I had the pleasure this summer of spending six weeks in Milwaukee as a QZAP intern. I got to help out with tasks like cataloging, peruse and research in their filing cabinets, get served a lot of lovely meals, and make some zines with Chris and Milo’s support.
QZAP interns are asked to make two zines: the first must be a zine that teaches someone something, on the principle that everyone has something they can teach others. Past interns have made instructional zines about screenprinting, making lemonade, doing dishes, and, my personal favourite, “how to bra-train your sugar glider.” Preoccupied by the current intensification of genocide in Palestine, and the ongoing task of keeping going in a world whose awfulness is even more than usually top of mind, I wrote my how-to zine on How to Find the Beauty Amidst All The Horrors.
The second internship zine is more free-form, from the principle that, as Milo puts it, “there’s not a ‘correct’ or wrong way to make zines, and we want folks who are newer to the medium and community to be inspired by all the shapes and sizes and possibilities that the collection entails,” but it’s supposed to be 20-40 pages. I completely overachieved and ended up with a 60-page beast: Making Friends With Zines.
It’s the third zine I’ve written that is entirely about friendship (the first two being PALS: The Radical Possibilities of Friendship and Five Friendship Fantasies), and I’m also working on a forthcoming book that’ll also be about friendship.
Making Friends With Zines is tribute to all the ways people can find each other and make and sustain connections through zines: trading through the mail, at zine fairs, by running a zine distro, on Discord, through zine libraries and zine librarianship, and… by running a zine archive!
I talked to a lot of wonderful people for this zine, including some who I reached via QZAP sharing my call for submissions: Cindy Crabb, Amber Dearest, Jenna Freedman, Keet Geniza, Julia Gfrörer, Kelly McElroy, and my sibling, Clare, and also received contributions from LB, Ocean, Sage Pantony, Nat Pyper, Jen Twigg, Soph Warrick, Andi Vicente, and Alanna Why. I commissioned the beautiful cover art from my friend Veronika Dawydow.
And of course, I also talked to my internship hosts, QZAP’s own Chris and Milo! I wanted to share the version of my interview with them that appears in the zine, which was excerpted from a much longer and very fun conversation about their lives in zines.
One of my favourite things about this interview is how it captures the happenstanceness of building a life centred around zines. None of us expected when we made our first zine that it would end up being the way that we connected with many of our closest and most beloved people, as well as a wide constellation of acquaintances and peers and fellow-travelers. It’s such a funny, niche thing!
What has making friends through zines looked like for you?
Milo: At this point, 30 years in, zines are such an integral part of my life, and my deepest friendships are with other folks who make zines or doing zine librarianship.
Certainly I have found numerous lovers, people to this day who are a part of my heart: even if we’re not in bed together anymore, we have learned so much about how to build communities that we want to live in.
We host folks here at QZAP, obviously, whether it’s through our residencies or through friendships or, “hey, people are coming through for a zine fest, sure, you can crash in our space,” kind of thing. And I feel like maybe it’s not different from other subcultures, especially ones that coalesce around fandom, but I don’t know for sure because they’re not subcultures that I’m actively a participant in.
We’re getting together. We’re bonding. We’re making more community. In some cases, we’re making offspring who are now moving through the world and discovering that maybe they’re queer also, and also maybe they’re drawing, and they’re making zines also.
Could you say more about figuring out how to build the kind of community that you want to see in the world through zines?
Milo: I think that a lot of the ideas that we see shared in print in this smaller format, this less public format, this personal, handmade way, a lot of where that is coming from tends to be what I think of as more leftist on a political spectrum.
An emphasis on doing it yourself, but also going together, building things together, skillsharing, doing education for the greater good. And I feel like those are ideas we’ve gotten through zines. When you meet somebody who wrote about that, you start to have a connection.
And working with a collection like QZAP’s, which is so queer. It’s explicitly queer. It’s intentionally queer. But then getting ideas about polyamory, getting ideas about alternative families, how to build those ideas for real maker stuff that doesn’t have to be explicitly queer, but tends to show up more often in queer communities.
And all of those are building blocks to a world that we would like to see more of. So I mean, it sounds fucking cheesy, but in some ways it’s modeling good behavior. If you want the world to be a way, then you need to be that way yourself, and do the labor of it. It’s one thing to say, oh, I wish it were like this. And then [another to,] in ways big and ways small, actually work towards that.
When did the internship start being part of the archive?
Chris: That’s actually a great story. That wasn’t even a thought for us. And we got an inquiry from a woman named Drea, who was a student at Carroll College, and asked if we offered internships. And Milo and I had a conversation, kind of like, “Internship??? I hadn’t thought of that, but what would that look like and what would we have somebody do?”
That’s how I came into helping develop, along with Milo, the internship program. We’ll work with your department. We can do for-credit. We can do not-for-credit. So that is what Drea kind of stumbled into. We had her come and interview with us, and she was delightful and we all just clicked. And she spent a whole semester [here] and then stayed on through the summer.
What’s it like having people come in and visit the archive and do internships?
Chris: It’s great. The most important reason is seeing the archive through the experiences and the eyes of other people, because we have been in it and doing it for 20 years. And [making zines] for a decade before that. So we have one perspective, or two perspectives that intertwine.
And folks that come to us through internships really come from very different places, different socioeconomic backgrounds, racial backgrounds. So we get to also have people’s lived experiences inform what they’re doing here at the archive.
What kinds of things bring people here?
Chris: I think part of it is the phenomenon of seeing yourself. I think part of what drives people to come here is their connection to queerness, and how they see that representation in the materials here in the archive. And also for some folks, it is maybe even seeing themselves quite literally. And then other times, it’s interest-based. So folks are, I think, coming to us more because they know what queer culture is now, and they want to see what zines captured of all of that time before, and how it informs us.
How has running the archive changed your relationship with zine communities and the types of friendships and interactions that you have?
Chris: For myself, it’s weird. It’s professionalism. I’m clearly not a professional, but Milo and I have become sort of de facto experts, or professionals, or librarians, and…
Milo: Spokesmuppets.
Chris: My interest was always about making connections or finding interesting music or stories to read, and I never thought about the side of it where Milo and I often are asked to come and be keynote speakers or teach in a class or guest lecture. I also recently branched out into my first experience in academic writing, because I didn’t go to grad school. I’ve actually kind of punk-rocked into it by doing real-world experience, and without going into debt.
And I joke about this all the time. If I’d known that the [first] zine that I made back in the day was going to lead me to where I’m at, I would’ve done a better job!
Milo: There are some folks in the zine community who I interact with on a zine fest level. We might see each other at the same fest. We say hi. Sometimes I’ll pick up their work. Sometimes they’ll pick up mine, and it’s lovely.
And then I have this whole other level of friendships with folks who are at this point more than just zine makers, they’re also zine scholars, they’re also librarians or academics. We’ve met because of the labour that we put in personally and also the love that we put in. It’s not just a vocation, it’s an avocation, right? And so for those folks, I feel this super, super intense connection.
And some of them are folks that we share struggles with, very intense personal struggles. And I feel like my experience with zines has led me to this group of folks that I feel so charmed and blessed to be in community with.
I don’t know that I would’ve expected that from my 18-year-old self when I first started making zines. It was something silly and fun to do, but looking at this long chronology of essentially 32 years, in a lot of cases we’ve all become adults together in a way that is unexpected, I think.
And for me, I think it’s partially unexpected because being queer in the early nineties, it wasn’t totally a death sentence, but it also certainly wasn’t NOT, with the AIDS crisis.
I think we’ve been very blessed with how the amazing folks that we get to meet and welcome into our home, the amount of learning that we get to do, the discussions that we get to have about a world that we would like to live in as queer folks.
Chris: I think for me, there’s so much more that I’ve been able to achieve in life because I have this amazing love and support from makers in general.
It achieved the purpose that I set out to do 30 years ago, which is to make connections and meet people and find amazing things. I would not have contemplated that some shitty cut-and-paste thing that I put together [would be my] in. How fucking amazing is that you can throw something together and it gives you an in to this amazing community.
And [it could have just] been a thing I did back in the nineties or whatever, but it was always there. And it meant so much to me that, even in those few years where I wasn’t really making zines, I was still in the culture traveling and building off of those connections. 💜
Making Friends with Zines is on sale now in print and digital formats.
Lee P, interning at QZAP in summer 2024, is a long-time zine maker whose current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Lee is also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
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