging one zine a year, why let any of it be imperfect?

& once that's all done, off to the copy shop for a test copy. if margins have to be adjusted, if the masters have to be shrunk, i do that. then i start making copies. i always try to do something special with the cover. the last issue was a blockprint. so i'm thinking about what the cover will be like the whole time i'm working on a zine. i like to use color on the cover colored paper, rubber stamps, something to make it stand out. i just staple as binding because it's the most reliable. & that's that.

how do you think the zine community or the process of making zines has changed since you've been involved?
computers are much more widely-available now, so obviously computer layouts are pretty standard in the zine world now. it's even pretty common for people to make zines using fancy word processing programs with columns & grayscale & stuff. in the early 90's, the zines i was reading were written by teenage girls in their bedrooms, crayola markers & elmer's glue. it was more about catharsis & connection than anything slick & well-produced from a professional graphic design standpoint.

& the availability of computers has brought the internet into the picture more, as previously discussed. people have more online relationships, rather than waiting by their mailboxes with handfuls of letters to be mailed. i think the internet has also served to make the divergent communities of zinesters writing about their own personal niche interests more aware of each other, so there's more overlap & common ground among people working in different "genres," so to speak.

on a strictly personal level, i'm older now. i'm 27 years old & i live in the middle of boston, a major urban metropolis. i'm not some 13-year-old kid in oak harbor, ohio anymore. i've traveled all over the country, i've organized zine conferences, i've met tons of my zine friends, i've lived with them, i've dated them. the concept of a "zine community" is no longer an abstraction. i live it, & i also see in concrete terms the way the zine community overlaps with other communities: punks, anarchists, & travelers are what i see because those are the categories i happily participate in. i move into new houses in new cities & a new roommate says, "you wrote this zine I read in 1999, i picked it up off the kitchen table of a punk house i was crashing at during an earth first! gathering & now we live together. let's start a radical feminist bookstore!" i mean, that really happened. & it was not an isolated incident. so as disgusted as i sometimes get with the more abstracted internet zine community, i know it's a wide world out there & every punk house bathroom hides a stash of zines under the sink, everyone who has swung through an anarchist skillshare has thumbed through some zine or another, this community is real & it's a lot more diverse & uncontainable than even i can probably imagine.

are you "out" to people in your life as a zinester? how do you explain it to people who don't understand?
i kind of have to be "out" because i don't have a job & people love to ask new people they meet, "so, what do you do?" so i say, "zines." at this point, it's uncommon for me to stumble across someone who doesn't know what a zine is. i live in a punk house with a bunch of anarchists, i'm the zine buyer at the local radical infoshop, i spent the winter working twenty hours a week at the local zine library, my social life sort of revolves around these d.i.y. savvy, creative, radical fringe communities. & zines are assuming their mantle in the consciousnesses of a lot of people that might not have known what they were 20 years ago. bookstores carry them, "utne reader" profiles them, they're not really a secret. it's more of a challenge to try to explain to people the breadth of the culture that surrounds the medium, a culture that i have sort of built my life around, but whatever. they probably don't need the details anyway.

when i worked at the library, we did get a lot of people who came in, wondering what a zine was. the fastest answer was, "take something off the shelf; that's a zine." or i would say, "it's something like a self-published magazine." because so many of my on-going projects involve zines, i almost always have one with me, so i can whip it out as an illustration. it's not hard for me at all, & a lot of people have come to know me as "ciara--that girl who does zines." like we're synonymous.

what do you like best about the zine world? what do you like least?
i'll answer the snarky part first: what do i like least? i am hating the way that zines are treated as disposable commodities, like i said before. people order a zine, they read it, & that's it. i have gotten some fucking amazing feedback, sometimes from perfect strangers, sparked new friendships, & that sort of makes up for the more typical scenario of never hearing from someone ever again, but still. & somehow this has become acceptable. i remember staying up all night after work in 1996 crafting these ridiculously detailed letters to send to people if i had some sort of quibble with something they wrote in a zine. it was like dialogue happened, & now…not so much. sometimes. but not enough. & i hate the fact that i am not so different. because of the quantity of zines i read these days, i am a lot more likely to just stop reading a zine that i dislike than i am to actually try to engage the author in a conversation about it.

i dislike that so much of the exchange about zine information happens strictly online. i hate sitting in front of the computer. i hate that i have to google my own name to find some obscure blog i've never heard of before to find out that someone has taken umbrage with something i wrote, or that my zine changed someone's life somehow. talk to me about it, people! i actually want to hear this shit!

i dislike that hierarchies still exist, a cult of personality lives on in which some zines rise to the top more because the person who wrote them is popular or charming or ingratiating than because the zine is actually good. i hate that social politics play into zines in such weird ways-people are afraid to offend certain people because maybe they are influential. maybe they run a distro or write reviews & you don't want to give them a reason to dismiss your project.

but obviously i love a lot of things about zines because i have been doing this shit for almost the entire lives of high school juniors. it's always an amazing surprise to check the mail & find a zine that makes me want to put a record on & stay home that night to read & write some letters & work on my own projects. i love the fact that it's actually possible to build friendships on a foundation of having met through zines. i love that i have a network of people across north america with whom i can crash, based on our zine relationships. i love that i still get mix tapes in the mail. i love that i can give random houseguests from other countries my zines & they can take them on their travels & remember the people they met in boston that way. i love the times when i do get a dialogue going through a zine. Ii love the process of putting a zine together, the writing & editing & pissing off the neighbors with my loud typewriter. i love the fact that i am meeting some of the most incredible writers & thinkers of my generation because they are making zines.

do zines play a political role in your life? are you involved in other d.i.y. projects? do they play a political role?
well, i think d.i.y. is inherently political, or i have made it political for myself. as i said before, i got into zines at a tender age through riot grrrl, & riot grrrl was the manifestation of my feminism, which has grown to encompass anarchism. zines have always formed some sort of platform for me as i developed my anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist political views. i read zines that pointed me in the direction of books, such forth & so on, like the domino theory. & i can use zines to work out my political ideas & share them with other people.

the projects i am currently involved in include running this distro, organizing the boston skillshare on an annual basis, working at the lucy parsons center. all of these things are grounded in a political understanding. i do them all on a volunteer basis. the skillshare & the l.p.c. are collectives. i have been involved in other projects, radical feminist art collectives, female reproductive health collectives learning how to perform abortions, radical cheerleading…all of these things are political to me & they all involve some form of d.i.y. understanding. even just in my house, i try to steer us away from something simple like having a chore wheel with the hopes that we can all live together & be responsible for ourselves & to each other as a sort of embodiment of mutual aid. maybe that sounds sort of cheesy & ridiculous, but i kind of try to make all of my decisions while looking at the bottom line & how they reflect my anarchist principles.

what advice might you have for someone who is new to the zine community?
your first few zines will suck & there's nothing you can do about it. try to remember that editing is your friend. you are committing words & images to paper & making copies & potentially giving them to strangers. try not to put anything on paper that you are ambivalent about, quality-wise. watch your margins. white space kills tiny baby kittens. ask yourself why you want to make a zine. find your own voice & use it. DO NOT PUBLISH POETRY, i don't care who told you it was good. be prepared to lose money, forever. write letters! ask yourself what you are doing that is original & new, even if it's just telling your own unique story. don't try to follow anyone else's template. read as many zines as you can get your hands on-go to zine libraries, order from distros, trade with anyone who will trade with you. the more zines you read, the more you will come to understand what attracts you & what doesn't, & that will inform your own zine-making process. the writing you do on your blog is not the writing you want to publish in your zine, unless you are writing some sort of amazingly informative & engaging blog (unlikely). remember that the zine you are making is still going to be in new people's hands in a year; do you really want to make a zine about going to d.c. with your mom in excruciating detail or recount every confounding moment of your break-up with your boyfriend? the answer is no. look at your favorite zine & try to imagine how much effort went into it. put that much effort into your zine. fill orders in a timely manner. include all information requested when you send it out for distro consideration. things like "out-of-context quotes" & inside jokes are only going to be funny to the people who were there; limit your distribution to those people or don't publish that shit. be patient & keep at it. do not even think about starting a distro until you've been doing this zine shit for at least a couple of years.

what role do you think distros can/should play in the zine community?
it's a little bit ironic that i run a distro now because i used to be wary of them. i never sent my zines out to distros, i didn't order from distros. i didn't see the point. i thought they were middle-men. i perceived of zines as an exchange between the creator & the reader & a distro just got in the way of that. but eventually, in 1999, i read descriptions for zines i was curious about on a distro site & the author was impossible to get a hold of, so i just ordered from the distro. i was on hiatus from making zines myself then, but when i started again, i worked with distros. they carried my shit & got it into the hands of people that i probably never could have reached on my own. & a few years ago, i found myself having trouble finding a lot of the zines, or sorts of zines, i wanted to read, i perceived of a lack in the distribution process, so i started my own distro.

my goal is to support zinesters. zinesters can come to me & if i like their shit--boom, a guaranteed twenty copies sold that will end up in someone's hands. distros can really take the burden off a zinester who gets burnt out dealing with all those envelopes full of dollar-bills & notes that say, "send zine here." i make 750 copies of my zine, which is a lot for me to distro all on my own, so it's helpful to have someone dealing with twenty copies here, fifty copies there. i think distros can also raise a zine's profile. sometimes you don't even know there's a new issue of your favorite zine out there until you stumble across the listing on a distro site.

i also table my distro a lot, mostly at events around boston, but I have traveled far afield before as well. & sometimes those events are someone's first exposure to zines, so a zine i carry might be the first zine they ever pick up. that's exciting.

things distros should not do: be in it for the money. think they own someone's zine. think they are doing someone a great big huge favor by carrying their zine. exist solely to get free zines. go on hiatus & then disappear forever with a closet full of other people's zines.

i am not into this move toward publishing zines. note my off-the-cuff definition of a zine: "self-published magazine." self-published. i think it's important to note that few distros make money. most lose money, or maybe break even. my distro makes enough money to keep me in office supplies & web hosting. i don't have a business model. i maintain a budget, i track every penny, but i am not interested in opening a store or going in a direction that will put me more in communication with the forces of capitalism than is absolutely necessary. i have personal relationship with just about everyone i carry. i have met & hung out with almost all of them. i've cried in front of these people, i've thrown up in front of them, some of them have met my parents. this is not a mercenary relationship. i know maybe this is just me & i quite possibly don't know anyone who is as intimately involved with the zine community on a personal level as myself, but there you go. that's why i get protective. that's why i have these grand ideals.

are there changes you'd like to see in the zine community or your own zine creation?
well, i wish i could make my zines a little bit faster, be a little less pain-staking. or at least display some modicum of discipline toward my craft, so i was working hard a little bit every day & making more zines more often. i'd like to see people speak up more when they have an issue, a criticism, whatever. i wish that public discourse on zines would move beyond this "how to for beginners" stage & start getting a little more analytical & crusty. i don't need another book telling me how to measure for margins. i don't need a documentary full of people telling me about their favorite zines. i want to see people talking about the realities, like how some zinesters are sexual assaulters, some zinesters are capitalist assholes, zine fairs are sometimes nothing but mutual masturbation affairs, attempting to maintain anti capitalist d.i.y. ethics in this community is a fucking challenge & people could use some support trying to do it…i'd like to see people get together to publish their zines together to cut down on costs, travel around & sell their friends' zines at stores to break down the monopoly of big wholesale distribution. little collective efforts like that would be a breath of fresh air & create more spaces for new zinesters to shine. i want to see zine tours & zine readings & people trading zines at breakfast potlucks. i want to see zines shared around like music is shared. i don't want to hear anyone else say, "i thought about making a zine…but i didn't."

xo, ciara xyerra

i run this here zine distro, learning to leave a paper trail, & have been doing so for four years. i carry almost 150 zines. i also write "you live for the fight when that's all that you've got", "up the logic punks!", & "love letters to monsters" zines.

write me at: 12 lincoln ave. #3
somerville ma 02145
or e-mail: theciaramonster@riseup.net