Have you heard about Zines?
Zines are small, home made, limited run periodicals. A huge range of topics are covered in Zines.
The first Zines started way back in the 1930s as fan magazines for fantasy and science fiction buffs. In the 70s zines were popular within the punk music scene, and in the 90s women’s rights were a popular theme. Over the last two decades the popularity of Zines has grown particularly among alternative thinking young people and there are hundreds of different Zines available today.
For a better description from someone who know much more about Zines than me, have a look at this article
I am always on the lookout for fun ‘real life’ writing experiences for my boys, so I was pretty excited when I discovered Zines. I think that publishing a Zine is a great project for children, adults or as a family.
To get my children inspired, the first thing I did was order about 6 Zines from Sticky Institute which is a Zine Distro (distribution centre). I just ordered mine off the website, but if you are in Melbourne, drop in to Sticky and check them out. I tried to select Zines that would be of interest to my boys – you need to be a little bit careful as some of the Zines would have content that is not suitable for children, but I’m sure the staff at Sticky would be happy to advise if you are not sure.
Here is a link to the Sticky Institute Website. There are other Zine Distros around Australia and you will find a list of these on the Sticky website.
Our next step was to brainstorm ideas for topics that we could make a Zine about.
I thought we should start by working on one Zine as a family, but Zac was pretty keen to make his own. We selected our topics, then another brainstorm generated ideas for stories and articles.
Z ac decided to make his Zine about Electronic Game reviews, and Axel and I decided ours would be about Minecraft Tips, Pets and Comics!
After this we all selected a topic for our first article and got to work.
Hopefully we will have some finished products soon.
If your family get into making some Zines and you would like to sell them, you can send them to a Distro like Sticky where they will put them in their shop for sale. This is a great incentive for my boys and really helps to make this a real life writing experience.
Get creative and have fun with Zines!
All the best,
Sharee
of life and art 