Extra


Interview for August/September

For this month, I got a chance to talk with Lizzy of marching stars distro. Her distro is one of the very few distros in the UK that are active. She carries a wide variety of personal zines. It's totally amazing!

first off, how did you get into zines?

After endless wandering around the internet looking for Tegan and Sara things I stumbled across a zine (Off My Jammy) that had an interview with them in. I emailed and I ordered it and I read it cover to cover on a rather dull train journey and thought it was pretty interesting. I didn’t know it was a “zine” and I didn’t think all that much of it. A couple of months later I stumbled across a UK distro and it had links to other distros. I found Frenzy distro and without really knowing what these zine things were I knew that I wanted to read about all the things in the descriptions. I sent off my money and my package of 8 or so zines came and I stayed up till about 3am until I’d finished reading them all. As someone who was then obsessed with trashy celebrity/teen magazines I knew I’d hit on something a million times more fulfilling and was hooked from then on!

as a distro owner, what do you search for when carrying a zine?

Beyond the loose set of “themes” that I list up on the site I guess I’m mostly looking for the zines that I have to stay up late into the night reading because I just can’t put them down and go to sleep because I have to know more. I know that’s terribly undescriptive but all my favourite zines have a certain quality about them that I can’t quite put my finger on. Other criteria I have floating in my head are zines that other UK distros aren’t stocking and zines that “fit” well with the zines I’m already carrying.

what do you strive to do as a distro owner?

A number of UK distros that I loved closed and I figured I could try and fill the gap by making the zines I love (that are mostly international) more easily available in the UK. Another goal I always have in the back of my mind is trying to be the kind of distro that people can order from and know that they will love 95% of the zines without having to go to lots of effort reading descriptions and deciding specifically what to order. I appreciate that for someone to be able to buy from my distro like that it would require them to have an almost identical taste in zines to me, but I know that I’ve certainly felt that way about ordering from distros in the past so it is possible!

how do you feel about the role of the internet with zines? do you feel like e-zines are part of the zine world?

Without the internet I would never have found zines in the first place, and I definitely wouldn’t be able to run my distro, so I’m a big internet fan in as much as it “supporting” the paper zine world. I wouldn’t really be able to comment on what it was like before the internet because I didn’t experience that, but I very rarely find myself thinking “If we didn’t have the internet this would be better…”. A little bit of me wishes I had more orders sent through the mail though because sometimes paypal can be so faceless. I don’t read any e-zines at all. It’s not the same. I don’t think they have a place in the part of the zine world I’m in. Maybe I’m materialistic, but I need to be able to hold zines in my hands and know that time was spent over the layout and the production and getting it into my hands. There’s so little left in this world that isn’t mass produced and consumed with little or no thought given about the process of it reaching us. I could never connect with an e-zine the same way I do with a paper zine because I’m still going to be sat at a computer reading it. I love snuggling up in bed and reading zines, they’re like letters from friends you don’t know yet!

are there many people in your area that you get to talk to about zines? how do you explain to others that don't know what zines are?

I have some friends in my area that read zines, but that’s only because I got them interested in zines and they pretty much only read what I lend them (I think). I’ve met a couple of new people since I started the distro who live locally but I’ve never really sat down with anyone locally and talked about zines. It’s one reason I love zine festivals so much! I regularly find myself trying to explain zines to people who don’t know what they are and it usually involves hand wafting and me getting rather flustered! I normally just say “little photocopied self published magazine type things” or something along those lines but I know that description never does them justice. Invariably it’s part of a conversation about something else, or something distro related so I just need to them to understand very vaguely what I mean so I can move on. The people in my life that I care about and want to share my love of zines with have all been lent 5/6 of my favourite zines that I think they might like at some point. Some really enjoy them and want more but others don’t “get” them. I think showing a selection is the best and only way to explain what zines are properly.

how do you feel about being in the zine community? what would you like to see more in the community?

Most of the time I don’t really feel part of the zine community which I think is because I don’t write a zine myself. It’s as though I’m not sharing a part of myself with the world through zines so perhaps I shouldn’t be taking anything from a community that is based on the sharing of personal experiences.

I don’t think there’s particularly anything I, personally, would like to see more of in the community. I’ve felt incredibly supported with my distro from people ordering, letting me stock their zines, saying nice things and offering to help out occasionally. I was quite surprised that as someone who’s never existed in the zine community as a writer I was able to get support and respect from people when I started the distro. (I can’t think of any distros run by people who hadn’t written at least a zine or two beforehand?). Perhaps I have a very skewed view of the zine community though and I’m way too caught up about not having written a zine myself!

what other d.i.y. projects do you do?

As unusual as the answer is from people in the zine world, I don’t really do anything d.i.y. related apart from my distro. Various health problems over the last couple of years have meant that doing anything much beyond what I have to do (school, work, etc) doesn’t really happen. Which is a shame, but can’t be helped.

what ideas do you have for the future?

I’d love to put on a zine festival at some point in the not too distant future. I was so overwhelmed by a sense of “this is IT, for the YEAR” at London Zine Symposium that I felt quite inspired to organise a mini event to help break up the year. So I have vague plans for that floating around in my head. Who knows if and when it will ever happen, but plans are better than nothing, right?

any advice for someone who is new to zines or looking to open a distro?

My advice to someone new to zines would be to just read as many as you possibly can! I’ve recently started keeping a “zine diary” where I write a paragraph or so with my thoughts on every single zine I read. I’ve found that really helps me focus on what I like and don’t like about certain zines, so I’d definitely recommend that. Good luck to anyone looking to open a distro! Apart from all the normal advice (think about it, it takes a lot of time, you have to be committed, etc), I would say that the one thing I didn’t fully appreciate when I started was just how much time and energy it takes to write descriptions if you’re not naturally good at that type of thing! So yes, when you’re going down the checklist of things you need to consider (time/ability/resources), don’t forget about description writing. Some days I really do worry that it will be the death of my distro, which seems ridiculous because I’m so efficient with all other aspects. Having said that though I’d like to see more distros out there, especially quite specific ones that you can go to for a specific type of zine (I’m thinking along the lines of Jenny’s Not Sorry Distro which only stocks zine dealing with body issues/image).

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