“To those who dream but have never created;
to those who create but have never been heard:
to those who are heard and are yet creating —
this magazine is dedicated.”
– Four Winds magazine
I began this project due to several factors. At the time of writing I am a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center’s English program. This unique position means I’ve had to occupy varying roles, responsibilities, and spaces that have, in no small part, influenced this project that I’ve titled, “zine-show-case.” I’ve taught at CUNY Queens College for the last five years, an astonishing time when considering I only attended CUNY Brooklyn College for four years in undergraduate. This unique position of doctoral student researcher has also meant I’ve had to teach. Due to the global pandemic and transition to distant learning, across both roles I’ve come to see teaching and research as processes that go hand-in-hand. They share, as environmentalist William Cronon would write, “mutual determinability.”
My pedagogical interests in the zine stem from my scholarly ones in New American poetics, the little magazine of the 20th century, Black Mountain College, and book history. I view literary magazines (MAGS, as the poet Charles Olson would call them in Letters for Origin) like Black Mountain Review, Sulfur, Four Winds, Hambone, and the Magazine of Further Studies as sites of creation, poetic experimentation, and voices all inhabiting the margins. The writing studies and composition scholar (and poet) in me sees zines and chapbooks as a place for ENERGY in writing and thinking to occur.
The opening quote on creation can be found in the first issue of Gloucester print-maker and poet’s literary magazine Four Winds, hence why I see the zine assignment and task itself not only as a research and writing assignment that promotes critical thinking. inquiry, and rhetorical skills but as an artistic one that promotes composition and the act of creation. We must center the arts within the liberal arts. These skills and emphases tend to die (so I’m told) beyond college composition / first-year writing courses. I’ve always been interested in keeping them alive (for majors and non-majors alike). Plus, the point of the zine-show-case is to celebrate that act of creation–to provide a record, no matter how marginal it might be, for it’s in that very spirit of the margins such a project exists. Plus, who doesn’t like knowing that they’re published somewhere out there?
I could go on and on but, let me add this final note: I originally intended for this project, that initial semester I assigned it, to be something like a classroom magazine. There’s something special about placing the written works of people together, in a book, in the same pages, much like the little magazines of the 20th century did. While the form and scope of the project has shifted, the original intent has not.
I will periodically update this website, until either CUNY either takes it down or I’m tired of maintaining it. One or the other. To all my students, current and former, who have ALL contributed to this project in some way:
I thank you.
