Zine events in Ghent in September

Come and make or buy some zines in September! If you are in Ghent this month, check out these zine events:

• This Sunday September 11th I’ll be participating in the Go Local market at Meubelfabriek. I’ll bring my postcards, buttons, (mini)zines and maybe some other things! Sister Ray Zines will share a table with me with her witchy creations.
• On Saturday September 17th I’m organising another zine-making gathering! All welcome to make zines, do crafts, or just hang out. It take place from 3 pm at the Bijloke park on the picnic benches in between the STAM museum and the Kunstenbibliotheek. Cancelled due to rainy weather!
• On Saturday September 24th the feminist collective Girls Go BOOM hosts a workshop to make your own mini-zine. This happens at the Meubelfabriek too.

Also, there’s an online zine symposium and zine jam this Friday the 9th and Saturday the 10th with super interesting talks and workshops! Make sure to sign up in advance.

Herbal walks – collecting Springtime herbs and flowers

Springtime is my favourite season, not only because of the weather – sunny but no heatwaves yet – but also because I love to see all the blossoms and flowers appearing everywhere… It feels like a fresh start and all that colour inspires my creativity and curiosity too. In this season I love walking around, looking around, and taking some plant samples home…

Ostara altar – Spring Equinox

I’m constantly learning about witchcraft and one thing that I enjoy exploring are cycle/time based rituals such as the Sabbaths or witch/pagan holidays (Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, and so on). Today is such a holiday: the Spring Equinox also known as Ostara. And for this occasion I decided to redecorate my mantelpiece and make an Ostara-centred altar as well as try out a tarot spread and tend to my plants.

Zines I’ve read in 2021 (July) – International Zine Month edition

I intended to read at least one zine every day in July for International Zine Month (IZM) and succeeded! I ended up reading 46 in total. My selection for this reading challenge included a comic about travel adventures, a comic about overcoming tiredness, metazines encouraging readers to make their own zines, several riot grrrl zines from different parts of the world including Brazil and Denmark, a few quaranzines with personal reflections and experiences, a Jewish queer zine with personal-political stories and artwork, a zine about dealing with abuse and community accountability, a fanzine about horror films directed by women, personal-political zines about manarchists and anarchist organising, perzines with a glimpse into the life of the authors, mini-zines about mental health, a play your own adventure about zines, a music/perzine about reclaiming an interest in playing guitar, a study about black face masked as a children’s holiday and how art can offer criticism or alternatives, a zine with ideas for dabbling in witchcraft, an artzine about winter plants, and more! I love that these publications use a mix of text and images to express what they want to say, with fictional stories and passionate revelations as well as black & white collages and splashes of colour in the paper choice, binding, or ink. One zinester even made a curiously folded zine, one of the tiniest zines I’ve ever seen, and a mini-zine with a pocket filled with seeds! Clearly, every zine maker has their own unique style and voice and each zine is so personal and reveals a lot about the creator or author. I recommend checking them all out!

PS. I actually read the two feminist mini-zines by Girls Go BOOM that you can see in the photos below in June but forgot to add them to my previous post. I got both of them during a recent visit to the Girls Go BOOM zine library and look forward to upcoming issues.

More photos and links to where you can find the zines:

International Zine Month 2021 – zine library day

Today is Zine Library Day, part of International Zine Month! Stolen Sharpie Revolution says:

“Zine Library Day! Search for a zine library in your area and make plans to go someday or contact them about how to include your zine in their collection.”

For this occasion I’d like to talk about the zine library of the Girls Go BOOM Clubhouse in Ghent (Belgium), the only zine library I’ve visited in the past 1,5 year!

IZM 2020 progress: new zines, Lavender Witch news, and other stuff

We’re over half-way in International Zine Month so it’s time for me to look back at the first few weeks. I’ve been neglecting the list of daily IZM prompts a bit but on the zine-making front things are going great! I don’t think I’ve ever made/worked on so many zines (including several collaborations) before in my life… 🙂

Some things I did:

• I’m reading zines, of course. I will post photos later of all the zines I read this month.
• I edited and finished the two lockdown diary comic zines I made in the past few months. I also decided on a title: Confined. The first batch was printed this Friday. I’ll announce the release on this blog soon.
• I started a new diary comic zine, Scissors & Chainsaws #2, to talk and draw about everything I’m doing during International Zine Month (mostly but not only zine-related stuff). It’s sort of a continuation of Confined #1 and 2 too… I’m really addicted to making diary comics at the moment…
• The zine Communal Care that the new With_Drawn collective had working on in the past few months was printed. You can find it online here soon.
• The same collective also just made a 24 hour split zine and participated in the virtual 24 hour zine event organised by Brighton Zine Network. The zine is called Planet of Capitalocene, Surplus Humanity, and Revolt / Dancing, Drawing, and Day Dreaming. It’s #3 in the With_drawn series.
• The Archiv der Jugendkulturen (Archive of Youth Culture, based in Berlin) interviewed me about zines. So cool! *blush* Read it here. If you’re ever in Berlin, make sure to visit this awesome archive that has great collections about zines, riot grrrl, punk, and other subcultures.
• My band Lavender Witch released our first album and our first zine “Awakening“! Order it on Bandcamp.
• Not zine-related but a lot of fun: Lavender Witch was interviewed for the radio show Bricabracarama at Radio Primitive based in Reims, France. We were also introduced at RadioT from Germany. Next week we will play at the virtual edition of Gentse Feesten at Kinky Star (in collaboration with Girls Go BOOM). It will be screened live at 6 pm CET so you can watch from the comfort of your home! Find the facebook event here.

That’s all for now!

ZineWriMo 2019: day 4-10

We’re on week II of ZineWriMo and I’ve been quite busy zine-wise as you can see in this long post. I’ve spend this week brainstorming, preparing, and creating the beginnings of multiple mini-zines and I also continued writing and lay-outing the splitzine I’m making together with Kirsty. Hopefully we’ll get it done by the end of the year or early next year! Here you can see the work in progress of some of the zines I’m currently making… The first photo contains pages for the splitzine and the rest is for upcoming mini-zines:

Opening of the new Girls Go BOOM Clubhouse

Last Saturday I visited the new Girls Go BOOM Clubhouse in Ghent (Belgium). Girls Go BOOM is a DIY collective who put up shows for female(fronted) bands and organise other feminist activities as well. They were offered a space at the Meubelfabriek, a huge building with lots of rooms that are going to be used by different organisations and projects including a bike repair shop, a community garden, and an anarchist boxing club! Saturday was the official opening of the Meubelfabriek during which all the residents could introduce themselves. Girls Go BOOM built a rehearsal space there and has a living room-like space with a library and distro. It looked really cool!

What struck me most was that there were zines EVERYWHERE in the Girls Go BOOM Clubhouse! So I had to take lots of pictures. 🙂 In the library you can read zines like Vinyldyke, Artificial Womb, and Ladyfuzz, and even zines by yours truly as well as books about feminism and women in rock. For the opening of the space, Girls Go BOOM organised a “zine jam”, meaning you could just come by and make a zine. I used this opportunity to draw for upcoming issues of Same Heartbeats (yeah, I’m working on two issues at the same time…).

I’m already curious for what kind of activities Girls Go BOOM will organise in their clubhouse in the future! For sure it’s amazing to have such a space for your own project and I’m sure they’ll make good use of it!

More photos…

24 hour zines at Girls Go Boom Clubhouse + new zine: Dirty Lesbian!

One and a half month ago (sorry for the delay in reporting on this), in a youth centre/basement/venue called PLEK in Ghent, while listening to a mix of Team Dresch and the Cardigans, a bunch of zinesters and curious creatives got together to try to make zines in 24 hours…

The event was a collaboration between Girls Go BOOM and ECHO. As part of their month-long residence at PLEK, Girls Go BOOM offered space for a creative zine gathering during which participants could create their own zine. This resulted in the birth of several amazing zines (some finished later). It was a great occasion to see the medium of zines spread even more in the local punk-feminist scene.

The zine I made during the 24 Hour Zine Thing event is called Dirty Lesbian. It’s about lesbophobia (even within some feminist scenes), reclaiming lesbian-feminism, cool dyke heroines / musicians / comics / zines, like & hate lists, and more. It’s at the same time an angry and a silly zine.

Dirty Lesbian features Chainsaw Bunny on the cover, and consists of lots of collages, a comic, and hand-written text.

 

Dirty Lesbian is A6-size, 32 pages, lavender-coloured cover, recycled paper inside and lavender-coloured mini-poster.

It costs 1 euro + postage or (preferably) trade with similar zine. Mail me for a trade/order.

[I no longer sell this zine to cis men!]

 

Upcoming zine events

Here are two upcoming zine events I’m doing (with FEL & the 24 Hour Zine Team / Creative Coffee zinesters):

• 24 hour zine challenge!
  Feb 16-17th from 16:00-16:00:
  This is part of the month-long Girls Go Boom Club House event at PLEK in Gent. Come and make your own zine in 24 hours! You can also come and join us for just a few hours. At night we go to sleep, to regenerate our zine energy, so find a sleeping place!
  Facebook event
  Where? PLEK: Kammerstraat 10, Gent
  What to bring? Pen, pencil, paper, scissors, glue, some old magazines, and any craft materials you like to use.
  (The activism workshop on Sunday 18th is cancelled!)

 

• DIY zine workshop afternoon!
  March 3rd from 13:00-17:00:
  Learn how to make your own zine or mini-zine, at Vort’n Vis in Ieper.
  Facebook event
  Where? Vort’n Vis: Sint-Jacobsstraat 3, Ieper
  What to bring? Pen, pencil, paper, scissors, glue, some old magazines, and other craft materials you like to use.
  Option to make copies of your zine at a nearby copycentre (bring some cash!).