Zine Library Hosts First-Ever Reed Zine Fest; Keynote Speaker James Spooner Talks Indy Publishing

Content warning: mention of the N-word

Zine Librarians Ann Matsushima Chiu (left) and Chloe Van Stralendorff (right) pose together at the entrance to the Reed Zine Fest in Kaul. Photo courtesy of Reed Zine Library.

The Reed Zine Library hosted the first-ever Reed Zine Fest in Kaul Auditorium on Saturday, March 30, from 11:00am-4:00pm. Roughly 90 zinemakers tabled in the auditorium as an estimated 850 Reedies and guests perused their self-published wares for five hours, before an afterparty punk show in the library lobby at 8:00pm. Keynote speaker James Spooner, director of the 2003 documentary Afro-Punk and author of The High Desert and Black Punk Now, gave an address entitled “A Cut and Paste Journey to Mainstream Publishing” at 12:00pm in the PAB. The Zine Library said the event was extremely successful and hopes to host further Reed Zine Fests in the future, funding permitting.

The word “zine” is short for fanzine or magazine, and according to a sign in the Reed Zine Library, it more specifically denotes “a small-circulated, self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced by photocopier.” The Zine Library website elaborates that “Zine creators are often motivated by a desire to share knowledge or experience with people in marginalized or otherwise less-empowered communities.” Visitors to the Reed Zine Library can find zines from a variety of Reed and non-Reed authors about topics including but not limited to anti-capitalism, art, feminism, the queer community, people of color, and the Reed community. A full inventory is available in the library catalog. The Reed Zine Library is directed by librarians Ann Matsushima Chiu and Chloe Van Stralendorff, along with four student interns. 

The variety of zines offered at the Zine Fest was immense, with topics ranging from mushroom identification to queer identity to Jersey Shore. Many zines were offered for free or on a pay-what-you-can basis, with those that cost money generally on the lower end of the $1-10 range; a number of the tabling zinemakers also offered trades. The zines varied greatly in content, format, and length, with some primarily text-based, some primarily or entirely visual, and many mixing the two. In addition to the zines on offer, Spooner tabled with copies of his graphic novel The High Desert and edited anthology Black Punk Now, enlightening attendees with his more than three decades of punk and independent publishing wisdom.

Zine Library intern Aida Taha ‘26 tabled with a collection of mini-zines on early 2000s pop culture. Taha said that “zines are very accessible” because “most people can make a zine,” and the lack of format and content restriction means that “you can literally do anything with a zine.” The Quest reviewed zines from a variety of individual and organizational authors, including the fall 2023 edition of Biozine, Starting the K.A.R. (Kink At Reed), The Reed College Whimsy Report, COVID is a Labor Issue, etc. Some, like The Reed College Whimsy Report and three zines produced by the Reed Community Pantry, were made explicitly for the Zine Fest, while others, like Biozine and Al-Falaq, were already in circulation and meeting a wider audience for one of the first times. 

Rivi Yermish ‘24 tabled with a zine they described as “a little meditation on being nonbinary.” Like many zines at the Zine Fest, their zine was formatted as a comic and was originally produced as part of Art 251: Making Graphic Novels, an art class in which each student self-publishes a comic. Yermish said that there is an affinity between comics and zines, because “short-form comics make good zines,” and “lots of zines are comics that have broken enough rules” to warrant nontraditional formatting and publication.

Ruby Culhane ‘24, an intern at Grover’s Curiosity Shop on Clinton Street, tabled with some of the zines sold there. These include Martha Grover’s zine, Somnambulist, and Joshua Amberson’s zines from local zine distributor Antiquated Furniture. Culhane said “Everyone I interacted with was very kind and considerate and interesting. The main thing that stood out to me was how many community members who did not appear to be members of the [R]eed community specifically showed up.” She added, “I was very impressed with how dedicated the organizers were to reaching out to the larger community and coordinating such a large-scale event. There were also way more tablers than I was expecting and it made me really happy to see so many people engaging [with] the event.”

After an hour of exploration and mingling, 70 Zine Fest attendees moved from Kaul to PAB 320 to hear Spooner’s keynote address. Matsushima Chiu thanked the event’s sponsors and said they were “happy to celebrate indy publishing, zinemaking, and DIY culture,” before introducing Spooner as “someone really special in independent publishing.” Spooner laid out the structure of the talk, saying his plan was to discuss his life as an artist starting with underground zinemaking and moving to mainstream publishing.

James Spooner gives the keynote address at the first Reed Zine Fest, on March 30, 2024. Photo courtesy of Reed Zine Library.

Spooner started thinking about making his first zine while visiting The Long Haul, an anarchist infoshop in Berkeley, California, at the age of 17. He became interested in the feminist punk zine Slander by Mimi Thi Nguyen, then a 19-year-old UC Berkeley freshman and now Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A volunteer at the infoshop arranged a meeting between the two, further inspiring Spooner to publish his first zine in 1993. Spooner described this first zine, which largely dealt with animal liberation, as “crappy,” but was positively surprised when it inspired correspondence from readers. His second zine, published in 1994, was longer and reflected “a significant upgrade.” Spooner’s zines became increasingly popular, but kids in the punk scene burned out, moved on, and went to college, making it difficult to continue producing them. Spooner was surprised, however, to learn that kids in Washington DC had started their own chapter of one of his projects.

In 2001, Spooner was looking through a collection of punk albums when he “did a double take” upon seeing the title of the all-white Patti Smith Group’s 1978 song, “Rock N Roll Nigger.” In the song, punk musician Patti Smith sings about making the “choice” to situate herself “outside society,” in a fashion she apparently considered to be characteristic of Black people, and identifies herself using the N-word. The song induced Spooner to think about the predominantly white punk scene’s erasure of Black people and its failure to address racism, and he embarked on a search for information about other Black punks. He decided to make a movie about Black punks and went on to conduct interviews that turned into the award-winning 2003 documentary Afro-Punk (a February screening of Afro-Punk was covered by Vincent Tanforan ‘27 in the March 8 edition of the Quest). The film was an international sensation and Spooner said it contributed to the development of a Black punk community.

After Afro-Punk, Spooner made another film, but it flopped and he withdrew from the public eye to pursue tattooing. Several years later, Spooner decided that he “wanted to start telling stories again” and began illustrating what became The High Desert, a graphic memoir of his experience growing up in a rural Californian desert town with a serious Neo-Nazi problem as one of two Black kids in the local punk scene. Spooner’s first agent failed to sell the book, but after finding someone with experience selling punk books, The High Desert got a 3-house auction and was bought by HarperCollins. 

The High Desert subsequently won awards including a 2022 American Library Association Alex Award and the 2023 Cartoonist Studio Prize for Print Comics, and was listed on the Washington Post’s 10 best graphic novels of 2022, according to its page on the HarperCollins website. Spooner dedicated the rest of the talk to advice for prospective authors based on his experience working with mainstream publishing houses, including how to work with agents and find opportunities to tour. He said to always sell your own books while touring to avoid the risk of being exploited by publishers and bookstores, to try to leverage events for more opportunities as much as possible, and to utilize “the secret power of librarians.” Following the conclusion of the talk, Spooner and 25 students departed for a lunch break at the Multicultural Resource Center, while the rest of the attendees returned to Kaul to continue distributing and perusing zines. 

Reedies and guests gather in the library lobby for the Zine Fest afterparty with Horsebag, zerocool, and MIJA. Photo courtesy of Reed Zine Library.

The Zine Fest was followed by an afterparty in the library lobby at 8:00pm, with performances by local Portland punk bands Horsebag, zerocool, and MIJA. According to the Zine Library, Horsebag consists of Reed alumni and staff, and zerocool consists of Reed alumni. Roughly 150 people gathered for the show, forming a mosh pit that one student reported “went hard.” 

Matsushima Chiu said that the Reed Zine Fest was a “huge success.” She added, “We had a lot of community people visit and express that this was one of their most positive zine fest experiences in a while.” The opportunity for Reedie and non-Reedie zinemakers and readers to meet each other and exchange knowledge resulted in “a lot of people inspiring one another,” and allowed “Reedies to learn what Portland zinesters are making and… the community to see how artistic, interesting and creative Reedies are.”

On the possibility of future Reed Zine Fests, Matsushima Chiu said that the most common question she and Van Stralendorff have received is whether the Zine Fest will become a yearly event. She said that “we honestly don’t know what next year holds,” and whether more Zine Fests can be held in the future “really depends on if we can receive another year of financial backing [from] the campus departments that generously supported us this year.” The Reed Zine Fest was funded by the President’s Office, the Office of the Dean of Faculty, the Office of Institutional Diversity, the Cooley Gallery, the Office of Student Engagement, the Student Life Office, and the Library. Matsushima Chiu also noted that “Chloe and I’s team of student staff really made the zine fest run. Truly we couldn’t have done it without them!” In future years, the zine librarians “would like [Zine Fest] to be more student-organized… [with] us as advisors and mentors.” 

Over the summer, Zine Library intern Percy Okoben ‘26 will work on organizing the Zine Library’s collection, which was expanded by “a lot” of donations during the weekend of Zine Fest. Zines donated this past weekend will be cataloged and processed in time for Reedies to check them out in the fall. The Reed Zine Club, led by Taha, will also continue to hold monthly meetings for the rest of the semester and into the future. Reedies can find the Zine Library located on the library’s main level, next to the South Stacks, and anyone interested in making their own zines can join Zine Club or consult the Portland Independent Publishing Resource Center.