Tuesday 29 December 2009

Call for Submissions - Newcastle Zine Review 2009

Before 2009 is over, I wish to make a Newcastle Zine Review.

This will be a fuller version of what I did in August, featuring 2 sentence reviews of locally-made zines and small press things, with the odd photocopy or thumbnail pic of some of them. I'll print 200 or so copies and leave them out around toon over the next month.

Considering the v.brief timing (which is essential to me actually doing it, because I start my hated job again in January), this will not try to be a very comprehensive or beautiful thing but it will, I hope, be good in at least 3 ways:

1. It will include contacts and snippets of locally available zines, made available to random strangers who may try to get them, or even make their own.

2. It will put on paper some kind of ephemeral history, the non-published Newcastle, the zines that are out there then disappear. I would like to be able to add to this underground history in future, by discovering people's zine collections or being told about this and that.

3. It will be a call out to a DIY community. In a sense it will be an opener to a 2010 Newcastle Zine Review, produced in about a year's time, for which people can write articles on DIY events, send me their zines for review or write their own, etc...

There's probably a 4th good thing about it, that it puts me off the looming work-based existence that so destroys my spirit. And I like cutting and pasting and looking back on things, too.

CONTENTS

Well, I start today so we'll see, but I anticipate:

1. The basic reviews and pics of zines and small press comics that went in the first one.

2. An account of my own zines, advertising the no-cost availability of some of them.

3. Reviews of a few DIY events of the year, probably: DIY Aye, Story Zine, the tribulations of local free festivals, Unsuitable Passport Photos, the Star & Shadow volunteer cinema.

4. I'll also invite a couple of people to write, although it's probably too brief notice, about things they've done and been involved in, like the pink-papered Feminist zines or CJ's house gigs.

5. Advertise one or two DIY things, like Wor Diary & Paper Jam & anything else I can find quickly!

If anyone wants to contribute something - anything - just email it to me, oldglen at gmail dot communism

Squeezing the last drip out of 2009's goodness - the world of zines is what kept me going this year.

1 comment:

  1. Posted to printers Monday 11th (thanks Marian)
    Since when two participatory zines have been advertised already - a poetry zine for Fenham, and a volunteers' zine for the Star & shadow. I can't keep up.

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