I needed to get back to sometime tactile, and so I started back with zines.
By the time this blog post is published, I will have finished more than a dozen zines, started far more. My first zine had to talk about zines — “you say ‘zeen’ like ‘magazine’ but without the ‘maga’ ” — and we have to talk about Prairieland.**
I had been working up a project in my mind for months, but kept stopping before I started. I’d meet up to start on zines and instead we would go to yoga or have coffee or go on a bike ride. I’ve eaten every chocolate chip cookie within a few miles and can tell you far too much about the comparative lattes in the more than two dozen coffee shops within a 10 minute bike ride. But my zines were still imaginary.
Edwin started up again with his shop zine and I sat down next to him at the table in our little house in Wishram* and asked him, “what should I say after ‘zine’?”
“How about ‘life’?” he asked. And that is what I began. My zine life. I’ll be including downloads of the different versions, but they are best delivered as intended; copied and signed by me. You can email me at mama at cafe mama dot com with your physical address if you’d like to have one delivered.
I’ve written a lot about an extraordinary book I want to link here. There are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak.
*there will be an upcoming zine about Wishram
**zines were a major exhibit in an anti-antifa case against ICE protesters in Praireland, Texas, the Prairieland Defenders. One defendant, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, in the case was arrested for moving boxes of zines, mostly slightly or majorly anarchist in nature, which our constitution supposedly protects us to do. Two others, Ines and Elizabeth Soto, were also given harsher (and equally outrageous) sentences due to having possessed zines. While this is shocking, it is not surprising for those of us who understand that the law only protects those who the law is written to protect; the lawmakers (most of the time) and the wealthy.