DIY Chaos: How Making Zines Saved Me – HECK Is Now Online!
welcome to HECK!
personal stories, self-care, reflection, and healing refreshers for the soul.
I’ve always made zines. In high school, through college, even when I moved to the Bay Area after graduating. My longest lull in making them was when I moved to NYC.
The city is overwhelming for newcomers, and I landed due to a traumatic event. I blocked my creativity for nearly a decade. My energy went to distracting myself with thousands of nights out until 4, 5, 6 a.m., hundreds of shows and dj sets, and bodega breakfast sandwiches to keep the hangover at bay. Self-assigned coping mechanisms. Despite some out-of-pocket, near-derailments all the chaos led me back to myself.
HECK, my first and only NYC-made zine, debuted at the end of 2019. Eight years had already elapsed since moving outta laid back Berkeley, California, but I was still processing my first three New York years (the equivalent of 6 years anywhere else).
HECK Issue 1 is the visual form of distilling what went down in those first few years. It’s 8.5”x11”-sized pages dripping in Lower East Side spirit: graffitied, dive bar bathrooms, a tribute to my fave LES bar, manic collages that reek of downtown and subway rides.
Issue 2 introduced what became the trim size for issues 5-8 (half the size: 8.5”x5.5”) but with issue 3 and 4 I still had plenty to share that required max headroom.
By the time I got to issue 5 and 6 in 2021 I hit a stride. They were released 6 months apart. 5 was my formal, retrospective and shout out to the LES, while issue 6 was the present day version of me: melding nights in the Lower with morning walks in Chinatown or Central Park.
Time started to widen. Life’s lens zoomed out from my early NYC years. Publishing issues 1-6 was fully cathartic, like pushing a burdensome boulder over a cliff into the ocean.
Issue 7 (2023) marked the last HECK made in NYC. Themed around obsessions, I remembered myself as a reader and featured a list of book recommendations, plus an A-Z feature on what I was recently obsessing over.
HECK Issue 8 was made when I relocated to my east coast hometown and has a wildly different vibe from 7. Never before had Maine been featured, for instance. It announced my move and sought connection, recommending that people get off their phones. It included a quiz asking people what their new identity should be, as I wondered in real-time who I was outside of the city.
I wouldn’t say HECK is over, but as a pivotal vehicle in personally reconstructing myself into a better human, it’s done its job. By unearthing my creativity, I fell into alignment with myself again. If I hadn’t made HECK there would be no Party Dip. Hey, maybe the next zine I make will be a supplemental Party Dip zine.
For the first time ever, you can access every issue, 1-8, for free on HECK’s tumblr. Don’t miss the bonus, extra vintage, 2008 Christmas Coloring Book on the last page.
Let me know if you check it out!
Cool to see the evolution, Bee! 🫶