zine review

This past weekend, we were lucky enough to table at the 11th Portland Zine Symposium. We love the PDX Zine Symposium because we always end up with a big pile of zines at the office come Monday morning. Kjerstin, Ann, and I decided to share some of the zines that piqued our interest at the zine symposium this year. We hope that you'll decide to pick up some of these zines yourself.

In Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills, Raleigh Briggs writes about how DIY activities that take place in the domestic sphere don't seem as legitimate as, say, bike repair. But after teaching a class on herbal first aid and natural housekeeping, she came to realize how important it is that natural housekeeping is taken seriously within the DIY community.

More after the jump!

Lots of fantastic zines have been showing up in our mailbox lately. Thanks to all of your donations, the library's zine collection has been growing like crazy. Here's a little taste of some of the zines that are new to our collection:

Photo: Hot Pantz: Do It Yourself Gynecology zine

Hot Pantz provides readers with an understanding of anatomy, recipes to conquer yeast infections and hormonal imbalances, an extensive glossary of self-healing herbs, a list of aphrodisiacs, and it provides instructions on how to give foot massages that will alleviate cramps! I can't tell you how often I consult this zine, or how excited I've been to share information from this zine with a friend in need.

Dames on Frames: A Feminist Bike Zine is the first in a series of four zines that explore the relationship between feminism and bikes. When Claire Stoscheck was in Bogotá, Colombia — the city that is said to have the most extensive bike paths in the world — she realized that only around 1-2% of the bicycle commuters she saw on the streets were women. Stoscheck began to ask questions about Bogotá's gender gap in bicycle riding, which then led to questions about the relationships between gender and bikes when she went home to the Twin Cities.

The title of this zine comes from an old Irish expression that says, "There will be white blackbirds before an unwilling woman ties the knot." The zine features interviews with 11 women who all have something to say about why they don't want to be married.