Filling the Void: interviews about quitting drinking and using
A great resource for people trying to quit. Not spiritual or straight-edge. 8 interviews with people who have quit drinking and/or using. Frank discussions and stories about the positive and negative roles drinking/using had in their lives, why they decided to quit, what they struggled with and how they managed to do it.
interviewees include Erick Lyle (Scam zine), Artnoose (Ker-bloom zine), Cindy (Doris zine), and John Geek (The Fleshies). Interviews conducted by and edited by Cindy and Caty Crabb
Trans Health
HotRods – A Health and Resource Guide
For Portland and Oregon for folks assigned a female sex at birth who have strayed from that path
Welcome to edition 2 of Pathologize This!: A Mental Health Zine We are very excited about the fact that this zine is a serial! We think it’s important to talk about feelings, situations, diagnoses, medication, drugs, harm reduction techniques, ability and disability, intersections with other oppressions. Hopefully, doing this can be an important challenge to the stigma around talking about our mental health. We are committed to delivering honest, sensitive, intelligent, gutsy narratives about experience, emotions, and politics.
I made these postcards because I wanted to make art about intimate moments in one person’s trans/gender experience. they are not meant to homogenize or generalize trans/gender experiences. every transitino looks different, is different.
Mad Hatters’ Tea Party
(tea, cake and discussion)
Bring your most fabulous hat and come celebrate strength in the face of adversity, masticate some tasty vegan treats and join a discussion on Queerness and Madness! The stigma attached to mental illness means that disclosing you are or have ever been unwell can be a coming out of its own. With this in mind, what can the mental health movement learn from the queer movement? How are the two related? There are limited mental health services available to people who are not affluent, and medication is cheaper than talking therapy. When accessing what mental health services are available, GLBTIQ people and/or members of radical communities frequently have their identity and/or lifestyle targeted as the source of their distress. This is none too surprising considering the history of the mental health system being used to police deviance from social norms, with homosexuality listed as a mental illness in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) until as recently as 1987, and Gender Identity Disorder and Transvestic Fetishism continuing to be classified. Having a supportive community is important in helping people defend their identity/ politics to themselves and to health care professionals when in a vulnerable situation. Spaces free 26 from stigma allow people to make positive decisions about their health and to fight for their rights. This workshop is about actively working to create/bolster such communities and spaces. (Food provided but bringing a plate to share much appreciated).
Contact: Nat
Trans Healthcare in Melbourne: Creative Solutions and Strategies
(A public thinkfest)
Hands up who thinks trans healthcare in Melbourne isn’t good enough? Surely the bad old days of gender variant people being labelled as having a disease are over… or are they? Why do our doctors ask us not to tell too many of our trans friends that they’re prescribing us hormones? Why are we forced to attend a 70’s-era gender dysphoria clinic, or outlay thousands of dollars for private psychiatric, surgical and endocrinological care? Why is it wrong that poor people come out the worst in this scenario? This think and talkfest starts from a premise that we need better healthcare for trans people, more community involvement in healthcare provision from transpeople rather than doctors and ‘experts’, and that this healthcare should be publicly funded. Here is a safe space for people to talk about their experiences finding treatment, what changes need to happen, and how best to work to change the system.
Everyone is welcome: transsexual, transgender, ftm, mtf, cross-dressers, genderqueer, non-trans or something else entirely.
Bring food and drink to share.
Contact: Az
Femme, Trans, Mental illness
Project 76 #2 – The Politics of my body – in this zine i talk about my body. that means fat stuff, trans stuff, self mutilation, sexual abuse, body modification, s and m, cops, etc. some of the terms i use for my own body might offend you. but i am not talking about your body. it is mine, and my own to define how i please.
Mental Health
Witch Hunt
Addressing Mental Health and Confronting Sexual Assault in Activist Communities
By Annie Anxiety
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Mentally Ill
Sometimes Things Get Confusing When You’re Mentally Ill is a brief comix history of a revolutionary activist’s struggles with depression, PTSD, abuse, marriage and fatherhood, recovery and struggling to reclaim a sense of self. It’s cartoony but not light hearted. There is lots of potentially triggering stuff here. Consider yourself warned.
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Surviving Love A Mad Journey In Extreme Romances And Lovingness
A 19 page, short Zine covering personal experiences with my journey through trauma, madness and romance.
I wrote this because I need to put my emotions and confusions
and madness into words, or pictures, or forms, or thoughts, or ideas or… or…
or… Anything but in my head. Because I too often times find romance difficult
due to paranoia, manic episodes or complete loss of coherency and logic. And I
am hoping that in writing this that I am able to help myself, as well as others.
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Dyscalculia the social math of multiplicity
Throughout history and across many cultures, there have been various phenomena that fall under the umbrella of multiplicity: the experience of more than one self in one body. Modern psychiatry has pathologized this as Multiple Personality Disorder (now Dissociative Identity Disorder) but many multiples are now coming forward as healthy, functional groups of people who don’t seek a psychiatrist to “integrate” them.
This is a collection of short essays, poems, and doodles by our group, trying to explain our experiences and how other people have treated us when they discover our multiplicity. Topics include depersonalization, human rights, gender and sexuality issues, psychiatry, alienation, and struggling to learn how to co-operate as a collective when joined at the hip.
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Transgressive Ability
The LGBT people with mental illness and other disabling disorders sometimes have to deal with the mental health system and still are rejected in some areas according to the type they have. This one is about the stigma we face in our day to day lives as anarchists and LGBT with different abilities and qualities. It is based on my view point as an anarchist transman with Asperger’s disorder and why I question the stigmas that occur in my life.
Any comments, questions, or suggestions
Email me at piratesphinx@riseup.net
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Sex Critical
this is about more than who we fuck (and who fucks us)
This zine was born out of one part desire for a writing project and one part desire for more writing to be out there about the place of personal relationships in the struggle (against authority, oppression, domination…). The things that destroy us aren’t just the cops and the prisons, but the models of relationships that are implicit, taken for granted and sap us of our ability to imagine something different. These writings, in different ways, attempt to lay out some glimpses into fights against the things the writers were taught about sex, love and close relationships
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This is about more than who we fuck (and who we don’t) #2 REAL
We said before that this zine was born partly out of our desire for more writing to be out there about the place of personal relationships in the struggle (against authority, oppression, domination, and all the bullshit). I think the same holds true this time around. We’re still fighting against all the things we’ve been taught about relationships, and we’re still figuring out hot to have radically different kinds of relationships than those we were taught to desire, and still figuring out how to bring politics into our relationships and relationships into our politics, and this zine is just a few people writing about that fight.
Please email us with thoughts, comments, etc.
morethanfckng@gmail.com
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Enemies Rapists
Rapists, part 4 of the Enemies poster series from the Institute Experimental Freedom
From the opening paragraph:
THE RAPIST IS NOT A DEVIANT. RAPE IS THE NORM. RAPE IS NOT A CRIME OF PASSION; IT IS QUITE POSSIBLY PASSION’S FARTHEST OPPOSITE. PASSION’S CRIME PAR EXCELLENCE IS MURDER; WE MURDER FOR HATE OR FOR LOVE. MURDER IS AN ACT THAT VIOLATES “THE RIGHT TO LIFE” THAT IS PROMISED BY GOVERNMENTS; ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION IS “PURE MURDER,” A VIOLENCE WITHOUT OBJECT. RAPE HAS ONLY ITS OBJECT. RAPE’S LOGICAL CONCUSSION IS “PURE DISTANCE.” THE RAPIST DOES NOT HATE OR LOVE ITS OBJECT; THE RAPIST ONLY FEELS DISTANCE. AT LEAST PERVERTS HAVE THEIR IMAGINATION TO FEEL AT HOME WITH. RAPISTS ARE ALONE EVEN WHEN THEY ARE WITH THEIR THOUGHT. THEY ARE THE SADDEST CREATURES TO WALK THIS EARTH.
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Delete me, I’m so ugly | New text on Madness & Despair
Forty years ago, the Socialist Patients Collective, embarked on a project to turn illness into a weapon. To hold on to the fear and paranoia that dresses our despair in its most vibrant colors; to claim that experience as valid, and as the very condition on which modern capitalism reduces sense, claim bodies as its subjects, and functions to generalize alienation. The gun followed shortly.
Three stories separated by almost a century links the terror of woman. In Daldry’s The Hours, Mrs. Dalloway lives and continues to reveal the tragedy of our world. There is nothing comforting that calls on the bodies marked dysfunctional to restrict their desire toward death. The body wants to fall, to submerge, to cough, to inhale the dark liquid and dissolve.
The house wife goes on strike, alone, acting as does the marginal factory or service worker. Stealing no longer keeps despair at bay; cheating can’t bring back the years of doomed performances ahead. The future is always bleak. Addiction, a slow death. She drowns her children, she murders herself. She interrupts, in the most grotesque and elementary form, reproduction, and she assaults the meaning of this world. Minus one.
Madness, addiction, dysfunctional positionalities. I am terrified by the pen mark of the doctor, and of the indifference afforded to me by the consciously depressed. I want to make sense of it, but I can’t. My texts, my speech, constantly acquiesce to the demand for rational discourse, molds into another author-function—disciplining her, and making room for me, and repeating the operation that gives encouragement to others who want to play with power. My experience drifting through twelve step programs will always remind me of a sense that there are those who want to hurt us, and then repair us. Who want to manage our despair, and reproduce the addicted-rock-bottom-body, the broken-mad-body, as a petri dish on which to make a different functional subject. While it’s important not to equate madness with addiction, the scandal of these dysfunctional subjects is nevertheless similar. The sadness provoked by the realization that these experiences find analogous homes in what could be called an emotional commons requires unblinking eyes, and, in the days we can get out of bed, collective self-organization of care. Should it surprise anyone that this “care” has come and will come again in the form of “force?” We chose to publish Delete Me, I’m so Ugly in order to contribute to a reading of our times through the lens of despair, to hone in on the intelligence of madness, and to continue to ask “Of what does our congregation consist?”
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i am no hero, and neither are you thoughts on how our histories of abuse inflect our anarchist practice
Contributions made in response to the prompt “How have our histories of abuse inflected our anarchist practice?”
-may be triggering.
-anonymous; keep it secret, keep it safe!
-title & quotes from Delete Me, I’m So Ugly. ❤
-not imposed–print as booklet.
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Sex Critical
- FUCKED: on being sexually dysfunctional in sex-positive queer scenes zine
- 2Fucked2Furious
- this is about more than who we fuck (and who fucks us)
- This is about more than who we fuck (and who we don’t) #2 REAL
Abuse and feeling ok about sex negativity
- i am no hero, and neither are you thoughts on how our histories of abuse inflect our anarchist practice
- The anarchist world and feeling okay to be fucked
- Support zine
Limited sexuality in a sex positive movement
- Flying – Kate Millett
Against Normative
Against therapeutic acceptance of social norms
Against False Positive Essentialism
- Against Separatism
- “Feminine” Heterosexual Men: Subverting Heteropatriarchal Sexual Scripts? – Darryl B. Hill
- Anarcha-feminism and the newer “woman question” – sallydarity
- How-an-outdated-view-of-masculinity-ignores-the-needs-of-all-men/
- Forever your girl
- Subversive Submissive #1
- Defeated Binary?
- An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender
Against Uncritical Liberation of Desire (privileged lifestyle politics)
- Ployamory off our backs
- boredom / happiness studies: adorno on the fetishism of suntanning & schopenhauer
- Demoralizing Moralism the Futility of Fetishized Values
Towards a radical subjectivity
- authentic desire and moral development
- Anxiety, affective struggle and precarity consciousness-raising
Sex Positive
- Radical Slut Dis-covery: building and re-building our sexual selves
- WHORECORE Fucking Queer and Getting Paid
Sex Negative
- Negative feminism, anti-social queer theory and the politics of hope
- Delete me, I’m so ugly from the Institute Experimental Freedom / Liam Sionnach
Sex Militant
- DANGEROUS SPACES: Violent Resistance, Self-Defense, and Insurrectional Struggle Against Gender by Untorelli Press
- Toward The Queerest Insurrection
- ‘Do We Scare Ya’ Cuz, We’re Not Afraid To Fuck’? Queer-feminist Punk Countercultures, Theory, Art and Action
- Enemies Rapists from the Institute Experimental Freedom / Liam Sionnach
- .B.E.T.C.H. Rag Issue No. 2 by Austin ladies’ group B.E.T.C.H. (Beautiful, Educated Thunder Cunts from Hell
Positive Philosophy
From identity crisis to the quest for authenticity
From the crisis of discontent to the quest for happiness
From meaninglessness anxiety to the quest for meaning and purpose
From isolation anxiety to the quest for community
- Radical subjectivity
- Community How To by Sage
- Tiqqun – Theses on the Terrible Community
- Matters of Independence: A Study of Self-Reliance in Into the Wild
- Emotions and Emotional Labor at Worker-Owned Businesses
From freedom anxiety to the quest for responsibility
- The Rebel – Camus
From death anxiety to the quest for death acceptance and self-transcendence
- Jay Michaelson – The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path
- Old Age by Simone De Beauvoir
- Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
When it’s Oppression not Depression
- The problem’s oppression not depression – Stay Solid! : A Radical Handbook for Youth
- Hate Kills: A social justice response to “suicide”.
- i am no hero, and neither are you thoughts on how our histories of abuse inflect our anarchist practice
- Anxiety, affective struggle and precarity consciousness-raising
Zines for future etsy/ distro
Trans zinesters
The Trans Oral History Project
Trans Oral History
The Transgender Oral History Project is a community-driven effort to collect, preserve and share a diversity range of stories from within the transgender and gender variant communities. We accomplish this by promoting grassroots media projects, documenting trans people’s experiences, and teaching media production skills.
H. Melt is a poet and artist who was born in Chicago. Their work proudly documents Chicago’s queer and trans communities. Their writing has been published by Chicago Artist Writers, Lambda Literary, and THEM, the first trans literary journal in the United States. They are the author of SIRvival in the Second City: Transqueer Chicago Poems and currently work at the Poetry Foundation.
FED UP FEST is a three day, all ages, DIY music and workshop festival showcasing and celebrating queer and transgender voices in punk communities. We are a collectively run group that actively opposes racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, capitalism, and all other fucked up isms and phobias at macro and micro levels. FED UP FEST is inspired from the short lived direct action coalition FED UP QUEERS (FUQ) that existed in New York city from 1989-1990 that grew out of the AIDS Coalition.
Kimberly Bowen PURRsonal Space / Kisston Gorgeous Attitude
Kisston blogs about female/queer/trans musicians & keeps on truckin’.
Stranger Danger Zine Distro
Dig Deep, Slander, Nashville Transit, Alex, International Girl Gang Underground, and a million more.
Stranger Danger is a zine distro based out of Chicago that carries feminist, queer, trans (& more!) zines.
Shotgun Seamstress #8 
Oh yeah! Osa constructs some of the best zines out there. This issue (which is full size — 8.5″ x 11″!) has interviews with Italian horror movie star Geretta Geretta, Monika from Chicago Black and Brown Punk Shows, and a 65-year-old jazz drummer in his first punk band. Rad! There are also articles about Marsha P. Johnson, a pioneering transwoman activist, signs of punk in Nigeria, and the feelings of hope and disappointment in modern day activism amongst so many examples of police killing people of color. Get this! Get every issue! (Thanks to lb of Truckface for the review!)
Mental Health zinesters
Everyday Magic / Finn Cunningham
This 50 page illustrated zine explores how to create a healing connection to the natural world through an engagement with plants, nutrients and microorganisms. It’s not a traditional cookbook but a how-to guide covering: nutritional basics, sprouting, fermenting, gardening, foraging, medicinal herbs, flower essences and more! Read a review.
Against the Flood #2-4 by Hannah, 2008
“I don’t want to be telling you this. My ego is screaming at me to stop writing about [cutting myself]. I want to be a good role model, someone who deals with her depression by going for a bike ride, taking to a friend or writing in her journal. But if you are depressed then you know that part of depression is that you don’t always feel like doing these things. Sometimes you feel like hurting yourself.”
I gotta say this excerpt reinforces the power of zines: first person reality, stuff that couldn’t get published published because it might be considered dangerous, but might actually be the most useful and relatable thing a person could read. Quoted with permission.
infecticitisComet Crowbar
Infecticitis # 11: SELFISH by H
2012. 36 pages, A5.
A zine on being selfish, in regards to mental health. This zine is the result of a long Winter Depression, with a personal account on such topics as depression, suicide, self-harm/ scars, being an adult, self-awareness and taking care of yourself.
The Adventures of Cublet Dvorsky
Sweet writing about crushes, mental health, frienship. Also a thoughful story about violence, mental health, anarchism and trauma – being a queer, trans, female socialized young person from a working class background, and looking at how their ideas about non-violence and fighting back are changing – including protesting.
Better Days: Stuff that helps with all this anxiety
cute drawings chronically the things sarah does to help with anxiety, from holding her pet hedgehog to staying up late, to focusing on a friend, finding some structure, and more. Inspiring. Makes me want to make one too.
Telegram #33
Miranda talks about trying to get couseling and always being misgendered, even in a place that had an intake that recognized trans*, and how inaccessible therapy is, even when you really want it. A big list of things they’ve tried because they’re sick of everyone saying “have you tried….” Mad Pride. Madphobic language. Ideas on how to make spaces more accessible.
Telegram #31
“On Broke-femme identity, self-care, magic and ritual, finding meaning in illness, winter survival…”
Telegram A Collection of 27 Issues
This beautiful book compiles the first issues of Telegram, which is one of my favorite zines. Thick with useful stories about all kinds of things with a focus on mental health, including how to make a zine, and why zines are good for survival. I am so excited to get to read these early issues that I missed out on!
Witches in the Weird World #3
Epically thick zine about “being a mad witch but what living that life is like in terms of our oppression as mad people, how to heal and maintain mental health, what it is actually like to be mad, how people can be allies, dealing with suicide and the search for life” (from the intro)
When Lanugage Runs Dry #4:A Zine for People with Chronic Pain and Their Allies
another issue of this great compilation zine. Issue #4 discusses chonic pain, mental illness and identity; it has a great practical piece on self-care, and much more!
Reverse Cougar Years #3
The first issue in 7 years of this Canadian zine, which they stopped writing because someone told them it was selfish to share thoughts just because they liked telling stories. F*** that! Welcome back Maxx!! This issues is partially about mental health, anxiety, family history, going to the West Bank, taking anti-anxiety/anti-depressant medication and not knowing for sure if they are helping or not, but knowing that seeing a psychologist and talking is totally helping and they recommend it.
Also, talks about being a sound tech and female in this male dominated field.
Brian J. Solem /Brianna Dearest
Motor City Kitty is a long-running perzine from Ohio that discusses trauma, recovery, sobriety & more. Recent issues of the zine focus on her life adventures- such as touring the east coast alone via Megabus, and striving to live an ideal life, despite having to navigate her way through complicated relationships and struggling with mental illness. The zine is made cut and paste style, with typewritten text juxtaposed alongside Brianna’s own illustrations.
Motor City Kitty #24
“I think disclosure’s frightening for anyone telling anyone (else) about their past…” Struggling with suicidal thoughts, therapy being pushied on them after their father died (age 13) and later attending radical mental health collective meetings. Surviving a sexual and emotionally abusive relationship trying to access therapy and it being shitty. Finally finding a good therapist who understands how trauma lives in the body, how to listen to our inner voices, embracing imperfections.
Motor City Kitty #26
Typed on a beautiful handwritting manual typewriter. Writing about therapy and developmental trauma, and trying to let in good feelings like the beautiful moments from Girls Rock Camp.
Alex Dahm – 159
STUPID, I’m Sorry if That Was Weird, Happy Birthday, Please Forgive Me, I’m Working On It, Nose Petals, Brighter and More Lucid Than Before, Just a Dream
Hi! I’m Alex Dahm, a queer comics creator living in Chicago. I’m interested in making comics that explore abstract storytelling, mental health, and physical manifestations of memory. I also love drawing noses, underwear, and silly comics about my partner, David, and I running amok in our tiny apartment.
alexdahm.com
Ashley Zielinski – 58
Aus Bahadur Wheelhouse a queer, brown, intersectional feminist born and raised in the region of Mississauga land known as Toronto, who tries to make art about survival, mental health, and the encroaching doom that awaits us all… but mostly (just barely) makes rent. the-wheelhouse.org
Brown & Proud Press – 136
On Struggling Identity, On Struggling Self-Care, On Struggling Bodies, Support Zine for Marissa Alexander
Brown and Proud Press is a writing collective of people of color based out of Chicago, IL. We believe in the necessity of self-preservation and creating visibility around our struggles and histories through the medium of zines. Our main project, the “On Struggling” zine series, brings together personal narratives on topics such as identity, assimilation, racism, mental health, modes of self-care and more from people of color across the country.
Dirk – 33
OCD Throws Bows
A zine about ocd, my personal experiences with it, and what that means for the conversation around radical mental health.
JC
Tributaries, Collide
“Tributaries” is a perzine about growing up with rheumatoid arthritis, and the impact of physical disability on daily life. JC also compiles the zine “Collide,” a submission-based zine on the intersection of physical disability and mental illness.
Kisston Gorgeous
Gorgeous Attitude
Kisston writes about mental illness and keeps on truckin’.
Mack Attack – 146
Heart Pulp
Mack is a (trying to be) posi person who has been writing about their feelings in journals, margins of notebooks, backs of receipts, and on their arm for as long as they can remember. Only recently have those things been put together into zine format. Mack talks a lot about their struggles with mental health, their politics, relationships, and their experiences as an AFAB non-binary, queer person.
Nichole – 128
Pieces, A Visitor in Myself
Nichole writes perzines that snapshot various points in life. She has written about mental health, therapy, lucid dreaming, a 50 mile work commute, acne, relationships, and thriving instead of just surviving.
Sage Adderley / Sweet Candy Distro & Press
Marked For Life, FAT-TASTIC!
Sage Adderley is a single mama of three humans and one cat. She is passionate about kindness, coffee, mental health, fat activism, and the DIY lifestyle. Sage is the owner of Sweet Candy Distro & Press, Sage’s Blog Tours, and writes the personal zine, Marked For Life. She is also the creator of the body positive zine, FAT-TASTIC! Sage currently resides in the magical land of Olympia, Washington where she swoons over the breathtaking view of Mount Rainier. Invoking Nonna is her first novel.
Sprout / KC Zine Collective – 118
Sprouted Ink, Undercurrent
Sprouted Ink is a collaborative personal and art zine about mental health, self empowerment, and DIY learning/sharing. Curated by Sprout with submissions by Sprout, her friends, and strangers met on the internet. Sprout is also part of the KC Zine Collective, Zine creators and enthusiasts working together to foster zine making projects, support zine culture, and increase access to zines (and awareness of them) throughout Kansas City.
Nichole Pieces, A Visitor in Myself
Nichole writes the perzines Pieces and A Visitor in Myself. She has written on various topics since 2010, such as mental health, lucid dreaming, a 50 mile commute, breakups, medication, friendships, moving beyond diagnosis, desexualizing touch, and more.
Nicole Jennelle / People Make Plans
A perzine about partying, grieving, mental illness and social justice in education peoplemakeplans.tumblr.com
Synthia Nicole / Damaged Mentality
Synthia Nicole writes, creates & self-publishes the zine Damaged Mentality. Which has a personal look into invisible disabling brain -injury & how her mental health is/has been as a result.
Sobriety zinesters
geoff is a mixed race gender queer of filipinx descent as a settler living on colonized land known as toronto, turtle island, traditionally land of the haudenosaunee, mississaugas of the new credit, huron-wendat and other indigenous peoples. they are an activist, grassroots community organizer and writer. they identify as a sober addict in recovery. geoff is a graduate of the social service worker program at george brown college. recently, they completed their undergraduate degree at the university of toronto, majoring in equity and sexual diversity studies. they wish to politicize their experiences with substance use and sobriety while unravelling the limited representation of the addicted body.
Areolas and Eyelashes
This is a beautiful zine, about trauma, addiction, femme, PTSD, sobriety, being misgendered and misraced, written by a “rad, mixed-race gender queer anarchist that believes in creating communities of love and still dreams of smashing the state…”
Make All Good Things Fall Apart #1
Written by Geoff (Nobody cares) and Clemintine (Sea Witch) this zine is an “invitation for further exploration, honesty, communication and dialoge” around drug and alcohol addiction. Both writers are sober addicts, reflecting on their own past use and the implications it had on their lives. Includes thoughtful questions about your relationship to substances, including questions about the criminilization of certain types of addicts. Trauma and triggers. Being starved of “the right to envision and experience sexuality as sane and safe, as wild and mine…” Healing.
Make All Good Things Fall Apart #2
this half-size, 32 page zine, featuring a colour cover, is a collaborative project between geoff and clementine morrigan. it explores addiction, alcoholism, recovery, trauma, madness, radical sobriety, sobriety as resistance, intersectionality and the various ways in which addicts and alcoholics are constructed. a zine which steps out of the medical model, explicitly politicizing addiction, normative intoxication, sobriety and recovery, it is also extremely personal and intimate, daring to speak from the heart. in a world where addicts and alcoholics are frequently talked about, but rarely listened to, this zine is an unusual opportunity to hear two self-identified addicts speaking our own truths. it also functions as an invitation, asking us all to think critically about the role(s) intoxication plays in our lives and inviting us all to share our own stories and come to our own analysis. the zine can be purchased on clementine’s website
ocean capewell used to get in trouble for answering the phone rudely when she was in the middle of writing a story. her parents’ friends were horrified at the snarled, “what??!!”, not knowing what they were interrupting, not knowing how hard it is to get started again when you’re interrupted in the midst of inspiration. now she has a cell phone and lives alone, and misses being so completely wrapped up in writing that nothing came before it. she is trying to get back to that pure place: seven years old & writing in notebooks until her hand was sore, going so fast, trying to get it all down.
rotherham zine library, rotherham, UK, reviews issue #5, a split with a friend who was incarcerated at the time.
doris doris doris, cindy crabb’s zine distro (athens, OH) has issue #10.
“I love ocean’s stories. This zine includes sections from the memoir they wrote and then decided not to publish when they found out one of the main characters is a rapist… Obviousy, they don’t reprint the parts about that person, but do include wonderful stories about their first “punk community” in Philly when they were 19, with big queer dance parties. Drag night, race and gender and sex. Also stories about oceans life now, working as a social worker in SanFrancisco, and how shitty people in the tech industry are about homelessness, socialwork, and everything.” – Cindy Crabb
i feel a little weird about the fact that these random people scanned in the entirety of issue #4 without even sending me an email and making sure it’s ok. buuut….i know they only did it because they really liked it. and i like this issue a lot too. so here you go!
on sobriety, singledom, and the world’s single best proposal: “will you, ocean capewell, by my a-official law unabiding partner in oil can romping, floor stomping, catchphrase poppin, jawdropping, mischief-copping amazement, till our travels do us part?”
indigenous immigrant queer boi writer.
Quiet Riot: aka: The Shy Sober Kid Zine
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i really believe that i was set up to be awkward. being an immigrant brown kid in the u.s. is isolating and i have learned to navigate the tiring hyper-visibility and invisibility that comes with being who i am. i learned early on to code switch on some fronts like school and with my friends parents. but when it came to peers i didn’t get the memo and i was left with my internalization of hyper-visibility and invisibility to fall back on. what this meant that i was either incredibly quiet and hard to get to know or loud and lacking tact. there was little gray area for me growing up…
the thing about getting sober is that it doesn’t solve the problems or issues that we had when we were drinking. getting sober didn’t get rid of racism for instance. i still deal with that shit on the daily but what it did what it gave me time to figure my shit out. i mean think about the hours and hours occupied either drunk or hungover, now that i don’t have that i have time for other shit. but the downside to all that is that it gives me time to think about my past and all the things i could do differently. also being sober means that there is no out of having the hard feelings they come regardless of how much we try to run from them. for me my first two years of sobriety meant confronting my discomfort with my awkwardness.
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- “thoughts on being an awkward sober brown queer” in Quiet Riot aka the shy sober kid zine available at Left Bank Books in Seattle and available to read at the zine library in Halifax, Nova Scotia. email riotbrrrlzines@riseup.net if you want a copy
xx fabian
Sub Rosa #7: the sobriety issue
A small, intense zine. In her intro she says: “The point of this zine is to purge, to get it all out and attempt to move on … This is my rise and fall, and my climb back up.” At the time of writing, she had two years sober. It’s a story of teenage drinking, getting married young, divorcing after 11 years full of him cheating; her drinking more, getting out of control, going to jail, and finally getting sobar, and the pain and hope of it.
A Struggle to Stay Conscious #7
Queerness and naming; meeting their new girlfriend at queer Dungeons and Dragons group, and it being amazing to be with another “trans crazy alcoholic…boderline punx,” frustration with their 12 step program but it also being helpful
A Struggle to Stay Conscious #5
Ways that misogany has negitively impacted their life. Self-worth and sex and dissociation. I love this zine, the rawness of self-criticism and trying to find a way out.
A Struggle to Stay Conscious #4
Small, pretty cut and paste zine with small stories about a bunch of things: romanticizing brokeness, sobriety, friends, zine reviews, queerness.
You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania #9 Two Years of Sobriety
Sari reflects on two years of sobriety. They quit drinking because of bad experiences, family history, the desire to create more space to “investigate some heavy and hurful feelings and memories,” and because their family had a long history of alcholism, abuse and suicide, and Sari wasn’t addicted YET. They write about the “hardships, mistakes, lessons learned and positive experiences” they’ve gone through in sobriety, working to open the door to “communicating about the topic with folks who are sober, interested in becoming sober, or empathetic to those who are sober.”
You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania #7 On Queerness, Introversion and Friendship Theory
Text heavy, great zine about so many things: Valuing friendship, the Myth of the Good Friend (worrying about being a good friend, different support different people are able/unable to give, the BFF catagory, what it means to be a friend), being sober, introverted and trying to make friends (to go online or not), Friends with/out benefits (platonic frienships, dealing with years of non-consentual sex, being trans, setting boundries), Boundries, Choices and Limitations, and so much more.
You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania #6
Sari explores the history of suicide in their family, and their own struggles with anxiety and depression, and much more – including an exploration of drinking in their family and their own history. This is a really excellent and full issue!
You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania #5
about working in a male-dominated and centered space and trying to find a way to deal with and resisting militant masculinity ad offensive comments.
Seawitch #4
Childhood sexual abuse and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and learning about emotional flashbacks — feeling an emotional response that is out of proportion with what it going on in the present (something so many of us experience and everyone needs to be educated about/understand). Supporting sex workers by doing research into porn producers who treat porn performers with respect and not just downloading free porn off the internet. “Call out ” culture and accountability. Polyamoury bring up too much jealousy — and how it’s ok to believe in polyamoury as an ideal but still have a hard time practicing it. Talking about what it’s like to be sober for 2 years.
Activist Journeys 