A version of this post originally appeared on the Patreon page for Zine-A-Month (ZAM), a zine distro run by Anna Jo Beck.

I took a week-long trip to Asheville, NC last January. My brother lives a couple of hours outside of Asheville, not far from Charlotte, and has always had good things to say about the area. I had also heard that Asheville is a sort of haven for queer creatives and is home to an eclectic and welcoming art scene.

Truth-be-told, I could have just as easily ended up in any one of a handful of other cities. I was just looking for somewhere to go. I had spent the majority of 2023 in a period of rapid growth and self-discovery and by January of 2024, despite how dangerously close to burn-out I was, I was still pushing myself to lean into the things that brought up Fear and Shame. Asheville was my first ever solo trip and my chance to see just how well I could handle being alone after a decade of never spending more than a day or two apart from my former partner.

I spent most of that trip being cold and deeply, woefully lonely. I also learned to push myself way outside of my comfort zone. I asked strangers asinine questions and diligently took notes (I called these "interviews"); I joined tilde.town, a cyber-community primarily for creatives, which I am still a part of; I sent personal emails to artists whose works spoke to me; I contacted Anna about a guest artist spot for ZAM. I realized how much I needed to exist and how much that meant reaching out for connection and community.

Asheville '24 is part perzine, part art zine, part newsletter, and part brain-dump. My process involved cooking down highly conceptual pieces (overthought and iterated on for nearly a year) to a thick and saucy reduction of trash and aesthetic.

The cover is a scanography piece I did using mixed media and fake doll eyes--which blink when rotated!--that I was given as a birthday gift.

The text is all either handwritten or typed up on the typewriter I picked up at The WasteShed last year.

I chewed up 30+ pieces of Orbit peppermint gum to create the truly disgusting assemblage piece, which I gave the working title "Cinnamon Banana Cream Pie".

My flatbed scanner and Brother laser printer are largely responsible for bringing my disjointed visuals together into something I could then trim down and staple together.