Doing It Better

Doing It Better - Conflict Resolution after Abuse in Leftist Communities

Joe Biel / Microcosm Publishing

11cm x 18cm, 40 pages

$4

Doing It Better is a timely proposal of ways allegations of abuse should be handled, in most instances that means differently than they are currently. 

At long last there has been change in public consciousness surrounding the exploitation of others by men in positions of power. There are now seen to be consequences for abuse and exploitation, although, as Joe points out, for those in true positions of power "a person's finances can insulate them sufficiently from true accountability for their actions".

Joe relates cases of perpetrators of abuse within the radical zine and activist communities, and how those perpetrators have been dealt with in the past. Often it has been with a form of vengeance rather then justice. The problem is that ostracism of the abuser from a community doesn't lead to behavioural understanding by the perpetrator, or more importantly change of those behaviours, and they are just likely to be repeated elsewhere. 

The zine is in no way making apologies for criminal and unethical behaviour, and of course Joe isn't suggesting further contact between victim and abuser, but seeks to put forward a strategy for actionable accountability. It's a zine written with unflinching honesty, which is crucial for issue that often provokes knee-jerk reactions. And while those reactions are completely understandable, it's the more radical responses that will perhaps prove to be the most valuable. 

Doing It Better doesn't have all the answers, but it is a set of starting points for discussion and elaboration - a provocation for the open conversations we should all be having. 

Buy a copy direct from Microcosm: microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/9119

Review by Nathan Penlington

Everything is Fine #1

Everything is Fine #1
36 pages, digest
$3.50 U.S. delivered
$5.00 International

Old school, cut & paste perzine with graphics on every page. Cover is delightfully creepy.

Nyxia Grey fights back against abuse and anorexia with scissors, glue, an old typewriter, a word possessor, and a ton of manic energy, purging herself of thoughts and feelings that have dominated her life. "i will cut it out of me and leave it here word by word by word until i am whole again."

In parts where she is using the typewriter she leaves in the typos and runtogetherwords and strikes a certain rhythm that becomes poetic the longer your read it.

She is recovering, so there is power and hope in her writing. Starkly honest, she puts it all out there, holding little back. Intimate descriptions of family conflicts, and the decisions she made about the world and herself that shaped her outlook.

At the same time that she's reaching deep inside herself, she's also reaching out to others who have been through, and who are going through, some of the same stuff. "I will write back. You are not alone."

See gives a very readable voice to a difficult topic. Kudos.


Order
https://www.etsy.com/listing/211428291/everything-is-fine-volume-1-issue-1?ref=shop_home_feat_1

Contact
everythingisfinezine (a) gmail.com



review by Jack Cheiky
This zine is being donated to the Cleveland Zine Library after review.

Fütchi Perf

Fütchi Perf

84 pages,  6 x 9 inch

soft cover, saddle stitched, two color risograph

$18 delivered in USA

By artist and writer Kevin Czap.

I was excited to pick this up, partly because it's Cleveland based, and partly because it's very colorful and nicely produced. I was a little let down because I didn't really get it, although it wasn't boring at all. It was intriguing and engaging, and I wanted to understand and appreciate it, but I felt it was just over my head. 

What I would have wrote about it is that it seems to be about black or mixed race lesbians, or at least generally girl-centric, and that it was about hip hop culture, and that it was very dreamy. As it turns out, I wasn't too far off. I'll provide a link to the publisher's promo copy and you can read what they have to say about it. There's sample pages there too.

I'm not a great target audience for this, but it did make me stretch a bit, and that gave me some appreciation for the work.

The price is appropriate.

A digital version is available as well.

http://www.czapbooks.com/product/futchi-perf

Review by Jack Cheiky

Frisk Flugt II - Sabotage

Frisk Flugt II - Sabotage

(Frisk Flugt is Danish for "Fresh Escape")

60 pages, professionally bound

65 DKK in Denmark, 105 DKK ($15.20 US) world wide

"Frisk Flugt is a militant research group based in Denmark."

This looks like a zine, but it's really a literary journal, very slick and artsy, nicely bound. 37 pages of photography including front & back covers, 17 pages of writing.

First thing I did was flip through and look at the pictures, which are pretty cool. Some are gonzo-esque archival stills of decay and destruction, others are gritty staged art photos. Taken as a whole it flows well and is interesting and provocative, if not pretty.

There are five pieces of writing. The first is prose that reads like stream of consciousness poetry. It's over my head and hard to read, intellectual and referencing things I can only guess as to their meaning.

The second and third bits are more interesting but still pretty heady. In one we get a look back at the anti-nuclear movement in Germany circa 1960s and 70s, and how that influences what's happening today. The other piece examines the thoughts of early 20th century feminist and labor militant, Elizabeth Gurley.

Then there's an academic commentary on modern sabotage in letter form, and an artsy prose-then-poetry thing about blowing up your home.

Although I'm not a good target audience for this material, I must say it is nicely done and stays on task with the topic of sabotage. I'm going to try to pass it off to one of my friends who are better suited for it and see what they have to say.

Order from:

http://ovopress.tictail.com/

They also have other interesting literary books there.

Jack Cheiky

new zines in the distro

at my distro click here for distro

Keep Track: Pocket Calender
This is my little calender and pocket organizer! Cute drawings! Fits in your pocket! There are two pages for each month, with four blank pages with little drawings for taking notes and making lists. The calender part has blank spots for you to fill in the dates, so that you can start at any time, but if you want me to fill it in, I will.

When the Crash Meets Something Solid Issue #002: Hewers of Water
stories, essays, and poetry about drug addiction; sex work - which she did at first by choice, and then how it got twisted; abuse, and survival
powerful and good

The Worst: A Compilation Zine on Grief and Loss: Issue 2
A new issue of this beautiful zine, thick and full of stories and articles about grief and dealing with death. I read it a month ago, and I can't remember for sure, but it seemed like this one had more stories from people who were a little older and had more time/distance from the deaths they were writing about, where as the first issue seemed more immediate. Both are so useful! Both have a wide variety of stories.

Truckface #14
Excellent zine! about her second year of teaching high-school. very funny, extremely tragic, inspiring, depressing, politics, comics, everything you could ask for. I love this zine!
It also has stories about life outside of school - starting a feminist band (the Ovens), bad roommates, and more! Every new teacher and everyone thinking of becoming a teacher should read this, plus everyone else should too!

Truckface #13
Thick little zine about LB's first (hellish) year of teaching highschool. In which she gets named "The Nose" by her students. Deals with a class of 8 bad apples - and how to teach, how to stay sane. Almost decided to not continue teaching. Deals with the religious right protesting at the school (for having a Gay-Straight Alliance), this zine is great and has a million funny/sad stories.
I wish all my friends who were going into their first year of teaching could read this zine! and everyone else too!

Truckface #12
"How do you become an authority figure when you yourself are anti-authoritarian? Questions that should have been asked prior to enrolling in teaching school."

student teaching in Chicago - dealing with bitter, assimilationist teachers; desperation and violence among students (24 students murdered this school year... and school authorities decided that tucking in shirts is the solution); dancing in class with the students, students talking about racism and discrimination, immigration, bravery.

When Lanugage Runs Dry #3:A Zine for People with Chronic Pain and Their Allies
another issue of this great zine. Issue #3 has a beautifully written peice about brain injury; an article about parenting with chronic pain; a comic/theory about Fibromyalgia and invisible illness; a conversation/interview between a step-mother and daughtor about what it was like to have a step-mother who was experiencing chronic pain; and an article about the workbook Living Beyond Your Pain: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Ease Chronic Pain

Posted by doris zine blog. for website go to dorisdorisdoris.com

Riot Grrrl: Traces of a Movement

Come Hell or High Water

I Have a Song for You

Don’t Be a Dick

 

 

 

Don’t Be a Dick

via Feminist Review by Feminist Review on 2/25/10

By Paul Brown

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture has made an array of otherwise lofty topics accessible through the format of personal zines that aim to educate and inform—from bicycle maintenance to vegan cooking. In particular, the strong foothold that DIY culture has in radical politics and feminism has allowed for the creation of some radical, eye-opening work. Paul Brown's zine, Don't Be a Dick, is an archetypal DIY zine, complete with staples, a gray-washed Xeroxed background, hand-drawn pictures, and a curious layout. It looks as harmless as a playbill, but is unique to the DIY format in that it is a boldly personal account of a heterosexual male's journey with consent.

Brown tackles a lot in the twenty-something pages that encompass his zine, such as constructions of masculinity, the United States as a rape culture, and definitions and approaches toward healthy consent. But Brown's ambitious approach is also his major downfall. Don't Be a Dick's focus goes far beyond the limits of its pages, and while the topics Brown discusses are important and pertinent to comprehending consent and sexual assault as a whole, nothing more than a basic understanding is ultimately conveyed. This becomes a problem because, if Brown's intention was to create a zine that is both informative and useful, neither goal is quite executed. He ends one section on the notion that men need to "wake up" and "hold each other accountable" but gives no clear indication as to how to accomplish either of these goals. Based on its ability to educate an array of people, I would be more recommend a zine like Cindy Crabb's Learning Good Consent than I would this zine.

Brown's zine is unique because of who he is—a man writing about male-to-female sexual assault. In the first few pages, the impetus for his zine is revealed—he once coerced an ex-partner into a non-consensual sex act and, after reading about consent, learned the true implications of his actions. Unfortunately, he went on to create a zine that is a digest of ideology found more thoroughly explored in zines like Learning Good Consent and Support rather than writing what he knows. My interest was most piqued by his perspective as a cisgendered man exploring the tricky landscape of consensual sex, such as the processing of the abovementioned story, or his deflated feelings towards pornography. I would like to see Brown adding his own voice into the discourse of radical consent instead of mimicking zines that already exist.

It is useful to have a heterosexual male narrative within the sphere of positive, responsible sexuality and refreshing, if not sobering, for a man to admit that he has committed an act of non-consensual sex. Stories like these are needed to aid in the awareness of consent, and Brown does a much better job than one of the only attempts I've read of a man taking accountability for his actions: zinester Rick Mackin's column in Razorcake Magazine and subsequent zine that was far from the self-effacing, courteous, and sincere zine that Brown's is.

Brown's path to writing this zine is admirable and humble, and it is this path that I find to have the most potential for change and transformation within conversations about men's role in consent and sexual assault. By taking the zines that inspired him and building from that, I believe Brown has a powerful jumping-off point for the hard and honest truths that will surface as consent and sexual assault continues to be discussed.

Review by Krista Ciminera

Check out more reviews at http://www.feministreview.org

 

 

Finding Gloria: Nos/otras

 

 

 

Finding Gloria: Nos/otras

via Feminist Review by Feminist Review on 2/26/10

In the spirit of Gloria Anzaldúa, Finding Gloria: Nos/otras is an independent zine featuring the words and art of various contributors. Anzaldúa was a writer, poet, and artist whose work focused mostly on her identities as a woman, Chicana, lesbian, and feminist. The title of the zine comes from Anzaldúa's work. Some of the contributors work directly in projects honoring her, and many of the pieces cite Anzaldúa or use her style of writing.

As Noemi "Hermana, Resist" Martinez explains on the very first page, this is a zine for those trying to create a space for themselves – a space that might be affected by the dominant culture, but that tries to break free from that dominant culture as much as possible. The basis of this is the term Nos/otras, created by Anzaldúa herself, is nos (Spanish for we) and otras (the Spanish word for other). Anzaldúa combined them to show that it's impossible to view ourselves as separate from the other, or the other as separate from ourselves.

With these concepts in mind, the work included in this zine takes on a fresh perspective. The very first image you see (which happens to be one of my favorites in the zine) is the work of Celeste de Luna, and it is that of two women standing on opposite sides of a river. The women appear to be similar in age and each is a mother with children, who are also close in age, yet their differences shine through in their appearance, particularly in their clothing and the way they carry themselves. They have things in common, yet they remain divided.

As a big fan of Anzaldúa's work, it meant a lot to me to see her legacy live on in the works of these other women. The contributors are obviously inspired by her and continue to build on her work with their own poems, collages, drawings, and other creative works. It has been a few years since I got my hands on a homemade zine, and this style lends itself well to the content within its pages. Sometimes the page numbers or other text were cut off, and some of the images were hard to make out because of the resolution of the print, but I think the energy and emotion is still captured.

Review by Frau Sally Benz

Check out more reviews at http://www.feministreview.org

 

 

 

Trees Zine #4

 

 

Trees Zine #4

via Feminist Review by Feminist Review on 11/13/09

By Samantha Trees

A quarter page booklet of photocopied text with one off-center staple and as much profundity as you can cram in that meager space—how else would you present yourself to the world? I thought that zines went out with the twentieth century, at least in the sense of personal confessionals, and journaling went out traded out for online diaries, journals, and social networks. These days even the formal blog seems to be winnowing down to its base denominator: trading out contemplation for a sound bite, reflection for a terse witticism. Zines, with their labor-intensive, frequently amateur construction and problematic-at-best distribution, are the antithesis of convenient, concise communication. For most zinesters, this suits them just fine – better to create something a little flawed and heartfelt than to encapsulate your heart and soul in a polished, pre-packaged medium saddled with embedded advertisements and suspect signifiers of a commodity culture.

Samantha Trees demonstrates in twenty-four tiny and mostly half-filled pages that there's still plenty of soul in the zine movement, even if it has lost some visibility since its heyday in the 1990s. In her "Hopeless Romantic/Punk As Fuck" fourth issue ($2), Samantha revels in the giddy enthusiasm of the first nights living in a punk co-op, starting up what could be considered a pick-up, come-as-you-are riot grrrl music collective, and trying to teach a bunch of grrrls how to play Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" (probably easier than "Double Dare," although not as fun in my opinion). What really strikes a reader is the hopeful vibrancy of her voice, an optimistic yearning for life still being tested by the daily rigors of post-adolescence.

The content of the zine is hardly more than personal reflections recorded on scrap paper and post-it-notes probably cribbed from where she works if Samantha cleaves as closely to traditional zine assembly as she does its design. Trees is simply presented with an unadorned layout and sparse design. Unfortunately, the text is similarly sparse, with anecdotes and insights that could merit fleshing out.

Samantha hints at more in-depth stories and experiences than the zine allows itself to give space. In particular, her experiences with her loves and the time she spends at work with a crisis call center assume direct knowledge of her acquaintances or familiarity with such an environment. Regardless, Trees succeeds in its self-defined mission of offering a "really sincere piece" of the author to the reader. While her opinions occasionally stray into those of questionable wisdom (her rant against the Calgary police force strikes this reader as being shortsighted), the reader can't help but recognize that these are the irrepressible moments of sincerity, emotion, and passion that grip every young woman before the tawdry banalities of adult life set in their hooks.

Review by Melissa Ruis

Check out more reviews at http://www.feministreview.org

 

 

 

 

Somewhere to Run From

 

 

 

Somewhere to Run From

via Feminist Review by Feminist Review on 11/28/09

By Tara-Michelle Ziniuk
Tightrope Books

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk is an activist poet, critic, playwright, and performer working in Montreal and Toronto, and whose first poetry collection, Emergency Contact, was published in 2006. Her second book of poetry, Somewhere to Run From, is full of bittersweet and sarcastic poems about love gone wrong, political activism, and loneliness. There is a confessional quality to many of her pieces, which examine a wide variety of emotional topics that range from unfaithful lovers to religious persecution, blending political commentary and personal tragedy. She describes both intimate interpersonal situations and global catastrophe with razor-sharp wit.

Ziniuk's work has a straightforward quality that I found myself wanting to imitate. I was struck by her use of juxtaposition, and how simple statements become somehow more evocative with pop culture references, such as "net-speak," and unexpected details. Her black humor adds greater depth to poems about small disasters and everyday heartbreaks.

In the prose-poem titled "How To Be Perfect Men," she writes, "...Every sad mix CD has a song about a basement on it. We do a keyword search for 'waiting' and when I finally remember you, every song I hear makes me feel like I'm on hold..." To me, the magic of poetry is the way reading lines like these reminds the reader of their own long-forgotten mix CDs and their favorite songs about basements and waiting, re-experiencing old sadness through the lens of nostalgia, and with the benefit of hindsight.

In "Through the Night," Ziniuk riffs on a Frank Sinatra quote:

I'm for anything that gets you through the night. A warm body/hot water bottle/Degrassi special features./I'm all for take-out in bed,/crumbs, spilled shake from the bottom of the bag,/and lipstick on pillow cases...We're all getting old./Maybe this is what lube is for./Or maybe it's for people who never liked each other anyway.

This brief and unexpected mention of the campy Canadian melodrama Degrassi inspires a feeling of affinity with the speaker of the poem (and by extension, the poet) in me. References like this one give the collection a feeling of an early twenty-first century time capsule. Ziniuk's poems are full of quotable—even chantable—lines: "People only spin the bottle/when there's someone in the room they want to kiss" or "You/give/girls/eating/disorders."

One of my favorites from the collection is "It Must Be Stopped," which is a darkly funny poem about a misunderstanding mother. This is a wonderful example of the range of contradictory thoughts and feelings Ziniuk's Somewhere to Run From will inspire.

Review by Kellie Powell

Check out more reviews at http://www.feministreview.org

 

 

 

 

make/shift: feminisms in motion (Issue 6)

 

 

 

make/shift: feminisms in motion (Issue 6)

via Feminist Review by Feminist Review on 12/2/09

Make/Shift aims to thrust the ignored populations into the greater recognition. Native Americans living in urban settings rather than rural reservations tend to be invisible in our nation's consciousness. Society shies away from the combination of disability and sexuality, and when it comes to women's prisons, many question the validity of empowerment through peer education health programs. The Fall/Winter edition of Make/Shift explores these and a wide variety of other social issues. It highlights individuals working to improve the world on personal, local, international, and virtual levels through social action or artistic ventures.

A letter from the editors tells readers that the theme of the issue is movement, but some of the articles that follow move more efficiently than others. A few of the more personal pieces struck this reader at a trifle tedious. A piece about losing one's ethnic identity by using a certain hair product makes about as much sense to me as the belief that using spray-on tanner would force me to concede my Whiteness. An article entitled "Vocabulary Lesson" questions the queer world's borrowing of the word wife from mainstream society when that word has many negative historical connotations attached to it, but the execution came off condescending, and seemed to push for the continued separation of the two groups.

Many stories move quite fluidly, however. A tale about a formerly battered woman's journey into professorship hits the mark, as does a story about a Haitian lesbian's encounter with a skinhead on a train. A collage piece on kitchens examines how this politically charged space changes depending on the occupants and attitudes. A series of segments on health focus on specific issues concerning women's health, such as environmental hazards connected with work traditionally performed by females.

Another focuses on the push to provide health care for transpeople. As a health care provider featured in the article puts it, "If someone has a cervix, they need gynecological care," yet many trans people harbor fears of discrimination and simply discomfort with entering a clinic. A piece on immigration explores how the nation's policies affect those in the queer community.

The magazine doesn't focus long on any one issue or demographic. Make/Shift strives to reach out to all who identify as female, no matter what their origin or back story, and there is a tidbit for everyone—hopefully more, if you're willing to learn something.

The design would benefit from more art and photographs to further connect readers to the subjects of the articles. This shouldn't be difficult, considering that this is a magazine that celebrates artists. I don't know if the lack of image distribution is a reflection of the magazine's relative newness, a lack of resources, or failure to see the need, but either way, the need is evident.

Review by Kelly Palka Gallagher

Check out more reviews at http://www.feministreview.org