Zinefest is like a box of chocolates

Fanzines, bagazines, perzines, sock zines, illustrative zines ... You never know what you're going to get.

The name zine seems self-explanatory: it’s basically a magazine, right?

Well, no. Meet bagazines.

“It’s just this whole bunch of random things in a bag. It’s a zine in a bag,” says Wellington Zinefest organiser Ellen Walker.

Along with her fellow organisers, Cathy-Ellen Paul and Rachel Lynch, I’m told about someone who wrote down their deepest secrets to put in a bag with a tiny bar of chocolate.

Another person filled a mason jar with glitter, rosemary sprigs and little envelopes with illustrations of their dreams.

“The definition of zine is really open,” says Cathy-Ellen.

Zines have a long and enduring history. Punks in the late 1970s created fanzines on their favourite bands and shared them with each other, and in the 1990s the underground feminist Riot Grrrl movement put its own stamp on them. Punk never dies and apparently neither do zines.

Rachel says people understand each other through the art they create.

”We’ve all had that experience of finding a zine or a couple of zines that make you go ‘Wow, this is exactly what I’ve gone through and I’ve not seen someone else talk about that’,” she says.

The creativity and the drive of zine-makers explains why the form has been around for so long even with the advent of the internet.

“You can access a lot of ideas online but it’s kind of en masse, it’s vast, whereas when you come into any zine event, it’s a smaller group of people attracted to the medium as a way of self-care and expressing themselves and connecting to other people like them,” Ellen explains.

For some people, that self-expression helps them deal with certain mental health problems. All three of the organisers note that quite a few people they’ve met in the zine scene suffer from social anxiety.

They believe the zine community helps combat that.

“It’s a way to share those feelings and experiences with other people and it makes you feel validated,” Cathy-Ellen says.

“Time and again I’ve just seen so many people connect with other people for the first time and share things together and understand things together and they’ve only met that day. It’s beautiful,” she says.

Wellington Zinefest is happening on November 19 at Wellington High School.

ZINES AND ZINE-MAKERS TO LOOK OUT FOR

• Jem Yoshioka writes and illustrates comics about culture and identity and has a new comic out called Office Couture.

• Pinky Fang, author of Worst Zine Ever (and contributor to The Wireless). Pinky collaborates with various artists who create illustrations to go alongside negative reviews they’ve sourced online.

• Our Naked Mates are a collective of artists who create zines of their work.

• F.A.Y. is a perzine series written by Ellen Walker from the zine collective Closet Monster Zines and showcases her literary and autobiographical writing.

• Closet Monster Zines is a zine collective that includes perzines, literary work and illustrative zines.

• Sock Review is a zine that reviews socks. It’s everything you expect from the title.

• Sarah Laing is an author and graphic novelist who recently released Mansfield and Me, a graphic novel which is part Katherine Mansfield memoir, part autobiography. Sarah creates zines to accompany this new book.

• Murtle Chickpea founded the Zine Museum and will be creating zine related events at Wellington Zinefest.

• Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People was created by artist Bryce Galloway back in 2002 and has just passed its 60th issue. The zines themselves are full of images and quotes inspired by the author’s life.