so i’ve discovered that making a zine takes a lot of commitment, love, dedication and time. i’ve been working on making a zine for months now, and although i started out with the idea of making one zine a month, my grand plans have quickly turned into “jesus let me finish this one before the end of the year *please*.”

as i’ve been working, there have been two women that really guide me: Noemi Martinez and Nadia. I’ve got different zines of theirs and I read them incessantly looking for techniques and ideas and just plan ol’ encouragement.

i’ve been particularly obsessed with Noemi’s //Aged Noise// lately–a zine about conflicted love (what other kind is there, really? :->), it uses what i think is the technique of piecing together small pieces to create a larger text. this is often how i write, so i really identify with this zine–but it’s so much fuller and more complex than anything i’ve written. simply by including pictures of a star–one of them is what i think or imagine to be the star on the texas state flag–and it’s a recurring theme in the text. over and over that star appears, changing the meaning of the star every new time it appears.

for example, on one page there is the following text:

I go over a hundred
times how it would
be. What could
happen. How it would
start.

It was you lighting a
cigarette with lust in your
eyes. You blowing smoke in
my face. I liked it.

and along side this text are three cut outs of stars. again, i’m probably reading the stars wrong (in that they aren’t the Texas flag star) but that’s what i thought of–and the resulting connotations for the text made me think of how especially for a Latina living in the valley, the state is never too far away from her life…even her love life.

love is political.

i am such a big fan of zines like this. it tells so many stories in one page, draws together so many complicated textured layers–going back to my pathetic whimpy zine with it’s overabundance of tape and it’s hardline reliance on cheese is a bit disappointing.

the good thing is that both noemi and nadia skill share on their blogs all the time. so when i have a totally stupid question like “how do I make the pages go one right after another?” they are their guiding me along. Furthermore, they were both at the AMC two years ago and led one of the most popular workshop out there.

i hope that they can both be there again this year (if you want to help noemi get there, please buy the CD, buy noemi’s zines, or make a donation to the AMC!), so that they can share their skills again. learning how to speak in such a layered complex way is no joke–it’s necessary, difficult, important, revolutionary work. it’s media justice.