Stolen Sharpie Revolution

Oh, if you would like a a copy of the 31 activities for International Zine Month poster along with a Portland Button Works Quarterly here’s how you get them: Send a self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to:

I want to hear your plans for International Zine Month. I’ve been adding events into the 31 activities calendar. I’ll also be adding the activities to the google calendar. You do know about the Google Calendar of Zine Events don’t you? You can add it to your own Google Calendar and see when there are zines events all around the world! Let me know about your zine events and I’ll add them to the calendar.

Ok, a big reason I picked July for International Zine Month is because that was the month of the 24 Hour Zine Thing. I think it is an awesome project and everyone some at least try it. Did you know that you need to sign up to be counted? Go here and sign up to be a part of the 24 Hour Zine Challenge.

That being said, The Portland Zine Symposium is hosting their 4th annual 24 Hour Zine challenge. This awesome event is a fundraiser for PZS and works like a charity walk. You sponsor a participant (or participants!) and you only have to pay-up if the participant/s finish the challenge! If you sponsor someone for at least $10 you will even receive the zine the participant makes! I have taken part in this event for the past two years and have finished both times.  I will be participating again this year at this event that will be held at the new spacious Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, Oregon on 21 July. I would love love love it if you could help out the Portland Zine Symposium and sponsor me, Alex Wrekk, in the 24 hour zine challenge. There will also be live cams to watch our sleep deprived scribbling….and also so that you can laugh at us.

Spill The Zines, a UK based zine news site, reposted the 31 activities poster! So did 365 Zines A Year!

There is a new issue of Zine World out! Zine World #31 is available for you to purchase and pursue zine reviews and find some good new zines to read. The cover is really cool and looks like a hidden object game! Also, have you sent your zine to Zine World for review? You should do that. Here’s the info on how to do that including this handy form to fill out so they get all the details right.

This is an interesting article about zines libraries from a Library School!

And to sum all this up, here’s a cute comic about how trading zines is rad.

Greetings! I have a few zine things for you this week:

-Wanna participate in an interview about Riot Grrrl fashion? (Zine related because Riot Grrrl and zines are inextricably linked in my head)

-Can’t make it to Paris? Want to have your zines on display in Paris? Send them to the Fanzines! Festival. I really love all the photos of the mail they have gotten!

-Do you have an event to add to the Zine Event listing page? Let me know! Did you know that you can actually add the Zine Event Google Calendar to your own Google calendar?

-We are 18 days away from International Zine Month! What plans do you have?

Just a short update to direct your attention to Postage Paid Zine Podcast that is airing in about a half a hour! Sage (Sweet Candy Distro) and Sarah (Once Upon A Distro) will be discussing things to consider when throwing a zine event! I’m so glad to see more zine podcasts. Fun stuff!

I’ve been busy but I have been keeping the Zine Events page up to date. As always, let me know when I’m missing  a zine event. I only have 2 eyes and they can’t see the whole world.

I attended the Woman of Color Zine Symposium last weekend. Jenna, the Lower East Side Librarian, was in town and we got to hang out. I saw a lot of old zine friends and met some great people. I think the event was awesome and I hope they do another one.

Registration for both the Philly Feminist Zine Fest (so bummed I can’t go!) and the San Francisco Zine fests are open now!

This weekend is both the Flint Michigan Zine Fest and the Scranton Zine Fests proving that awesome zine fests CAN happen in your city if you are creative and motivated!

And in zine new in my home city of Portland:

June 21 The Portland Zine Symposium is also sponsoring a Zine Bike ride and Bike-in movie during Pedalpalooza!(it starts at our lovely Portland Button Works shop! check out all our zines! Check out all our buttons!)

June 23 AmaZINE Day!- A new mini zine fest hosted quarterly in conjugation with the Portland Zine Symposium! Table space is limited and all table registration is to signed up for physically at the IPRC. Up the mini zine fests!

Did you know that July is International Zine Month?

What are you plans?I’ll be adding events as YOU send them to me.

The Portland Zine Symposium is hosting a 24 Hour Zine Challenge for the 4th year in a row! It will work as a fundraiser again where you have an opportunity to sponsor a zinester. You only pay if they complete the challenge AND you can even get a copy of they creation.

Also, July 21st is International Zine Library Day!

How will you show love for your local Zine Library?

Greetings! I have returned to dreary Portland after a few days in the dessert teaching the glory of zines in the Art Studios at Coachella and yes, I did see hologram Tupac and it was creepy. But more importantly I hung out with the fine Zine Works folks and taught people to make zines! I made two tiny zines about my experiences, more on that another time.

So, what’s up in zine land?

First, The next Zine Librarian (un)Conference will be held 27-28 of July in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA . Registration has opened so get in there! go here. Hang out with two awesome things that get even more awesome together: Librarians and zines!

I added 6 new dates for zine fests to the event listings! Go check it out. Including the Leeds Zine Fair that I will be attending in November! We are making it a date around out Copy Scams tour. So stoked!

Now for some talk about some of my pet peeves. First, my very least favorite question is “Didn’t blogs kills zines?” as if they are mutually exclusive. I have a blog. I have a zine. They both server different functions. The second is people who think zines are dead and talk about them like a eulogy of the 90s. Articles like this article or this one feel so dismissive. If you notice in the comments there gets to a point where contemporary zine folks speak up…but no one really seems to listen. I like to tell people that write this articles that zines didn’t stop existing just because they walked away from them. Thousands of us have been happily cutting and pasting, penpal-ing, and putting on zine fest for years. I guess I just hate seeing all the years of hard work, dedication, and connections that have enriched lives the world over dismissed as something that doesn’t exist anymore.

Another of my pet peeves is the term “e-zine” . E-zines are not zines. To me, zines need to be tangible. That is why I find this “Zeen App”  so annoying. The really horrible thing that a friend of mine brought up is that even if you hate it, you might want to secure your zine name now. ugh.

In super awesome news, Someone has created a Zine Crush site! It hopes to become a zine someday and I think that is amazine. I totally agree that  the consummation of a zine crush is a split zine! Go send your stories!

One more thing…

My friend Derek and I are combining our two button companies to make a mega-button company called Portland Button Works and last week we signed a lease on a brick and mortar store front! It is super exciting. We are going to to offer custom buttons, magnets, keychains and bottle openers. We are also going to offer our catalog designs for sale as well as starting a zine distro as well as sell zines in the shop! We have started getting distro stock and bought a bunch of lumber to start building fixtures but we still have a long way to go before the shop is operational in all of its awesome glory! We would really really appreciate your help with our indiegogo campaign!

Please go here and help out with our campaign and get yourself some pre-ordered buttons, bottle openers, or magnets. You can also get the newest issue of Brainscan Zine, or even discounts on buttons for life!

Greetings from sunny Southern California. I’m down here for the LA Zine Fest . The sun is bright and I, as a Portlander, had to buy some sunglasses! What is the crazy bright ball in the sky!

Ok, here’s some zine news:

-My friends and fellow Portland Zine Symposium organizers edit a monthly anthology/comp zine called, Stumptown Underground. It is a curated and themed monthly and they have just extended their submissions for this month. The theme is memories and we all have those, right? Why not submit something for consideration?

-Speaking of submitting… The Portland Zine Symposium is looking for artwork for this year. Guidelines can be found on the webiste. The theme this year is “Sea Of Zines”! Please make us something like a shark fighting a giant squid for zines or a pirate treasure chest filled with zines!

-Chicago Zine Fest has announced the line up of zine readers. Check it out! It includes my housemate, and Zine Thug creator, Marc Parker.  I sure hope he gets his zine done in time!

-Also in Chicago: Quimby’s is hosting the Zine Olympics at the Chicago Zine Fest. Have you been training?

-And another thing in Chicago: Sunday after the Chicago Zine Fest will be ZOE, the Zine Organizers Event. It will be a day long event for people who organize and want to start organizing zine events. We will workshop and network and talk shop. More details to come.

-In sad zine news, Profane Existence will shut down its print operation.

-In odd UK fanzine news, fanzines were seized at a football match.

Zine Events this weekend:

18 – Feria de Fanzines (Santiago, Chile)

19 - LA Zine Fest (Los Angeles, California, USA)

I’ll be at the L.A. Zine Fest on Sunday, stop by and say hi! I’ll have some flyers for this site and lots of other stuff!

P.S. in internet land a meme has been going around about occupations and what people think they are vs. what they really are. My friend, Tara, created this one for zines.

stI keep finding more awesome zine things to share with you!

- Atomic books, one of the sponsors the 2011 Revenge of Print, has tallied over 2,000 titles printed last year! Over 1,000 people signed up on the facebook page and over 2,000 zines have been made! Take that, people say print is dead! Read more about it here.

-Another sponsor of Revenge of Print is Quimby’s, and they mentioned this site in the quimblog this week. thanks!

-Portland, Oregon zinester, author, and illustrator Nicole Georges is working with IFC to illustrate THE MOST PORTLAND THING EVER. It’s a bit like a contest where you leave a comment about the most Portland Thing Ever that you have seen and Nicole will illustrate the winner. Check it out!

-Also in Portland: The 12th annual Portland Zine Symposium will be 11-12 August 2012.  The website  has not yet been updated because there is no new artwork yet (and tabling is not open either, FYI)! The Portland Zine Symposium is looking for your artwork to grace the website, t-shirts, posters, stickers and more. The theme this year is “Sea of Zines”  So there should be lots of cephalopods reading zines, pirates with zine booty, or a shark trying to eat a zine reader on a surf board. Deadline for artwork is 25 February and details can be found on the website.

-And another thing in Portland: The Independent Publishing Resource Center is moving across the river to the east side! Since 1996 the IPRC has been located in an office building in Downtown Portland. After shuffling around the building and expanding into other offices there over the years, it has just grown too big. The move across the river to 1001 SE Division quadruples the space for more ziney goodness! Stay tuned for more news about the move!

Canada Corner! (I couldn’t help myself, sorry)

-Speaking of moving: The Robert’s Street Social Center in Halifax ,Nova Scotia, Canada has lost their lease  on Robert’s Street. They are looking for a new space in the North End. I’m particularly sad about this because I had the opportunity to be a resident with the Anchor Archive zine residency program in 2009. I know they will end up on their feet and I wish them well!

-Amber, of Fight Boredom zine distro and Culture Slut zine, was interviewed in this Montreal article about Fighting Boredom. I really dig the thought that “only boring people are boring”.

-I was contacted by the people from XSPACE Cultural Center in Toronto that they are having a BINGO fundraiser on 17 February and that they are accepting zine submissions for their zine library!

Zine Events this weekend:

12 – Festival of the Photocopier Zine Fair (Melbourne, Australia)

12 – Bristol Radical Zine Fest (Bristol, UK)

Do you have zine related news? Drop me a comment to the right and I’ll try to get it posted!  —————>