Like countless other works of art, Aaron Lake Smith’s zines were born out of boredom. The author of Big Hands and Unemployment recalls how he got started in writing, in 2004: “I spent a summer living in a moldy garage behind an anarchist collective in Greensboro, North Carolina. All my friends were gone, and I had nothing else to do.”
The resulting collections of short stories and typewritten journals follow ordinary people, from retail drones to historical Moravians, and trawl their everyday actions for meaning. The most recent issue of Big Hands comments on everything from family Thanksgivings to Foucault’s panopticon, with an eye for finding truth in short interactions.
His latest work, Unemployment, is similarly scientific in its exploration of what happens when we have too much time on our hands. Smith says, “Unemployment is about having dreams that get put on the backburner for when you ‘finally get some time’. But when we actually get the time to do what we want, we fail to act.”
“My amateur sociological research reveals that people are deeply affected by their social relations and their routines—if you are surrounded by people who do nothing, you will do nothing.”
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Big Hands 6 by Aaron Lake Smith
Aaron Lake Smith’s zines read like journal entries – sad, humorous, and everything in between. While some might find the diary genre played-out, works like Big Hands incorporate Smith’s meditations and even an indictment of whatever he was feeling at the time. In a way, it’s a new genre: the extra-meta perzine.
“My writing process involves long months of reading too many books and watching too many movies, and filling up volumes of journals with writing,” Smith explains. “When I finally go back and look at the journals, I find my handwriting unreadable, and can’t make out what I’ve written.” This air of reconstructing human interaction in hindsight permeates his work.
As a member of the independent publishing community, Aaron Lake Smith also shares his take on the state of new media: “Independent publishing is the media today. If you look to the media dinosaurs like the New York Times and venerable book publishing houses of New York, they’re scouring the Internet for new bloggers to write about.”
In the end, he’s ambivalent, musing that, “in one way, it’s great that everyone can finally ‘express themselves’; but on the other hand, it makes you long for the quieter, simpler times when there wasn’t such a proliferation of awful, pointless cultural commodities out there.”
Aaron Lake Smith: oldwaysways.com
Zine Scene, by Mallory Gevaert, is a weekly column about writers and artists’ adventures in the world of independent publishing.