Poetry Friday - Zine Swap

It’s Friday! And you know what that means: Poetry! Want to know more about Poetry Friday? Click this link right here. And be sure to check out Mainly Write to see this week’s round up of wonderful poetry related posts, blogs and goodness. 

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I recently discovered zines (short for magazines). These little mini magazines that can cover the whole gamut of possible content.  And they can be very basic or very ornate. Just do a quick image search for "zine examples". But, at their core, they are very easy to make. Many (like mine below) are made out of one sheet of 8.5 x 11 printer paper folded a few times.

I decided to do my Poetry Friday as a zine this week. Once I had the poems, the whole thing took me about 15 minutes. Now, I did it just in pen really quick, so I could have spent more time and made it look nicer. But I just wanted to get a feel for it. Here is how it turned out:

The poems:

A little booklet
Holding creativity
Share one with the world


    coZy
succInct
    fuN
  entErtaining


Zine
Small, unique
Sharing, moving, teaching
Give to your friends
Imagination

ZINE SWAP

Now for the fun part! I thought it would be great to do a zine swap. Anyone who would like to participate is welcome to. The idea is you'll make 4 photocopies of your zine and get a copy of 4 other zines.

I write primarily for children and young adults, and my husband illustrates for a similar audience, so I wanted to broaden the content for the zines beyond just poetry.

Do you write poetry? Write micro-fiction? Make a zine with some of your work. Are you an illustrator? Fill your zine with your drawings or make a comic. All I ask is that you have fun and keep it PG-13 or younger.

The theme will be Autumn/Fall and this is how it will work:

• Email me and let me know you want to participate - slothreads1985@gmail.com 

• Make your zine out of one 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper (see video below on how to do this).

• Make 4 copies

• Fold all 4 copies and put your name and email (so people can say thank you) on the back page

•  Place all 4 in an envelope (a #10 size should work) with my mailing address

• Include a self-addressed stamped envelope (you'll want to put a forever stamp - $0.49 - plus an additional ounce stamp - $0.21 - to cover shipping)

• I'll use that envelope to send you 4 different zines back

• Envelopes should be postmarked to me by October 1st so I have enough time to get them back out to everyone before Halloween

I thought about collecting everyone's addresses, organizing a spreadsheet, and assigning addresses, but by me receiving all of the zines it accomplishes 2 things: 

1.  You can be sure that your address is only shared with me. It won't be given out to multiple people
2. I don't have to keep track of who said they were going to participate vs. who actually made zines. I want to make sure that everyone who creates zines receives zines in return and this was the simplest way of doing that. 

If you have any questions, send me an email! I'd hate for someone to miss out because I wasn't clear enough on any of this. It really should be easy and fun!  slothreads1985@gmail.com

There are tons of tutorials out there on how to make this type of zine. Here is one quick video: