Chicago Zine Fest
An interview with CZF Organizer Leslie Perrine
By Katrina Laura Ketchum
The popularity of zine-making through independent publishing is huge right now, and every year it seems to grow. What are three words you’d use to describe zine culture?
Awesome, Fun, Community
How does the Chicago Zine Fest differ from other Zine Festivals you’ve been to? What makes CZF stand out?
One thing we have tried really hard to do with CZF is to create a weekend of events rather than just a day of people selling stuff. In the past we’ve had an art show, Zine Olympics, a film festival, and we regularly host a youth and exhibitor reading. This year, we’ve created a game show called “Zine, Lose or Draw” which I’m really excited about. I think we as organizers are always thinking of the kind of zine fest we would want to attend and so we try to keep it exciting and fun. Also, being in a huge, centralized city, our festival is a lot larger than a lot of other fests. This can be both good and challenging. We constantly try to find the balance between a huge citywide fest and something that maintains the underground DIY feeling of what zine-making is. It’s hard to keep a small feeling of community with over 200 tablers, and yet every year, the demand for tables grows. It can be tricky.
What is the formula, or rather, the mix of ingredients / circumstances that needs to exist in order for this Festival to happen?
Haha, this is a great question. I’d say it’s definitely a mix of non-stop work, weekly 3-4hr meetings for 7 months of the year, tons of excitement, a great group of volunteers, a lot of pretzel rods and a dash of luck. We have a core group of organizers for the fest who all volunteer their time to make it happen and it takes a lot of time planning. We try to make our meetings fun and enjoyable in order to keep up the enthusiasm it takes to organize an event for 7 months out of the year! We’ve also been really lucky every year with finding amazing people who want to support our little festival and make it what it is today - from businesses that will donate for fundraisers, to people who will help hang posters all over the city to promote. It takes a lot of people, time and heart to make the festival happen every year.
As an arts & community organizer, we know it’s hard to pick favorites. But, if you had to, what would you say is your all time favorite zine?
That is really hard, especially since within the zine community most everyone whose zines I like to read are now also my friends. Currently though, I have been most inspired and excited reading the zine Deafula. Kerri writes really amazingly about her experiences being deaf, and for me, reading it has made me think in new ways and about things I had never considered before, which I think is the sign of any great writer. I’m excited that she is going to be a guest at the Chicago Zine Fest this year and part of our panel on disability and health.
What advice would you give to anyone who is interested in starting a publication of their own?
Just do it. A lot of people psych themselves out about who they are writing for or where their writing is going to be seen, but really, it’s most important to just create. The world of self-publishing has opened me up to so many different experiences and people that I honestly can’t imagine if I wouldn’t have ever started doing this. And I did it just how anyone did: I wrote something I cared about, drew some pictures, went down to the copy shop and all of a sudden, it existed! It’s a pretty awesome and amazing feeling to put something into the world that didn’t exist before.
