Jill Anderson, researcher on the Madzines project, traces the evolution of her own zine making –  and how it has contributed to our embodied understanding of Madzines.

 

 

 

A while back – at a workshop organized by Anna Stenning and  Neurodiversity at Oxford – I made a zine that reflected on the composition of our Madzine research team.

 

 

‘Madzine research: an ecology’ was based on a chat between our three team members, it characterised Hel as a natural ‘collector’, myself as an instinctive ‘sharer’ and  Tamsin as an organic ‘maker’ of madzines.  ‘Who says what?’ zine readers were asked to guess.  ‘Bring me the zines!’, ‘Set the zines in motion!’, ‘Come and make a zine!’: our natural ways of engaging people with our project felt distinct.

 

Sure, my zine had some truth in it, but it was also a simplification.  As Madzine researchers, we do have distinctive strengths, skills and limitations   However, in the course of this project, we have all been collecting, sharing and, significantly, making zines.

 

Hel has continued editing, or as we’ve increasingly come to understand it, curating, Asylum: the radical mental health magazine.  Tamsin, our PhD researcher,  has made a series of highly original zines, including some madzines.  I have made my own zines both about, and for, the project. 

 

Zine making has, then, been much more than our project’s object of intellectual inquiry.  It has represented more than a set of values we’re committed to.  Zine making has been a practical tool for our research, bringing our own hands – as well as our heads and hearts – into the picture.

 

Tamsin has already blogged about her own zine making, and Madzine making  here, and here.  I focus in this blog post on zines that I have made myself, either alone or with other members of the team. 

 

 

 

The first zine I made in fact pre-dated the Madzines research project.  It was a mini-zine to advertise Asylum magazine.  I made it at a time when, inspired by our joint involvement in Asylum, Hel and I had started to think about a possible research project about radical mental health zines.

 

I remember little about making that Asylum mini-zine, but I do recall Hel saying – after handing it out at a talk they gave about Asylum, at a Mad Studies reading group – that people seemed happy to receive the zine, and slipped  it in their pockets.  It escaped the fate of our standard Asylum flyers, that were often surreptitiously left on chairs!

 

 

 

 

 

 

That early Asylum mini-zine was closely followed by another – 10 Alternatives in Mental Health – that shared its cut and paste aesthetic.   I still carry those mini-zines around, so had a copy  on me at a mental health performance organised by Hope in the HeArt in Brixton last year.  I’d been chatting to a woman sitting in the row behind me, about what had brought us there that night, and her experience of using  mental health services.   Talk had to stop, as the performance started, but I reached into my pocket and I handed her the zine.

 

When the interval came, I felt a light tap on my shoulder.  I turned to find the woman smiling.  ‘I’m going to keep your zine in my handbag’, she said.  ‘I’ll take it out when things get rough.  It’ll help me cope’.  The woman’s appreciation of the zine, it transpired, went well beyond its content.  ‘I’ll just open and close the zine, like this’ she said, as she did just that, ‘and it’ll feel like. . . .  breathing’.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next zine I made also predated the start of our Madzines research, though related more directly related to it.  It was designed for Hel to hand out to funding panel members at our Wellcome interview, as an introduction to our project.  I chose a larger format this time (A3, rather than A4).  I incorporated the first in a series of images drawn for us by our collaborator, Jac Batey.

 

 

 

 

We received no feedback on our ‘Crafting Contention’ zine, so weren’t sure if the interview panel members really ‘got’ the point of it.

 

Either way, it felt significant. That’s because our Wellcome interview zine had its origins in our sense that the research we were proposing might learn from what zines do; and, in turn, that sense was strengthened through its making.   NB The project did get funded (despite Hel’s, self reported, ‘dreadful’ interview performance!).

 

There’s something magical, we have learned – throughout this project – in the transition from a single flat sheet of A4, to a cut and folded zine.  Those who receive it, along with the person making it, can sense its life, its agency, its . . . .  breath.

 

Could I have learned some of that that from encounters with the Madzines we were collecting, that had been made by others? No doubt.   And yet, there was something in having made these zines with my own hands that made that insight ‘stick’.

 

In the remainder of this blog I aim to show how, as Madzine researchers making zines, we have got into conversation with each other and the wider world; have  deepened our engagement with the Madzines we’ve collected; have shared some insights we’ve encountered through our reading and research, and have processed knowledge shared through workshops and events.

 

 

 

My first zine of the project ‘proper’ – a Madzine Methodology – was initially addressed from me (as researcher) to Hel (as principal investigator).  It summarised an early chat we’d had about methods. The making of the zine felt significant in part because Covid was, at that point, confining us to our homes.  I sent the zine through the post to Hel.  As a kind of ‘gift’, that could be touched and held, it  was some compensation for our lack – in those very strange times – of in-person contact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Already our creations were beginning to reflect our engagements both with the zines we’d been collecting – many also the products of confinement –  and with our reading.   Some months into the project by that stage, our Methodology zine was not a standard mini-zine but a flat plane that could be folded, map-like. It encompassed tinfoil, treasury tags and stitch.   Guided by Paula Cameron’s notion of ‘seamfulness’, I had envisaged this zine – while making it – as a quilt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hel said that, when they unfolded it, they saw it as a board game.  Through reflecting on that reaction – and only slightly disappointed! – I began to get a sense of the playful  unpredictability of zines.   Quilt or board game, either way, our Madzine Methodology zine had begun to move us away from habitual forms of academic writing. 

 

Zine making, with its spirit of creativity, had unsettled the neatness of  our writing spaces too!

 

 

 

 

Although many of our own zines were initially intended for our own eyes only, our Madzine Methodology zine has been  included in a current Wellcome exhibition ‘Zines forever! DIY publications and disability justice’.   That has given us some  insight into an experience common to many a zinester – that of watching one’s own, creation move across the boundary, from a messy desk in the corner of a bedroom, into public space.

 

If our Madzine Methodology zine was a record of one early conversation, it also marked the start of a series of such exchanges.  Zines are a conversation – set in motion  by Tamsin – circulated between us and our collaborator Jac Batey over several months.  Through the active exchange of zines, and through collaboration in producing them, we began to experience, as well as to understand with our heads, the to-and-fro-ness implicit in zine culture.  We each began to grapple with our own relationship to the form – and some of us found  that, where our heads or hearts led, our hands might not so easily follow.

 

 

 

 

 

Our collaborations, in those early days, moved outwards from the team too.  I signed up for a zine swap, on the theme of ‘places I go to feel like myself’.  Initially quite factual, my zine evolved into something personal.  I sent it off, to an unknown recipient in Canada, eagerly awaiting a response . . . . that never came.  The experience triggered reflection on what later emerged as important questions for our project, about intimacy, reciprocity and trust.

 

 

 

 

 

Tamsin and I also took part, at around that time, in the Swansea zine fest ‘24 hour zine challenge’. Our ‘Choose your own research adventure’ was the result.

 

 

 

Working together on that zine was fun.  It was cathartic too for Tamsin, I sensed, who’d been smarting from some of the initial responses from the ethics committee to her PhD research ethics application.  Through planning and making the zine, she and I  got to know one another better.  The foundations were laid for ongoing zine exchanges through the lifetime of our project, and for creation of our ‘Madzines Intro’ zine.

 

That zine went with us on an early post-pandemic outing –  to the Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) in 2021.

 

 

 

 

Printed on thicker, shiny paper, our ‘Madzine Intro’  felt to us less zine-like than our earlier efforts.  A printer keen to furnish us with top quality paper stock, had been bemused by our request for something rougher. We had at first held our ground, but been left unsettled, wondering: were we just playing with roughness (given that, unlike many zinesters, we could afford  better quality paper)?

 

 

 

That is just one small example of the many ways in which our own zine-making has challenged us to think more deeply about our work – not least because the very last thing we have wanted to do in this project is to somehow ape a zine aesthetic.

 

The power of one zine to spark another was, by that point, also starting to dawn on us – evident not only in the myriad connections between the Madzines we were unearthing but also within our own zine-making practice

 

A scattering of other zines resulted.  Some had had very practical purposes: as event guides (eg to Reimagining Mental Health), conference leaflets, or teaching handouts.  All three, but especially the latter, raised searching questions about the role of zines (and hence ourselves as zine researchers) in mainstream settings such as academia.

 

 

 

 

 

Other zines we made were less informative and more exploratory.  For example, ‘Some aspirations of Mad Studies’ and ‘Backgridding’ summarised ideas encountered in our reading, and were a means for others to engage with those ideas.

 

 

We have found ourselves returning, repeatedly, to ideas that influenced our initial project bid – Arthur Franks’ approach to narrative for example, in his book ‘Letting Stories Breathe: a socio-narratology’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If zine making has helped us to engage with ideas that we’ve encountered in books and journal articles, it has also helped us to process learning from events that we have organized or attended.

 

For example, Dolly Sen led a workshop for us, during the pandemic, on ‘How to be Subversive’.  I was struck, having created not one but three zines in response, by how Dolly’s sense of fun and lightness had taken hold.  My first zine ended up as a series of ‘failed’ drawings of Dolly herself; the second an out-of-control structure that had no logical means of navigation and the third a kind of floaty globe that seemed an embodiment of Huxley’s advice (shared with us by Dolly) to ‘take everything lightly’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An early zine of mine had taken as its starting point a quote by Rachel Berdach: ‘I want to know why we, like upside down sunflowers, turn to the dark side rather than the light.’

 

 

 

It had spoken powerfully to my own situation, in the time of the pandemic, and also to conversations Hel and I had been having over the years about the role of Asylum magazine  – with its ‘challenging’ content, black and white images and zine-like aesthetic –  in the face of what can sometimes felt like an unrelenting focus on ‘self-help’ and ‘wellbeing’. 

 

Dolly’s workshop, with its emphasis on ‘lightness’ – returned us neatly to Rachel Berdach’s question.  It had resonance with the Madzines we had been collecting – combining lightness, darkness and all shades of experience in between.    What’s more, Dolly has always been a master in what a Mad Studies student at one of our Madzine workshops identified as another strength of zines; their capacity to give an everyday situation a  ‘wee twist’.

 

 

As the project developed, zine making provided space for a twist on the events that we attended: the opening of Morecambe and Lancaster zine library; the previously mentioned Hope in the HeArt performance in Brixton; a teaching session in snowy Wrexham and a series of creative conversations held in Morecambe.  There we set out to expand our understanding of the potential forms Madzines might take: through crafting not just zines but boxes and then maps – a process that culminated (in a manner that couldn’t have been predicted) with the creation of  a walking lighthouse!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Madzines we have been collecting have been varied, not just in content but in their use of materials and form.  As an experiment, a year or so into the project, Tamsin and I agreed to take Raymond Carver’s poem, ‘Happiness’ as the inspiration for a zine, and then exchanged our versions.

 

 

 

 

The poem is about two newspaper delivery boys. My own zine was made from the slips that our local Lancaster sorting office attach to bundles of letters, that the postal delivery workers later discard in the street.

 

 

 

 

There, they are run over (and, in the process, textured) by car tyres.  That it crossed my mind to collect those slips, and to use them in a zine, marks a shift in my relationship – through this project – to materials and to making.   It was only through this kind of embodied engagement that I learned to read the zines of others, not only in terms of their content but as objects with meanings that go well beyond any words that they contain.

 

It was around this time that we encountered Nick Sousanis’ inspirational book ‘Unflattening’, which moved us to experiment  with more than two dimensions: the Turkish Map Fold for example:

 

 

 

 

A trip to the Artist’s Book Market in Edinburgh, while highlighting the differences in culture between the zine and artist book scenes, helped us move into new dimensions.  We encountered the genius of Tom Alexander and  I sent the ‘garden in a zine’ I made in a workshop there, to one of our project collaborators, Dina.

 

 

 

 

We have struggled, throughout the project, for ways of sharing zines that capture what it is to touch and hold them.  In our YouTube videos, my hands have featured, not just as tools for making, but as tools for sensing and experiencing other people’s makings.  Tam Martin Fowles has described her own emotions on seeing my hands on film, slowly and respectfully turning pages of a zine that she had made.   The touching, as well as the making, of zines has characterized our embodied research project.

 

 

 

 

Zine making has, then, featured in our project, not simply as a means of publicising what we do, but as a tool for reflecting on our methods, identifying strengths and skills and working ideas through.   From the early days of the pandemic onwards, we have sent zines to one another at times that have been challenging for us.  In that way, zines have also been expressions of care.  

 

As our project draws to a close, our minds have turned to zines as project outputs too.

 

 

 

Of all the zines that I’ve made  in the course of the project, this is perhaps my favourite.  As a kind of ‘found poem’, it draws directly on the words of contributors to our Madzines project blog.  I printed it on flimsy lined paper torn out of a jotter and collaged tissue paper to obscure the word ‘hidden’.  I made slipcovers, using an image from a Madzines trip to Ghent.

 

 

 

 

More than any other zine I have made, ‘A Madzine is a crafting tool’ felt  like an expression of an understanding gained.   It was not until afterwards that I came to see this zine as the product of a recognised creative research method: poetic transcription.

 

 

 

 

Small and unassuming, this zine has seeded ideas about Madzines in spaces where their potential had not before been recognised.  That image, of a zine as a potent seed, is one that we have played with for some time – inspired, in part, by our reading – early on –  of Laura Pottinger’s paper, Planting the seeds of a quiet activism.

 

 

 

Seeds, once scattered, can take root or otherwise. Zines are enabling precisely because there is no such thing as a failed zine.  Having said that, not all zines we’ve made  have germinated.   One painstakingly produced trio of minizines – ‘a zine of madzines’, ‘what’s a madzine?’ and ‘some madzine qualities’ – for perhaps obvious reasons (!) failed to see the light of day.

 

 

 

 

And some other zines took root but somehow never flowered . . .

 

 

 

The saving grace of these three is that, when opened out, they did – thanks to Dolly Sen and others – reveal fantastic posters!

 

It has amused me that sometimes the smallest, most throwaway zine, can have more impact than a creation that has been laboured over.  I made this tiny haiku zine, in five minutes, while sitting listening to a keynote presentation by Fiona Kumari-Campbell – at a conference in 2023 on Social Work in Turbulent Times.  At a subsequent event, a woman in a workshop we were running found it lurking in our library.  I’d love to share this with others she said to me politely – but I’m wondering. . . how might I go about approaching its creator?

 

 

 

 

Seeds of our own zine making have, on occasion, dispersed into other aspects of our working and our personal lives.  I’ll give just one example   At a workshop we ran at a Creative Research Methods conference, Suzannah Scott-Moncrieff made a zine about her great, great grandmother Jeannie, who had been incarcerated in the Aberdeen Asylum.  Suzannah has blogged for us about how her zine became, in the process of creation, a zine about Suzannah herself.

 

I found the zine deeply moving and it influenced a zine I made about my own great grandmother.

 

 

 

 

That zine, in turn, fed into another  project I have been working on – about a group of people whose lives, like that of my great grandmother, were profoundly affected by the Second World War.  They are the children born to Black American GIs and White British women, self-dubbed ‘Brown Babies’  You can read about the project here.  The children and grandchildren of ‘Brown Babies’, like Suzannah and myself, have been struggling with how to relate to stories that are not, and yet in some ways are, their own.

 

 

 

 

I mention that example because it has helped me to understand, from the inside, a very potent feature of zines their capacity to spark response, and in often unexpected places.

 

 

 

This blog post set out to convey the diverse ways in which zine making has enriched our Madzines project.  Like the participants in our workshops  we have been moved to ‘making and swapping zines’ by the Madzines we’ve encountered.  In the process we’ve been able to explore ideas, communicate those ideas to others, shape outcomes, engage with our reading, reflect on our own processes, honour the ideas of others, have fun and care for one another.  By pushing our own zine making towards its limits we’ve been able to discover for ourselves – as well as from Madzines made by others – what zines can do. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Madzine Methodology zine will be included in Zines Forever: DIY Publications and Disability Justice – curated by Lea Cooper and Adam Rose, and running at the Wellcome collection from 14 March to 14 September 2025.

 

 

Reference this blog post: Anderson, J. (2025). Madzine Research. ‘Thinking through Making: Getting hands-on with Madzines’, 10 March [Blog]. Available: https://madzines.org/thinking-through-making-getting-hands-on-with-madzines/