Microcosm Publishing is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years. Table of Contentsįoreword: An Uncomfortable Question / Sidnee Haynes More recently, Elly Blue Publishing/Taking the Lane merged with Microcosm Publishing in 2015. Recipe: A Foodie’s Confession / Adrian Lipscombe Us, Them, and the Imposter Within / Cat Caperello How Much Did That Bike Cost? / Gretchin Lair Really Awesome and Poor / Tammy Melody Gomez Happier, Ever After / Rhienna Renée Guedry We’ve been talking a lot here at the office about the difference between zines and the Internet. Conventional wisdom is that printed matter comes and goes, but the Internet is forever. The Internet is beyond ephemeral-a sort of timeless dimension, where an offhand comment on an obscure forum can resurface a decade later to haunt you forever, where an entire body of work can disappear overnight, where crowds frenetically build up heroes one day, rip them to shreds the next, and forget all about them immediately. It’s an exciting place of fast movement and constant stimulus. It’s terrifying and I love it.īooks and zines, meanwhile, are islands of calm. They’re places where you can learn to think and feel new things, trying on other people’s ideas and experiences in relative safety. Where you can make mistakes and change your mind. Without the Internet, I don’t know how I would connect these books and zines with their readers. But I’m forever grateful to have the medium of print available to learn and grow in. And one of the main areas that has expanded for me, as it has for many, is covered by this volume. I had a political awakening a decade ago, riding with Critical Mass through the streets of New York City, chased by police on motorcycles, in helicopters, and in unmarked black SUVs. It was the first time I’d viscerally understood that the government did not exist solely for my benefit and protection. That realization changed the course of my life and the content of what I cared about writing. It gave me a new certainty and a path forward.įive years ago, the Ferguson protests and the launching of Black Lives Matter by three queer Black women onto the streets and into the popular imagination-and explosively on the Internet-opened my eyes in a new way and I began to see the scope of what I truly didn’t know: The experiences of millions of people in the world, the number of ways blatant and subtle that people can systematically do wrong to each other, the depth of human experience. My realization was that I’d been, and still was, missing most of what was going on in the world around me, right in front of me. One result-I wanted to politicize this zine beyond the tacit for and by women, or at least not sexist definition of feminism I’d loosely been screening submissions with. Those criteria still hold, but they’re not enough anymore. Class and money was the original prompt for submissions it quickly became clear that a more intersectional approach was called for. Ultimately, this zine is about ways people negotiate power, and the various wedges that the powerful can use to separate us from each other.Įverything in these pages was written before the election of 2016, sometimes well before.
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