Making zines for a year with people in the Telegram and LINE and other spaces in Art & Copy Zine Club has been a highlight of my career, so far. I’ve loved the idea of anticipating possibilities ever since the time I was a little kid who went out into the world with my father to ‘see what we find out.’ There was all kinds of encouragement into being curious, and staying that way. Many people, in many moments, over the years have done some kind of double-take when they recognize i’m still like this. I always want to try new things, see the world, feel the feelings of discovery. Especially in a shared experience, as I got to have at Governor’s School East and N.C. School of Science & Mathematics as a teenager in North Carolina. These moments of finding out by showing up, inquiring together, and simply being there in the same time and space were highly influential for me. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, of course, and yet, there we were: looking, listening, talking, learning, laughing, discovering. It was pre-internet; I think it would be totally different being a teen now.
This knowledge of self is big becasue it is a way of coping with the darkness in a mean-spirited 2026, a world that makes it hard for us to simply laugh and talk, together. Without agenda. Without guilt. I know this is a very big subject. I like the zine club because it gives some of the members a place to be, where we can free ourselves up a little, relax, and converse about or in a tango with the creative process itself. This is a kind of art form, isn’t it? Being together, in play.
I’m lucky I had my father to teach it to me, at the very start. And Akira, too, all this time, as a companion in continuing to inquire, to be, to exist with the same shared philosophy of going and seeing, discovering and doing, to find out a little bit at a time more about the world, and ourselves. And each other.