I didn’t start my zine as a creative person so much as a desperate person. I had said to various people off-handedly that I would like to make a zine, but I wasn’t sure what about. It was more of a vague side project to explore. What really interests me, and what I’m still striving towards is writing prose fiction. In fact, I did start writing a set of short stories while I was cooped-up during the pandemic—this must have been around 2020 or 2021.

But I felt I was in a rut in many ways, as I’m sure most of you did as well. I wanted to prove to myself that I could put something out into the world, something I could actually manage to complete in an amount of time that didn’t make me depressed about my future.

Several things in my life collided to make this idea a reality. Perhaps the most important was my finding out about this small local bookshop on Fulton street, 1418. I had seen it on social media—this cute window shop that focused on writers of color. So, I paid them a visit and ended up spending way more than I should have on books and other odd items.

But what was notable about 1418 was that they had a sizeable zine collection, many of which were created by local artists. I had of course known about the existence and resurgence of zines in popular culture, but it was more of a vague notion than anything else. Being able to see the finished product in booklet/pamphlet form, work by local artists especially, without the drama and the time spent on a publisher’s label made me feel like I could put something out there. Of course, it was almost a year before I did. But the idea was circulating in my mind, and as always, I was writing in my journal—usually snippets of prose and poetry as they filled my head. This is how a lot of things come to me, I don’t think it’s necessary to stress about completion when writing, at least not right away.

Finally, after all this, the unbearable weight of my rut came crashing down on my head and I just started putting all these puzzle pieces together. I didn’t use any fancy art medium or digital programming, just Microsoft word. I didn’t even have all of the stuff I wanted to put in my zine just yet. But as I started formatting—very loosely formatting—the rest of the puzzle pieces came to me.

I titled the zine Frazno! very early on in the process. This was the most significant part of this creative act. Most of the people who read my zine for some reason are surprised at the imaginative subject matter that could spring up around the town called Fresno. But for me it wasn’t really an act of love so much as an act of escape. A large part of my rut has been, and in some senses still is, living in a town which feels like a huge weight upon my shoulders. You can still see this in the poem that’s on the cover of the first issue—the first piece of text the zine offers. The exclamation mark at the end of Frazno is because for me, this act of creation was a shout! It was an artistic pearl, it was looking around at my anxiety and frustration and saying, “this is what I have, I have more of it than anything else.” What do you do when you have a tree full of fruit? You give it to your neighbors. That to me is the most Fresno thing possible.

A lot of us, I think, grew up with fruit in a way that not everyone from California has. Fresno’s claim to fame is of course, agriculture. I think that our literature is a kind of agriculture too. We have William Saroyan, Juan Felipe Herrera, David Mas Masumoto, Mark Arax, etc. I’m not saying I’m imbedded in the literal and literary agricultural scene as much as these writers were, if at all. But writing and literature is for me the Main Thing, maybe the only thing. I’m not saying that this zine is It either. I write other things with the intention of going through a publishing house someday. But to put together a collage or even a pastiche sort of journal or notebook of the town that frustrates me has turned into something almost joyful, something that comes naturally. Seasonally, even.

That was the other main detail about my first zine. I subtitled it “Issue 1 Summer 2022,” without fully knowing if I’d put another one out.

This leads me to an important detail about the production of my first zine. It was with Vicente, who was an owner of the 1418 bookshop. I ran the idea for my zine by him as soon as I started to have something substantial and tangible. And most frustrating part of production by far, by the way, was that I had to make sure to format it in Microsoft word so that I could print it on both sides of the page. I spent a few more days than I’d like to admit figuring this out (and to be honest, I still do). Anyway, I brought the thing to him, sans most of the art –which was another precarious thing of its own, I’m by no means a visual artist. But I did it, and Vicente was kind enough to help format it and layer the images perfectly for the riso machine. The grainy format of the riso machine is something priceless he was able to offer me, and since 1418 has unfortunately closed, I have never been able to replicate this grainy, mono-colored ink on page format that people gravitated towards.

If you turn something upside down, you are able to look at it from a perspective that’s free from the angle you were previously used to. That’s what writing is all about. Our reference points and our mental framework can inhibit us from a greater creative freedom, or even from continuation and fluidity within our work. That’s part of what’s been so liberating for me about this zine. The subject matter (the town of Fresno) is familiar to me, and probably to most of you. But it’s completely foreign in its execution to many of the people who read it.

All of it is true—and I think it’s important here to make room for the idea that all fiction is true in very significant ways. If I tried to write something strictly factual about Fresno, I’d probably hit a wall or two. With something that feels more fantastical or even surreal, the notable side of Fresno and my experiences with it come to the front.

This is something I value in a writer. The individual experience, as nuanced and specific as it is, is more relevant to me than any lofty sentiment about universality or The Human Experience that young students sometimes find themselves mired in. All those odd angles of experience add up to a sculpture or an equation that is more meaningful to the viewer or reader. If someone’s experience is completely alien to yours, meaning that it is alien but most importantly, complete, dazzling in its depth and introspection, then I believe there is more room for the connection between artist and onlooker than there would have been otherwise.

There’s been something incredibly important in this process of using the zine medium as a mode of self-expression. For me, that expression starts most naturally with writing. For a writer, I believe, poetry is generally the most natural written form. This is true for people who wouldn’t consider themselves writers as well. You can easily organize thoughts which weigh heavily on you into lines guided by some sort of internal rhythm. Next for me came prose. Practice has made prose more fluid for me, as opposed to the short snippets that I often revert to when journaling. In the zine format though, I got to work with snippets and suggest that there is more of me, more to write, which there always is.

 But with something like this I feel that words aren’t enough. There needed to be a visual manifestation of my words, and this required me to follow my ideas in a way that usually would never occur to me. Obviously, the art and photos had to represent Fresno, but they had to represent me and my experiences with Fresno as well. In that way my visual art was a kind of love triangle between Self, experience, and presentation. Luigi Pirandello talks about this a lot when he talks about his plays and his audience, and his deep-seated desire not to give the audience the opportunity to overlay fascist meaning in a medium where it is quite possible to do so. I don’t necessarily fear a fascist interpretation of what I do, and looking at the finished product, I can see how the kaleidoscopic version of my experiences, desires, and fears has created something that feels hostile to the comfort of tradition which Fresno and fascism invite.

Anyway, being forced by myself to delve into the visual medium where I find myself constantly making mistakes and landing short of an original idea has made Frazno! for me. Without the misshapen thread in the loom, Frazno! would not be as fun for me, and probably the people who enjoy it. In music and painting there is even a whole time/style period devoted to the embellishing of mistakes and unevenness—the Baroque. With that I’d like to offer up my zine to you.