I live a very quiet life. I haven't always. I have had dumb jobs and passionate boyfriends, heartache and noise; I've had plenty of watching bands play in bars, puking on commuter trains, and sobbing into the phone (and sometimes all three on the same night).

But for a couple of years now I have lived and worked very quietly on the second floor of a two-story brick apartment building with my cat, the illustrious and exalted Trixie. Trixie has plush black fur and an expressive tail, and she sleeps curled up on the round papasan chair in my bedroom like she's an eagle perched in a giant nest. She is a perfect animal and I am too. I am perfectly animal. Every day I eat and breathe, look at trees, smell the air, and pull the laces on my sneakers tight. Some days I have a zine day, which means I sit on the hardwood floor of my living room and slice through paper with my delicious paper cutter. Then I do things like carefully arrange rubber stamp letters and stroke paint onto paper with a little-kid paintbrush.

But I am also perfectly spirit. I feel and think all the time. I'm not saying I think well or figure much out, but like all of you, my mind and heart are almost always busy. I composed this essay in my mind last night while I lay in my bed in the dark. I'd had a migraine all day long and although it had already broken and the pain had leaked away, I was feeling a little crazy. That kind of pain often makes me feel like that—wild when I have it, drifty and almost bereft when it's gone. To comfort myself I pulled my Stevie Smith book off the bedside table and into the bed with me. Other books in my bed include: Notebooks of a Naked Youth by Billy Childish (another comfort book because it's probably my favorite novel of all time), These Demented Lands (I haven't started that one yet but other things I've read by Alan Warner were really good), and The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan, a book about writing that I acquired in a zine trade. Trixie was asleep in her eagle's nest at the foot of the bed, and as I lay there with my books I thought about what I wanted to tell the readers of the Zine Yearbook about my life, and about what zines mean to me. That means I went to sleep last night thinking of you.

Through doing zines I have made some wonderful friends, real friends, and we write emails and letters to each other. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of us zine folks, especially people who are a fair bit younger than I am—say, people who are 20 years old or so—say the word love a lot. We love all the things that we like now—miso soup, knitted gloves—which is something I find touching, and although I don't say love quite as often myself, I love zines. Dreaming them up, physically constructing them, and bringing them to the post office all snug in their packages makes me feel whole in a way not much else does. It's hard for me to explain exactly why. I think I love zines for the same reason I loved writing in the beginning, before it got hard. The medium of zines reminds me of the point of the work: the deep and sincere need to be heard, the yearning for communion. I sign most of my zines "love, Katie" as though they're letters because they feel a lot like letters to me. I mean, I wouldn't bother saying something if I didn't think there was someone to say it to. Some of you have heard what I've said in my zines and I've heard what some of you have said in your zines and that honestly amazes me. The connection people make with each other through writing and reading is as human as we get, and zinesters know this, they live it. I'm writing this now and you're reading it in another now, which means we're here together in a way; wherever we are, we're both crackling with the same kind of life. Can you think of anything more incredible than that?