🜃 Zines
I started out with comics, drawn on notebook paper and meticulously photocopied at the library for distribution to a handful of kids I knew, mostly people whose thinly-disguised superhero characters made it into the stories. Within a few years I was making zines in high school, enjoying the opportunity they offered to be cool by proxy in the late 90s, because I was never going to be cool in the actual town I lived in. I was typing up terrible poetry on my lunch hour in the library or meticulously handwriting it so it was readable, writing little articles and essays. I made a couple of perzines inspired by the zines I was learn about online and send away for, mostly because I wanted to have something to trade with the immensely talented people I was mailing my well-hidden dollars to. My best friend and I published two issues of an underground newspaper until we got in hauled in front of the principal for (in retrospect, very mild) reporting. Eventually I discovered blogging and then livejournal, and I started posting my writing online instead, but every few years I get the itch to produce something that I could print and staple, if I wanted to.
Lately I've been thinking about zines again and there's a desire to make them that I haven't fully unpacked, but I think it's about wanting to have something to show, to point to that I've finished. I'd been looking for a good place to share some of my older projects and I think I've finally found one via discovering Zine Jams on itch.io, so both old and new projects are going there now.
Brainflowers is a zine I made in 2011, following a long year of physical and mental health issues. It was a series of essays that marked the first time I really sat down and gave thought to my gender and my relationship with my body, and marked an important step in my transition even though, at the time, I had no belief I would be able to physically transition in the future.
the Merciful Earth is a bit more of a booklet than a zine, clocking in at 66 half-size pages. It's a compilation of poems and prayers and storylets I wrote for a goddess, and it was both intensely personal and the first thing I actively, intentionally published in a long time. I've never gotten it physically published but eventually I'd like to print and bind a copy for myself.
Anamnesis is a short poetry zine about memory and repetition. It's not long but it's the first thing I've put together in a few years and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.
🜔 Poetry
I started writing poetry in high school, shortly after I started collecting zines. Don't worry, none of my high school work is included here, though I've thrown around the idea of going back and pulling out a few things to rewrite as a poetry version of a draw-it-again challenge.
I'm especially fond of the punchiness of haiku as a form, and my favorite era is the San Francisco Renaissance: Rexroth, Gleason, Spicer, Blaser, Duncan, and Beat-adjacents like Snyder and Whalen.
Don't Go There is a collection of poems written between 2010-2020 that don't belong to a larger project.
Messages Sent and Received is a selection of devotional poetry as well as poems about magic.
Poems from an Empty Sky is a collection of poems that are all set in the setting I refer to as the Empty Sky, by or about the characters there.
🜂 Other Writing
Baggage: Garcia’s been quietly building her practice as a freelance supernatural troubleshooter in Phoenix for years, and is almost ready to break into full-time if she can just deal with a thief, a library ghost, man-eating mermaids and her own relationship issues.
Antimony and Lead: The world ended weeks ago and Lacey’s been cast out of the safe bunker she called home with her husband and sister-wives. Now she’s got to figure out where she should go and who she can trust to stay alive in post-apocalyptic Utah.