On a recent Friday evening in New York City, a collection of young magazine and newspaper writers sipped $15 gimlets at a hotel bar in SoHo, each clutching a peach-colored journal with the words “Girl Crush” spelled out in letter-shaped candies on its cover. The celebrants had arrived from the offices of well-known, even legendary publications — The New York Observer, The New Yorker, The Paris Review — to fete, with cupcakes, the launch of a zine: a handmade, self-published magazine intended for a small community of readers. For many, the word “zine” will conjure images of Xeroxed-and-stapled underground tributes to science-fiction fandom or ’90s riot-grrrl culture. The form tends to be high on enthusiasm, low on production value. But Girl Crush, which features women writing about their female role models, has a glossy professional-grade binding and counts the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jennifer Egan among its contributors. Neither the zine nor its launch party would strike anyone as countercultural in spirit.
Edited by Jenna Wortham, a staff technology reporter at the New York Times, and Thessaly La Force, the former online editor for the Paris Review, Girl Crush is part of a resurgence in the zine form, particularly among media professionals. Like their rough-around-the-edges predecessors, these zines are independently published and precise in their editorial vision, but they have more star power and more mainstream editorial influence. Strikingly, often the same men and women who are helping to keep large media outlets afloat by day are also the ones going home and working on indie publishing efforts by night. Girl Crush‘s peers include Afterzine, from Vanity Fair‘s digital design editor, Hamish Robertson; the Spanish-Italian interiors zine Apartamento, whose braintrust includes magazine writer Marco Velardi and fashion photographer Nacho Alegre; and The La-La Theory and White Elephant collections from Katie Haegele, a freelance writer and reporter.
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While a small and dedicated do-it-yourself zine culture has been publishing for decades, zines haven’t enjoyed this much popularity in 20 years. Online craft mecca Etsy currently has nearly 50,000 distinct handmade publications listed for sale, approximately 3,000 of which are self-defined as zines; that number has been steadily increasing. “The biggest spike we have seen has been in the last three years,” says Joe Biel, who runs Microcosm Publishing, one of the few organized zine distributors in the world and the country’s largest. “We’re getting more submissions than ever.”
But given the rising costs of producing print media, why would anyone — let alone media professionals — turn to DIY publishing instead of WordPress or Tumblr? “It just feels good to make something by hand,” says Wortham of Girl Crush. “I love the way pop culture morphs and evolves on the web. At the end of the day, though, you can describe a blog post, but you can’t recreate it. It’s really neat to hold something in your hand that you actually created.”
“There’s a pleasure in making it difficult for yourself,” Haegele says. “Other people appreciate it and it appeals to them when you explain, ‘I sewed this together.'”
A zine also has a prescriptive quality that contrasts with the more freewheeling tendencies of Internet publishing. “I’m the biggest fan of print in the boundaries that it creates, especially because my day job is working on the web,” says Robertson of Afterzine. “Too many people think that you can just let the page get longer and longer on a website, and while that’s true, it doesn’t always make it better.”
So what makes a zine? And what distinguishes it from a small-run literary journal or a “photocopied blog” (as some zines have been derided)? The criteria vary from title to title, but a few basics are clear. A zine must be self-published and handmade. (Though even the concept of “handmade” varies widely: Haegele uses a typewriter and hand-stitches and presses her own binding, while La Force considers Girl Crush handmade because she learned Adobe’s InDesign software solely to make it.) It’s often published in small enough quantities that its creator can personally keep track of everyone who has it. It’s self-funded and sold either at a loss or only to recoup the cost of production. It eschews advertising, though some zinesters will promote other zines in their pages. And a zine follows its own schedule. The editor of a traditional magazine or journal says “It’s time to publish, so what are we going to say?” The editor of a zine says, “I have something to say, so it’s time to publish.” Girl Crush embodies this approach; so does Afterzine‘s themed issues, which so far have tackled negative space (issue one) and Los Angeles (issue two).
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Purists may have additional definitions. “I value the zine’s connection to anarchic-punk, DIY values,” says Jenna Freedman, a self-professed “zine snob,” who makes Lower East Side Librarian and curates Barnard’s zine library. She prizes activism-oriented zines like Shotgun Seamstress, which explores the intersections of racial and sexual identity; or Functionally Ill, in which a woman identified only as Laura-Marie records, among other things, the voices she hears during bipolar disorder–associated mania. Though the new wave of zines is less esoteric, Freedman still sees something subversive in it. “This new phenomenon among mainstream journalists could certainly come out of that DIY sensibility,” she says. “Maybe they’re not doing their own binding, but they are saying ‘I don’t want an editor — I have something to say and I want it to go out unmediated.'”
The first zines appeared in the 1930s, when science fiction enthusiasts began to self-publish and trade their own volumes of fan fiction. These were called “fan magazines,” shortened to fanzines. Fanzines found renewed popularity in the ’70s and ’80s in the underground punk scene, where followers of various bands would sell their homemade ‘tribute’ publications — usually black-and-white photocopies stapled together — at shows. In the ’90s, feminism and punk converged in some counter-culture communities, creating a third-wave feminism movement named for the first zine to identify it: Riot Grrrl, associated with bands such as Bratmobile, Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill. The zines of that era used the machismo and swagger of hardcore to spotlight feminine steeliness in the face of misogyny.
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“There was a sense of putting out unpolished writing that was thrilling,” says Johanna Fateman, who first made a riot grrrl zine called Snarla with her best friend from high school, the filmmaker and writer Miranda July, while living in Portland, Ore. in 1991. (After Fateman gave a copy of Snarla to Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna after a show, the two became friends and later founded the band Le Tigre). “There were no rules: we went freely between prose and poetry and collage. There were no censors.”
That freedom often fostered a confessional, stream-of-consciousness style that now looks like a forerunner of personal blogging. A crucial difference is that a post on the Internet can go viral, quickly leaving the relative safety of a dedicated readership for the digital echo chamber. But to criticize a zine, you have to take the time to write the creator a letter — and you have to have found the zine in the first place. Attendees at the Girl Crush party, who paid $10 for the zine, were of a type; the party was advertised on the contributors’ blogs and via Facebook, and the people who attended already knew what a Girl Crush was. Many of them were writers themselves and understood the importance of having a place to try something new. In “Say Anything,” Jenna Wortham chronicles her former infatuations and, in a few swift paragraphs, reveals nothing less than how she became herself, taking us from ages 9 to 23. In “Five Recipes for Your Girl Crush,” Nozlee Samadzadeh describes her crush on novelist Emma Straub through the brunch she cooked in Straub’s honor. Amanda Fortini’s ode to Janet Malcolm reveals the excruciating awkwardness of meeting someone with whom you already have a relationship — but only through her work.
Not all of the essays in Girl Crush are as successful, but even the lesser contributions offer a privileged glimpse — not often seen in more mainstream publications — of thoughts as they are actually developed: not just the whittled, well-presented thesis, but the entire messy thing. Recalling what she loved about making the influential zine Chickfactor, music journalist Gail O’Hara describes how different it was from her day job at Spin: “The words were in context. It wasn’t, ‘Here’s my story of what happened when I went to interview Guided By Voices.’ It was, ‘This is what they actually said. Here’s the whole conversation.'”
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