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"...feminism loves you for your individuality, personal insight, and experiences. It means something different for absolutely everyone.." -Liouxsie Doyle |
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Can you tell me a little bit about your personal (age, place of birth and residence etc.) and educational background? Well, I'm an 18 year old chick from [New] Jersey; I've been told for the past few years of my life that I'm a degenerate pink-haired chick with too many faux-pearl necklaces, too much attitude, and not much of a future. After being expelled twice, I'm currently working at graduating high school this June. Wish me luck! What are you currently doing, or involved in, besides your zines? My zine may be a minimum wage, part time obsession, but feminism isn't. I volunteer at a battered women's shelter and I take a keen interest in activism, especially in the form of planning future discussion groups with other ladies from New Jersey. Creating a safe place to vent, love, share, scheme and devour pizza is a top priority at this point in my life. Can you tell our readers about Danger! Hole? What topics do you discuss in your zines most often? What language are they written in? Danger! hole Zine is my 9-month old (and counting!) baby looking to change the way you view feminism and little girls everywhere, simply put. Every month I cover a different topic, like sexuality, health, sexual harassment, body image, pornography, art, censorship, music and more. The only thing the layouts have in common in the fact everything is written in English. |
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How long has this Danger! Hole been running? D!HZ has been around since June of 2007. Where/how are your zines distributed? Who are your readers? What kind of responses do you get from your zines’ audience? My zine is a little promiscuous, she likes to get around. About half my sales are done personally, where someone will contact me via myspace or e-mail, and I'll mail my zine out to them; just as commonly, I'll send a bulk order of zines over to a distro (such as Bad Habit, Marching Stars, Little Bigfoot, etc.) and they'll take over the sales aspect from there. Danger! hole's been sent around the world a few times; my address book currently holds readers from every corner of America, Australia, the UK, Germany, Canada, Israel, South Korea, Croatia, Belarus, and Austria. Perhaps my favorite addresses to send to reside in New Jersey; while I love knowing my zine's going to see places I probably never will, I get a real kick outta finding feminists I never knew existed right under my nose! How did you become introduced to the culture of zines? That's a tricky question; I suppose this best summarizes my decent into the underground world of zines and DIY: my friend introduced me to Sleater-Kinney, then Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, the Gossip, then Peaches; this sparked my interest in feminism, and this ignited my curiosity in anti-culture, revolutionary zines, grassroots, and activism. Music was the original catalyst, I suppose. What do you hope to accomplish by making and distributing Danger! Hole? I want, I want, I want. There are a lotta things I hope to accomplish with D!HZ; it's a small scale, no budget version of a much larger feminist, alternative publication I'd like to put out one day. For now, I want to do my best to reach as many girls and dudes as humanly possible, to not only network and potentially reactivate some glorious, yet temporarily dormant warriors, but to keep people aware, informed, and inspired. Hopefully while not going broke in the process. |
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What do you love and find challenging about zine making? I love the challenge, for starters. Writing articles, researching the obscure, reporting on events and issues I rarely see mainstream press poke at with their pretentious 10-foot-pole, meeting new people, trips to Staples for xeroxing, post office receipts, money in envelopes, these things keep me going. The fact I am not paid by the hour really gets me down. But perhaps the one thing in this world that topples all else in importance is feedback and love (as well as hate) notes. A letter in my mailbox gives me hope that the paper cuts, the empty gas tank, and dead rainforests I leave in my wake are all worth it. Which role does the Internet play for you? Ah, the internet. It's interesting you bring that up, I'm torn on the issue of technology and the impact it's made on activism (I divulged more deeply on this in Issue # 6). To keep this light, though, the internet kicks ass at hooking me up with strangers. It's how I deal with international distros, random isolated kids I never would've known existed otherwise, it's how I find/conduct interview potentials, and it's how I learned about you guys, actually. I owe the internet a thumbs up for its convenience, speed (on good days) and networking capabilities. I want to slap it in the face with a glove for making human connections so cold and... inhuman. Please name some of your favorite zines and the reasons why you like them. Ooh, zines I like! My first zine was Pulse, by Kelly Rose (a truly inspiring and successful perzine); I also love H*S*S Reader by Olivia A (it's fun, compact, and the editor is delightful), Ribald Zine by Liv (she's a smart girl with a crazy life and she documents it well), Fight Boredom by Amber (it's got an easy to read layout... which is surprisingly rare!... and interesting article bits), Hobson's Choice by Daniel (yes, a guy! He's so funny, so cynical, and his collection of diverse short stories, amazing as they are, leave you depressed for want of more), Bitchcakes Girlzine by Bec (this zine is pretty well-respected by feminist zinesters and I like to think this zine is my own baby's soul-sista-fighter-force... definitely worth a looking into), Fallopian Falafel by Hadass (this particular feminist resides in Jerusalem and I love her zine for our differences-like religion- and parallel loves-riot grrrl, empowerment, you know, the usuals-), and then there's Riot House Zine which is this spectacular mix of writers jumbled together in one big, ole' zine (it's the biggest zine in my whole library!) What advice would you give to someone who wanted to start a zine? When a potential new zinester to the block asks for advice, I enforce the obvious: stick to what you know (or wanna know) and decide ahead of time what you're capable of, how much energy you wanna put into it, and how much money you're willing to lose. One of the toughest questions you have to ask yourself is, do you wanna go this alone and save yourself the extra drama, or are you taking some other contributors along for the ride to save your sanity from the excessive workload? Remember: don't make this a high-stress project, you're supposed to enjoy yourself. And if things do get rough, never ever ever (ever!) get nervous about asking another zinester for help. We're pretty cool kids. And we tend to be very supportive of any new indie endevour. |
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