What is it really like to be a zine writer in today’s world of megacorp publishers and big media?
Amber Ridenour, who also writes under the name “Starlite Motel,” answers a few questions about process, creation, and reputation. With her husband Chris, Amber is the author of many zines, including Autobiographical Alley Map and Night Bomb.
How would you define the word “zine”?
I tend to define “zine” as a sort of pirate printing operation. For next to nothing, you get to put your words/art into people’s hands, usually bypassing all the niceties of conventional publication (editors, ISBNs, agents, blah blah blah).
It’s the kind of thing that blogs are supposed to achieve, but I think communication is more direct with a little stapled or beribboned zine. It’s hard to hold a zine in your hands and not feel, somehow, that the author made it for just you. And in a way, they did.
What is your writing process like? What do you find most rewarding about publishing a zine?
My writing process is both unique and pedestrian, which I guess is the case with everybody. I’m more of an editor than a writer. I’ll sit down in a dive with a cheap pint or a coffeeshop with really strong coffee until I get a few pages scribbled out, then I go home, tear it all apart, and rearrange it like a puzzle as I type.
For me, music is essential. I’m one of those people who always has a song in their heads. I will put the same song on repeat and keep it going for as long as it takes, if I’ve decided it sets the mood of something I’m trying to edit.
This can get annoying for anyone around me, since I tend to be inspired by Sun Ra’s more out-there stuff. And I’m really, really freaky about editing on a computer screen. One word is not the same as another, in my opinion. Not with poems. Not with prose. Every syllable counts. So does every comma or blank space.
Even different fonts have different moods to me. I have literally killed entire days and packs of cigarettes doing stuff like deleting a word, staring at the page, putting it back, deleting it again, trying a different one, etc. Words are the one area of my life where I am a straight-up control freak.
Why is independent publishing important to media today?
As a freshman in college, I had a very important poet-in-residence from New York professor tell our class that the way to get published was to go to high-end cocktail parties and shmooze the right people, and he was serious. I see this as the basic problem with mainstream publishing — it all seems to be a cocktail party.
I’ve picked up copies of many, many lit mags claiming to support “emerging voices” and “novel styles” and seen the same ol’ internationally best-selling authors listed as contributors to that issue.
I even attended a grad school for a while, and part of the disgust that drove me to leave it stemmed from the so-called “university” publication in which no student could ever be published. As a matter of fact, there was no submission information to be found anywhere.
This is why we need indie media. We need literature and art that is free, rule breaking, subversive, and fearless. We need artists who don’t have to conform or be in anyone’s pocket to get their unique visions out into the world.