Perfectly Designed for Connections: Zine Making in Denver Shelters

“My name is Tamara but I would rather be called The Windtalker.”

—The Windtalker

Some of today’s most prolific writers face barriers that obstruct their access to an audience in the present and the opportunity to leave written work for the future. Writers sleeping on the streets and in parks might get caught in rain or snow that destroys the contents of a notebook; writers staying in shelters might find a bag of belongings that included a folder of poems missing when they wake up or return from an errand. Writers living in tents might find it difficult to establish a writing routine without quiet, privacy, or a hard surface to write on. Many of these writers have nuanced understandings of the importance of their own writing and confidence in who they want to read what they write, if anyone; others have been told their entire lives that their ideas don’t matter, and they are beginning to believe it.¹

In the summer of 2021, fifteen writers living or working across three different shelters in the Denver area contributed to a collective zine called Perfectly Designed for Connections (PDFC). Several of these contributors regularly participated in one of the weekly writing groups that I facilitated in these shelters from 2020–21, while other authors and artists submitted anonymously or separately from the groups. With funding from Lighthouse Writers Workshop, a nonprofit that supports literary arts in Denver, seventy-five copies of the zine’s thirty-five pages were printed in black and white and distributed throughout the community. A digital version is forthcoming that will show the work in color and include an audio album of several authors reading their work.

Fig. 1.

Cover art for zine. Image drawn by Poetic Justice.

Zine making is rooted in marginalized communities such as these Denver shelters, though it grows increasingly into mainstream communities—from NPR listeners to students in undergraduate classrooms. While I celebrate this increasing reach of zine making, these mainstream contexts generate an academic discourse that prioritizes zine making in academic contexts and risks further marginalization of communities relying on zines to reach an audience. In part 1 of this essay I provide brief histories of and contexts for zines in the United States, including their increasing movement into mainstream contexts and the limited accessibility of zines being made in shelters. In part 2 I show how the benefits of zine making that scholars explore in academic contexts are relevant to shelter spaces but less important than an urgent need for audience. I cite excerpts from PDFC as section epigraphs and within the discussion to show the range of invoked audiences, real or imagined, that this one text holds and to call attention to the continuing urgency of zine making for writers like The Windtalker, cited above, and their contributions to the imagined archive of American literature and its readers.

Zine Making, from Sci-Fi to NPR

“I recently went to [a local shelter] and saw the list of people that have passed away this year, in the streets. My heart went out to them. What was their last meal. . . . What were they longing for in life.”

—Anonymous

Zines are low-cost, low-barrier publications—created by an individual or a collective—often with a limited print run. Scholars observe three phases in the trajectory of zine making in the United States, including, as a way for “science fiction enthusiasts” to share stories in the 1930s (Creasap 156); as a vehicle for fan-driven discourse among punk communities in the 1970s; and as a venue for the riot grrrl community in the 1990s to “confron[t] sexism in punk rock music subcultures” (Creasap 157; see also Gray 2–3).² Zine libraries around the country collect limited print editions, and there are several publicly available online catalogs, including Zine Wiki, which compiles more than five thousand articles about particular zines and zine making (“Main Page”).

Fig. 2.

Art submitted to the zine Perfectly...