Category Archives: sip a daily zine

in 2018, am setting aside time to blog a zine review and drink something delish

gigi works their arse off

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My post office box has been a source of joy over the last few weeks, due to what kinds of reading material I’ve received, and because this last week, I was musing on how I used to be the person that bought lots of cool zines but didn’t think I’d ever have work appear in them! Two copies of Concrete Queers – the ‘horror’ and ‘milestones’ issues. CQ accepted two poems of mine.

‘Bra’ is a musing on the unfairness of typically straight males wanting women to be fat in certain places (that’s what boobs are! fat!) with some of the Doctor Who ‘Adipose’ race in mind re. being made of fat molecules. Fitting for the ‘horror’ issue, albeit oddly?

For ‘milestones’, I submitted a poem (which I read far too nervously at early Feb Girls on Key event as sacrificial poet) called ‘stationary objects’ about not knowing how to celebrate a major, micro-event – cessation of self-injury. Content warning: it’s an autobiographical poem.

When G mailed out a copy of a perzine entitled ‘OH WELL’, it felt like cheating to choose it as my zine of the week because it’s short but sometimes media that can be consumed fairly quickly leaves a lasting impression. My designated book for Mar 2018 Froth felt the same way, so naturally I’ve taken a photo of two amazing bad-arse Asian women’s creative works for this review post, and am mourning the death of my ‘Cucumber Hippy Berliner’ by 8 Wired Brewing, which tried to break my father’s toe, and spumed froth all over the place. I didn’t even bother trying to drink what was left in the can (yeah, am totally annoyed, but can at least afford to replace it, which makes a nice change!).

In the spirit of the aforementioned short, sharp, fierce, creative ladies, this post is a short one too. I’ve been doing a tad too much lately – nothing major, just a little bit too much out of my comfort zone (good), but the kind that means I need more rest to recover, or to just stay home and write. I totally snuck in another poetry submission – am working on a sequence that I’m super-excited about because it’s personal, but hopefully funny and a tribute to fellow mental illness sufferers that can and do make wry observations about treatment and management in this ol’ Western neoliberal model that probs has Lenin melting further, chortle. He’s supposedly melting. Anyway, go contemplate that.

P.S. Oh! Gigi is not in ref to the lovely Viet-Aus writer Giselle Nguyen, but in reference to this video because my mind is twisted and I was thinking about how my head is still trying to make me feel guilty for not reading enough this week, and joke-chant to myself “Gigi works his ass off!”. I also wanted to acknowledge that my arse’s gender denomination is unknown but I don’t think it minds if I use ‘they’ pronouns <3 I’m so so sorry I keep boring my friends with this video!

those overuse blues

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I’ve been in pain the last few weeks after pulling a muscle before a poetry reading. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but driving seems to have made it worse, and it eventually became full-blown overuse pain, which I haven’t had to deal with for the last near-twenty years?!

Anti-inflammatory pain meds help (admittedly I’m pretty stubborn about taking them because I’m used to actually having a pain threshold), but it’s made eating, sleeping and working difficult. Hot showers haven’t helped much and I’ve spent the entire weekend wincing and feverishly sleeping in an old blue nightshift that used to belong to my mother.

I hate my body a lot less than when overuse (in the right side of my body, not left like now) was an issue, and having left my zine-drink review post till so late in the week again feels like cheating. I’ve made myself a strong, bitter hot chocolate sweetened with maple syrup and can’t really blog about the beer I got to drink over the week, because it’s all review beer for next month’s Froth, glee!

Admittedly, I have been doing a lot more things than usual…as ‘overuse’ implies, it tends to flare up when some part of the body is used too much – the lesser version of repetitive strain injury. It’s been a mindfuck listening to my left shoulder trot out an opera libretto-length version of ‘The Ballad of the Crunchy Shoulder’!

Anyway, I’m reading ‘A Sharp Knife x FOUND’ from 2015, which has ‘short, sharp poetry by women’. There’ll be a bunch of folks to tag when I post the photograph on Instagram, and I love how unapologetically hot pink the cover is. It’s put together by Alice Belle.

 


This zine is volume 6, and subtitled ‘ Positive Protest’. There’s a myriad of ways women or female-identifying voices can protest that doesn’t involve violence, and this zine offers so many paths into those possibilities…the selection does have common threads – blood, heart, stone and digging into ground, skies, what the body is made of, emancipation or extrication from stifling sources. I honestly couldn’t pick a favourite poem!

I did think ‘Terra Nullius’ by Polly Glamorous was especially noteworthy because it talks about who was on this land, Australia, before white colonisation, and it’s short and sharp, just like the zine brief states. This zine was part of an event that occurred in Melbourne called ‘Found Festival’ at Testing Grounds, where many of us also read work by other female-identifying writers – I still fondly remember audience reactions to my reading out Anne Sexton’s ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’!

It’s also interesting to look back at how terrified I was then of occupying creative space…I still didn’t feel like I deserved to be there, even though the people that asked me to take part were so supportive and encouraging. Most of the year after did start to fix a lot of that; I’d never really realised how much my mood disorder contributed to my outlook and self-worth.

Anyway, contents, in order of appearance:

‘untitled’ by Alice Belle; ‘Together’ by Laura Bibby-Bell; ‘Terra Nullius’ by Polly Glamorous; ‘The Caddisfly’ by Ad Hoc; ‘Starry’ by Tilly Houghton (poetry ed of Concrete Queers fame, yea!; ‘Red’ by me (shh!); ‘Letting Go’ by Bianca Martin; and ‘Alien Girl’ by Tegan Webb.

I kind of like the idea that all these folks have been slowly and steadily creating lots of things, and since this zine volume, have been really lucky to get to learn more about their work in visual art, music, and of course writing. I tried to track down as many of the contributors without being too stalky, so if you like their work, let them know and find more!

It’s started to rain again, which totally aggravates my overuse pain, but bless that ibuprofen tablet’s magic! The pain’s become easily bearable again.

what are the days like?

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I went to bed early, took my nighttime antidepressant before 10.30pm, and still couldn’t wake up early as planned. Last week, I pulled a neck muscle, and the pain wouldn’t bother me except that it’s not going away despite stretching, exercising and correcting body posture. It’s because I’m not able to sleep on my lovely futon mattress in a house with double beds aplenty, but none of the ones that are actually good for one’s back and overuse injuries.

It reminds me why I kept moving so much, last year. I never really mind when my mood disorder is chronic, because at least it isn’t like the physical pain that accompanies overuse injuries. In one shit sharehouse, my room pretty much only had space for my bed. My bad shoulder rarely complained.

At present, every morning, is pain. My bad dreams are slowly returning, and my head is struggling more now to block out noise, of others living, and self-hatred generally. That’s what life is like with a chronic mood disorder. It’s late afternoon now, and my (non-injured) left shoulder is still complaining, but I’ve read one zine while chugging down a beetroot latte.

‘a list of (some) things that trigger my PTSD’ doesn’t have a specific creator named, but on the back, it says ‘Nope Club ’16. The last page also says words that although are hard to reconcile, are comforting to those of us who have ever suffered any kind of trauma:

‘Sometimes your monsters look exraordinarily ordinary.’ (I’m not correcting the spelling error).

It’s hard to talk about or even admit PTSD-type triggers because they do often seem so silly, but terrifying to a particular person. I went a few years of not being able to watch Breaking Bad and still can’t watch Game of Thrones because my mind will bomb me with nightmares and guilt for months. When I first started watching Gilmore Girls, I had to stop because it upset me so much that I didn’t have anyone in my life, the way Rory has her mum Lorelai.

It took, and takes, more than a few years to develop opposite habits of consumption that end up acting as antidotes to PTSD triggers. As someone who has struggled with sleep for as long as I can remember, I find even now that thinking of my old cat Wolfie, or my current gorgeous rescue Fance as ‘guards’ on my bed helps me feel safer, warmer, happier, then eventually, safe enough to fall asleep.

Mel Stringer’s zine ‘Every Morning’ has a person looking happily asleep, while a cat sleeps nearby on the quilt, on its cover. A joyous image, squee! A lot of the folks profiled in the zine about their morning routines did indeed involve loving cats, and loving humans/partners, negotiating bathroom time and makeup/outfits. The zine is from 2015, and I totally just realised that in limiting computer use last week, I have also not reviewed any zines just before Festival of the Photocopier, sigh. Anyway, I’m trying not to beat myself up about these things!

My beetroot latte is finished and now it’s officially early evening, so off I jetset into another hot drink, and more reading material.

(PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – normies, please stop using it as joke to say you’re wounded by shit, btw)