Do you have a zine romance story?

[Androo Robinson]

I met my girlfriend in, what, 1994? That was at the Underground Press conference in Chicago. I had a minicomic called Ped Xing and she had a funny little perzine called Don't Say Uh Oh. We traded at the show but didn't talk much. After we got home and read each others' zines, we were instant fans of each other and became prolific pen pals. We both embroiled ourselves in a series of relationships in our respective states (she lived in Michigan, I lived in Chicago), but remained loyal confidants through the mail. After several years of this best-letter-friends status, we fell in love, moved in together, moved here to Portland, and here we are. This was about six years ago. (Seven? Something like that.) Anyway, we're still going strong, and occasionally collaborate on a zine called Secret Mystery Love Shoes. I think we're about due for another issue...

[The East Village Inky]

What a sweet story. Greg's only attempt at zinedom was a series of numbered pamphlets called Beautiful Story, which always ended with a bird plucking out the sub-stick-figure protagonist's eyes. I had totally forgotten about them until this thread. Thank you for reminding me.

We did however meet when he auditioned for me!

And he has been a very good egg about being featured in the zine for the last ten years, often in his underpants, or some other less than discreet circumstance. He's the modest one. People who meet him often remark on how he is way more handsome than I draw him. My editor was surprised to learn that he actually has eyeballs, pretty green ones at that. She had dubbed him the eyeless one b/c i always draw him in his glasses, sans pupils.

The East Village Inky would not have been possible without him. Or maybe it would have, but the title character and her younger brother wouldn't have been.

[Krissy PonyBoy Press]

Ah! I love this story...yay..Great thread!

[Amazing Sunflower]

In 2002 I was part of a group of anarchists doing a lot of prisoner support. One of our fledgling projects was a free lit distro to prisoners. The zines were mostly texts of anarchist writing, but close enough, right?

A prisoner in Oregon wrote to us in Lawrence, Kansas asking for reading material, particularly zines and other small press publications. The prisoner had a gender ambiguous first name (Cassidy), and for a while, we all thought he was a woman! I was pretty excited to help a righteous anarchist sister behind bars, so immediately offered to send free copies of my zines The Femmenstruation Rites Rag and Herbal Abortion and Me.

Of course, we figured out pretty quickly that Cassidy is a man. (I believe one of the members of our group sent him a letter explicitly inquiring about his gender.) He wanted my zines anyway, so I sent them along. (I'm kind of surprised now that they made through a prison mail room.) After he got my zines, we started corresponding regularly and quickly fell in love.

We have been together for five years and look forward to living in the same town when he is released within the next year.

[Amazing Sunflower]

Oh! Someone should collect these stories and make a zine out of them!

And speaking of zines, I am planning to make Cassidy a love letter zine for Valentine's Day. I need to get to work on that!

[The East Village Inky]

Chantel, that The Femmenstruation Rites Rag is one potent zine!

[Jerianne]

hehe, I met you guys then, too!

I met my fella in college and then we lost track of each other for several years. But one day something brought me to his mind and he did a search for me online and tracked me down because of the Zine World website. And now we're all practically married and have a kid, etc. Kinda counts?

[Androo Robinson]

That's right, Maria and I met Jerianne the same day we met each other! What a web...

Jerianne said:

hehe, I met you guys then, too!

I met my fella in college and then we lost track of each other for several years. But one day something brought me to his mind and he did a search for me online and tracked me down because of the Zine World website. And now we're all practically married and have a kid, etc. Kinda counts?

[Alex Wrekk]

The first time I ever wrote down Paul's phone number was on the back of his old zine, Lunchroom, that I traded for my old zine Fun in a Bucket at one of his band's shows... that was almost 12 years ago to the day. We both had zines and shared a post box for a few years until he broke my heart and I moved to Portland.

We found each other again 5 years ago, in between was a zine relationship I'd rather not discuss. Now Paul refuses to do a zine because he thinks mine are so much better. He's a musician and I refused to play an instrument or sing for years because he is so good until he got me to sing back up vocals on the 6th song here. So, if I can sing back up vocals then he can write another zine damnit! We have actually been working on a project where I write the zine and he writes the soundtrack, that's where that link goes.

[rhagfyr]

i met my girlfriend when she sent some of her zines to be included in my distro, the boy i run a distro with and her were pen pals for a bit and then i met her IRL (at a ladyfest meeting, lol) and the first day we properly hung out we put together a compilation zine at her house. after months of torture we got together and its been totally rad since. she hasnt really made a zine since as she claims she has no time and that she would be embarrassed if i read it. hmmmm anyway i hope she does make another one someday as they were really good.

im always totally obsessed about what she would have said about my zine if she had reviewed it before she had met me as she was often quite funny and cynical in her reviews... she claims it would have been posi though.

[ocean]

the ex-love-of-my-life isn't a zinester, but a few months before she met me, she read a zine i'd done that her roommate, who was an acquaintance of mine, left on the toilet tank. she said that it made her have a crush on me. we met & hit it off & we were together for five years. she didn't confess about the zine crush until we'd been together for a while. cute cute cute.

[Alice]

This thread is really sweet!!

I don't have any proper zine romances involving meeting people, although when I was much much younger in my early teens and had my first "boyfriend", we used to make eachother mixtapes every week with a little booklet to match which I suppose were arguably zines of sorts, although we didn't know it at the time. They all kind of correlated to our lives at the time. For example, when we were doing our SATS exams at school (yes we were that young), he made me little booklets made up out of practise examination sheets filled out with the tracklistings where the exam answers should be, and for the new year I have a little pop-up booklet made out of used Christmas cards - Santa's with the tracklistings written on their faces and so on. Randomly I also have a copy of the Qur'an with the tracklisting written on random pages inside with clues to find the name of the next song (eg. See Page 634 for Track 4...) God knows how this was relevant to us at the time but it was obviously important enough to keep in a box under my bed for however many years.

I have thought about making a real zine using those booklets but some of them are quite personal and the boy who made them originally and I are no longer on speaking terms unfortunately so I don't think it's appropriate to use things he made without his permission.