Self Publishing

You Can Make a Poetry Zine

Or a handmade publication of other tiny texts

Are you one of the many creative writers who enjoys sharing your poetry on Medium? Along with seeing your poems on the screen of your computer and smartphone, how would you like to see your poems on paper by making a handmade print publication?

I highly recommend you try making a zine with your poems, as a fun project for yourself, and a unique way to share your work with readers.

In particular, I recommend making a mini-zine using a single sheet of paper folded into eight pages. Sophie Lucido Johnson has an illustrated tutorial on how to make a single-sheet zine, and you can watch such a zine being cut and folded here.

Why a mini-zine?

1. It’s fun and easy.
2. It won’t take much time.
3. It’s free to make and cheap to print or copy — and to mail.
4. It doesn’t require special software or materials.
5. It can fit in your pocket and is ready to share.

OK, so what’s a zine?

Zine is short for magazine, and it’s an independently produced publication, often created by one writer working on their own, but sometimes made collaboratively.

You can put anything you want in a zine. There are zines about all kinds of topics, from perzines (personal zines) that focus on memoirs, to how-to zines that teach skills like cooking. There are zines with hand-drawn comics, copies of Polaroid photos, reviews of albums and movies, and travelogues.

And of course, there are poetry zines. There’s a lot of crossover between poetry zines and chapbooks. A zine might have multiple issues like a magazine, or it might be a single issue or “one-shot” zine, which is more like a chapbook, where a creator makes a single publication on a certain topic, like a collection of 15 haikus about animals.

Kristin Merrilees has a good overview of the history of zines in her article for The Startup, though her article focuses on zines and youth culture and how many creators share their zines on social media networks like Instagram and TikTok.

While zines can be a way for young people to express their individuality and creativity, I see people of all ages making and enjoying zines. Whether you make your first zine at 14 or 40 or 64 or 94, I think you’ll find artistic satisfaction in both the process and product.

For yourself, or to share

As with all forms of art, you can create zines to share, but you might also enjoy making them for just yourself, as self-expression or relaxation or anything you want. I liked how Christina Lui describes creating zines for herself in this essay on her artistic process of making and keeping zines.

I usually make multiple copies of my zines to distribute, but now and then I create a zine that’s meant to have just one copy, like the tiny poetry zine I made for my girlfriend’s birthday one year. I posted a photo of it in this article about creating a tiny haiku sequence as a gift for a loved one.

In short, zines can be anything you want them to be, for an audience of one or one thousand — the only limitation is the number of copies you want to print, cut, fold, etc. :)

One more thing

I’ve been meaning to write about zines since I started posting here on Medium, as I’ve been making zines for about twenty years and reading them for more. Is there anything you’ve wondered about zines? Are there topics you’d like to know more about in future posts? Please do let me know.

Also, if you’re a zinester, I’d love to know more about your work, so please drop me a line in the comments.

P.S. For a fun article on a related topic, check out Omy’s post on the history of miniature books.