I’ll be at the Midwest Perzine Fest (MWPZF), tabling with perzine distro Sugar Hijinx that I run with one of my besties Cynthia E. Hanifin. This fest has a special place in my heart. Both MWPZF and the fest that inspired it, the Dear Diary Zine Fest, are fests devoted to perzines, as in “personal zines",” which feature personal narratives, creative non-fiction before it was a genre with a popular name — the proverbial “ranting and raving” associated with zines, what I try to capture with my zines like Caboose, which I’ve been doing since 2002, or Cul-de-sac, which my childhood friend Julie and I started in the 90s and still sometimes publish these days.

MWPZF and Dear Diary inspired me and Cynthia to start Sugar Hijinx specifically to highlight zines that are heavier on writing. As writers ourselves, we wanted to give the zines we love the most an extra signal boost and because we love building relationships with writers, since they are our people. We curated a nice collection of Sugar Hijinx titles from people like Keidra Chaney, Jordan Sea, Katie Kiesewetter, Billy McCall, Krystal Ratticus, Kurt Morris, Aaron Cometbus and more. And yes, we love art zines, mini-comics and all that too (we even carry comics artists that are writing-heavy, like John Porcellino of King-Cat Comix and Carrie McNinch of You Don’t Get There From Here). But our jam is that we’re about stuff where writing is the main focus.

We intentionally don’t have a storefront or a place to sell these zines on the web. We only table at things like fests and pop-ups, often team up Zine Club Chicago, and we’re in the process of fixing up a trike to make it be a truly portable situation. For more info about SHJX & all the stuff we’re doing, see instagram.com/sugarhijinx.

More info about MWPZF at midwestperzinefest.wordpress.com + instagram.com/midwestperzinefest