🜃 Zines

I started out with comics, drawn on notebook paper and meticulously photocopied at the library for distribution to a handful of kids I knew, mostly people whose thinly-disguised superhero characters made it into the stories. Within a few years I was making zines in high school, enjoying the opportunity they offered to be cool by proxy in the late 90s, because I was never going to be cool in the actual town I lived in. I was typing up terrible poetry on my lunch hour in the library or meticulously handwriting it so it was readable, writing little articles and essays. I made a couple of perzines inspired by the zines I was learn about online and send away for, mostly because I wanted to have something to trade with the immensely talented people I was mailing my well-hidden dollars to. My best friend and I published two issues of an underground newspaper until we got in hauled in front of the principal for (in retrospect, very mild) reporting. Eventually I discovered blogging and then livejournal, and I started posting my writing online instead, but every few years I get the itch to produce something that I could print and staple, if I wanted to.

Lately I've been thinking about zines again and there's a desire to make them that I haven't fully unpacked, but I think it's about wanting to have something to show, to point to that I've finished. I'd been looking for a good place to share some of my older projects and I think I've finally found one via discovering Zine Jams on itch.io, so both old and new projects are going there now.

Brainflowers is a zine I made in 2011, following a long year of physical and mental health issues. It was a series of essays that marked the first time I really sat down and gave thought to my gender and my relationship with my body, and marked an important step in my transition even though, at the time, I had no belief I would be able to physically transition in the future.

the Merciful Earth is a bit more of a booklet than a zine, clocking in at 66 half-size pages. It's a compilation of poems and prayers and storylets I wrote for a goddess, and it was both intensely personal and the first thing I actively, intentionally published in a long time. I've never gotten it physically published but eventually I'd like to print and bind a copy for myself.

Anamnesis is a short poetry zine about memory and repetition. It's not long but it's the first thing I've put together in a few years and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.

🜂 Stories

Jack Rose, forcefully retired airship pilot, hasn't been making a lot of good decisions lately. Today he's making worse ones than usual.

Garcia’s been quietly building her practice as a freelance supernatural troubleshooter in Phoenix for years, and is almost ready to break into full-time if she can just deal with a thief, a library ghost, man-eating mermaids and her own relationship issues.

It's 1972, and Dan McCarthy is trying his damnedest to dodge the draft, the Department of Superhuman Affairs, and his ex-girlfriend, but all three keep coming back to haunt him.

The world ended weeks ago and Lacey’s been cast out of the safe bunker she called home with her husband and sister-wives. Now she’s got to figure out where she should go and who she can trust to stay alive in post-apocalyptic Utah.

Originally published in Imaginary Beasts

🜔 Poetry

A collection of poems, 2010-2020

Poems written for and about deities and magic

These poems are all set in the setting I refer to as the Empty Sky, by or about the characters there.