After writing and selling my first zine, Do Me Justice, I’ve learned a few things. The power of creating something with no editorial oversight is hilarious. I’ve worked the past two years as a college writing professor, and so too have I preached the gospel of revision, feedback, and editing. It’s funny to make something like a zine and eschew most of this. There’s a weird paradox here. Often a good editor is essential to writing something beautiful. But, just as often, the artist on a mission to bring their own, weird, singular vision of something into the world, is more beautiful and satisfying to the audience than the perfectly clean edited thing.

Something about unaltered creativity straight from the weird source of the person’s rambling mind is more satisfying than the perfectly edited, fully optimized for human consumption, product- be it digital or analog. I love to watch a very unselfconscious YouTube video (here’s one of a guy walking from Philly to NYC). I love to hear a totally self-produced musical album (hello Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska). I love to see what the monks drew in the margins of their illuminated manuscripts. I love receiving a letter from my grandma and reading the way her mind puts phrases together to express warmth. Is there too much emphasis on perfection in art?

I personally know of a three errors in my Zine currently. One is that I mistook the Paul Brady recording of “Frost is All Over: for The Mary Wallopers’ version. I then wrote that it seemed the band were singing along to themselves. I accidentally wrote “The Dublins” instead of “The Dubliners” in reference to a T-shirt somebody wore on stage. I wrongly conflated the Bowery and Broadway as being the same road by New York City’s Battery. That’s just not true. I live with these errors and I know they are in print. That doesn’t matter too much though. Because the existence and the effort of the zine far outweigh the very human errors it contains.

Do Me Justice is hefty and pretty and cute. People love it and marvel at the way it feels to hold. They see the hand-cut text chunks and illustrations and tell me they’ll read it over the weekend, maybe two weekends. They tell me the storytelling is fun while also being accessible around the higher concept historic/intellectual stuff. They see the effort I went to in building the object that is the zine. The zine lives a life of its own, hanging around people’s living rooms and coffee tables, dancing its way through the USPS, burrowing its strangeness into the minds of its readers near and far.

Audiences respond to honest effort, the folkloric heart, the authentic push and passion behind a work. Audiences don’t care so much for perfection. It’s a refreshing thing to glimpse into an artists’ humanity. This happens when said artist allows an unrefined part of their work out into the world. That’s trust. I will keep on trusting. I’m currently crafted my next zine, “Happy Within: An Irish American Songbook”. If I promise one thing to you, it’s that this songbook will be anything but perfect. It will be beautiful in its very humanness.

Photographs from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs Collection, Library of Congress. View here.