WHAT'S A ZINE? Zines are self-published, often handmade publications of various kinds. They can look like and be about anything at all. Mine have been small books of poetry, first-person narratives, and collections of interviews ... and of course there's my eccentric serial zine about language, The La-La Theory. My involvement with this community means a great deal to me. The people involved with DIY publishing tend to be loving, and to support each other in a way that feels really nice. But they're also honest and no-nonsense, passionate, and angry or sad about things that people should be angry or sad about. I feel that this is a way to live that makes some damn sense.

TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR ZINES, KATIE. My zines live in the collections of some public and academic libraries and infoshops, including Barnard College's zine library, the Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University. My found poetry zine, Word Math, was included in "Dark Matter," a 2004 exhibit of underground art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2007 I made a zine called White Blackbirds: conversations with women who aren't married and don't want to be, and Bitch magazine blogged about it. This online conversation generated enough of a response that I was able to produce a second issue of the zine, which, like the first one, is comprised of several lively, varied interviews with lady-identified folks on the subject of marriage. Some of my zines are sold by distros (zine distributors), including Parcell Press and Microcosm, and independent bookstores, including Philadelphia's landmark anarchist bookstore the Wooden Shoe; Bluestockings, the fantastic feminist bookstore in New York City; and Sticky Institute in Melbourne, Australia, which I'd really like to visit one day. I once read poems from one of my zines on a public radio show called Live at the Writers House, and in 2009 I organized a zine reading on NEXUSradio, a low-powered radio experiment hosted by Nexus Gallery in Philadelphia. My zine The La-La Theory and this website, yes, this website, are featured in the book Fanzines by Teal Triggs, put out by Chronicle in October 2010. And in the fall of 2010 I did a zine writer's residency at the Anchor Archive in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I finished the fourth issue of my zine White Elephants. It was beautiful there.