We live in the world with people

Notes on SF Zine Fest + why the internet is not totally cutting it for me these days

I really hate to admit it, but I missed the super blue moon last week despite my (casual) efforts to remember to go outside that night and look at it. Instead I spent the evening hunched over the coffee table in my living room, making zine after zine—cutting and pasting and editing and folding and stapling, hundreds of times over—in preparation for the SF Zine Fest that happened last Sunday.

Now it’s Friday, and I’m officially done zineing for the time being. (Actually, that’s not totally true: I have about 20 left over, and next week I might stop into a few local bookstores and see if they’ll put it in their zine sections.) Overall, preparing for and tabling at the fest was very fun and very tiring. I left with four main thoughts and an empty Avalon-turned-cash box with a grand total of about $10 in profit.

The zine printed in blue.

The zine printed in white. (Tell me why when I put this gif in right side up it’s too big for Substack but sideways it’s fine)

1. Short-term, high-energy projects are energizing (leading up to the day) and exhausting (afterwards)

Even though I would consider myself pretty artsy/crafty on the whole, I found that there was certainly a learning curve to making a zine—there’s a lot of printing, cutting, pasting, realizing you need the text to be a different size so taking everything you pasted on off, and starting again. There’s a lot of wasting paper. There’s cover design and visions not quite coming out right. Then, because it was all being made for a scheduled event, there are logistics involved. I’m not generally a planner so I’m kind of mystified by event planning, but preparing for the fest made me wonder if maybe event planning is mostly just getting all the necessary materials into a physical space by a certain time. (I’m sure there’s more to it, but is there?) So you have your Day Of date and then you work backwards from there. And when you only have a month and you’re a total beginner, that requires a lot of forgoing a lot of fun plans to grind away at your project, sit on your living room floor, and give yourself lower back pain.

That said, having a project—really working towards something—was invigorating! I felt like I was preparing for The Big Showcase™, and it made presenting my finished product to the world (the “world” being myself, my friends, and the festgoers) all the more satisfying. That said, since Monday this week I’ve been totally beat. As fun as it was I’m honestly glad the project is done.

2. I don’t know how to table

Once I was at the fest itself, I also learned that there’s a whole separate set of skills and knowledge specific to tabling (exhibiting) that I was totally unaware of beforehand. A lot of it is marketing. For example, there were elements I should’ve included on my table—like referencing the fact that Discussion Candy is a blog and that, basically, this is some of that blog in zine form—that just never crossed my mind until I got there and I realized my zine required some explanation. And, like, how do you interact with attendees? How much do you talk to people when they walk up to your table? Do you try to sell? Do you just let them browse? I think my conclusion on all that is you have to feel out the vibe person by person, and it would take doing a few more fests to develop that sensitivity. There were also a couple questions I got again and again—mostly “What do you write about?”—that even after trying multiple times throughout the day I still don’t have a good, concise answer to. (Maybe I should think more about that, but also like, idk read it and find out!)

3. Indie art is worth making

The event was like seven hours long, so I spent a lot of time walking around and trading zines with other artists while Johny manned the table. I don’t mean to put any value judgement on this, but I did notice that in the marketplace of SF Zine Fest this year my zine was kind of unique. There weren’t many (if all, from what I found) essay-based zines. There were poetry zines and service-focused zines (like, “who to call instead of the cops,” that kind of thing) that had a lot of text, but not many long-form, journalism-y, cultural criticism essay zines. A few attendees told me they noticed it, too, and that they were excited to find mine. To be clear, I like all the poetry zines and service zines! The authors of those clearly have things to say that are worth saying. It’s more that, like everybody, I wonder sometimes if I’m just a poser who makes things that are ultimately just sorry imitations of more acclaimed works of art, but I left the zine fest feeling like I did have something to say worth saying, and that was a nice, solid feeling.

4. We live in the world with people

But the most remarkable thing about the whole experience was how different it felt to create something made to be distributed physically as opposed to posted online. There was something that felt so revolutionary about putting my works into a pamphlet—revolutionary like the Federalist Papers revolutionary, like the 95 Theses nailed to the door revolutionary, like disseminating information that might get passed around from hand to hand and shake things up in the real world. Printing my ideas felt radical. Posting them feels whatever.

I feel like now we just assume that it’s best to post your art online because it’s the cheapest and easiest way to distribute something and you can statistically reach the most people. But the internet is also a nowhere place. It’s so saturated with users that reaching no one is just as likely as reaching a lot of people. You can’t make eye contact or wave someone over or see the real depth of someone’s body when they walk up in front of you. It always feels worthwhile, if for no one but myself, to write down my ideas, but the second I post something on Substack, 1) Substack immediately owns it a little, and 2) I become hyperaware of myself as a virtuality, as a set of performance metrics and a flat persona packaged in a profile connected to a blog post. It’s dissociative and trippy, and in the end has nothing to do with what I wrote in the first place. I also sometimes feel pulled to write about the internet and in that internet girl tone if you know what I mean, because I know whoever reads it will be at that moment on the internet. But we don’t live online. We live in the world with people. We sweat next to them and commute next to them and we all take up space in rooms, and online communities are just not the same. Several times during the zine fest I found myself talking to someone who had walked up to my table, discussing something we both found interesting and open-ended, and I could say to their face that I honestly think they’d like the blog, because they seem to think about things in a lot of the same ways I do. They could hear my voice and I could hear theirs. They could take my zine home and read my ideas and know that I am a person.