"Zines, although they’re called ephemera in library lingo, are actually a lot more permanent than blogs," writes Jenna Freedman in her essay, Zines Are Not Blogs. "The zine reader gets to keep the thing forever. When the reader returns to the zine, unless zhe has spilled coffee on it or wrought some other type of damage, it will be the same."
Freedman recently opened a new archive for 1,500 zines at Barnard College. While she has strong views about the difference between the genres of zines and blogs, her unique collection utilizes the web in innovative ways--connecting to readers through a webpage, a MySpace account, and a Facebook space.
This week, I picked Freedman for my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
With your own zine, what kind of a relationship do you have with your readers? How often, how much do you interact? How is this different than the relationship between bloggers and readers?
Jenna Freedman:
I will tell you that an intimacy develops quickly when you're reading one another's zines and communicating by snail mail... I've found myself asking audacious questions and revealing surprising things to people I don't know—in a traditional sense—all that well. Writing these letters can be liberating, and it feels more like journal writing than other forms of communication. That leads to a weird phenomenon in zine communities, which is the inevitably awkward meeting in person.
I always feel like and probably behave like an ass at my first encounter with someone I previously only communicated with by zine or letters and/or e-mail.
Zinesters write letters to one another. That takes time, and it's very personal. With blogs you get quantity while with zines it's more about quality. I also see a competitive dynamic in blogging that reminds me of junior high school.
Bloggers are concerned with blogging something first. It also seems to me that they're more conscious of their popularity.
Zines and blogs both build community, but because blogs are so public, the community aspect can be to some extent for show. I've definitely seen bloggers in my community get off on their public friendships with one another, but some of that may be as deep and true as it is in zinedom. In zinedom, though, there's less motivation to be fake.
Both zines and blogs tend to be authored singularly or by a small team. There's a special genre in zinedom called the "split zine" where two individual zine makers collaborate on one issue. Usually the zine is two separate sides, upside down from one another, so neither is backwards.
That's a collaboration that doesn't have a parallel to my knowledge in blogging. Bloggers can "friend" each other or include one another on their blog roll, but a one-off project like a split zine isn't likely.
» Mothers With Zines from ThePublishingSpot
Too many people brush off zines, thinking the whole genre is overloaded with teen-aged hormones. Over the course of my week-long interview with zine librarian Jenna Freedman, we discussed mothers with zines--an unexpected sub-genre of the zine univers... [Read More]
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