For my spring Undone Rituals Mixtape on Patreon, I made a zine! That sentence got an exclamation mark because I haven’t made a zine since I was 24. That’s over 20 years ago!
Making a zine in 2025 was different in two main ways: 1) No longer having an office job where I could sneak photocopier time before everyone else arrived; and 2) Resisting the urge to lay everything out in InDesign and simply print it. There’s nothing, like, morally wrong with printing out a digitally-laid-out zine of course, but I craved the muscle memory of copying, pasting, stapling assembling; the muscle memory of nonediting, recording, celebrating imperfection.
It was a smaller zine than I usually make and relearning the specific quirks of photocopying was … let’s just say an experience, but I’m so happy I did it. I miss my long-armed stapler but am grateful for having to improvise with a regular one. I’m grateful for having kept my bone folder, for moving it with me across kilometres homes and years, a symbol of something I thought I used to be but actually still am. It felt life-affirming to get back to my roots in this way.