On Nov. 25, SUNY New Paltz’s Zine Collective and Library hosted an event at 6 p.m. at The Bakery in town. The Zine Collective and Library has been prevalent on campus for the past decade, originally formed in 2014. Despite the club’s hiatus a few years back, they successfully revived the organization in 2022 by hosting numerous interactive events.
Fourth-year anthropology major Marin Koferl is one of the club’s organizers. “I knew that there was a zine library, which was part of the reason that I was like, New Paltz is the best. So I had reached out to the librarian, and she was like, no one’s really been doing zine club. So the first week of freshman year we met up in the library, and she showed me a bunch of [old zines]. At the end of the fall semester and then into the spring she ended up having some of her seniors … come in, because they know their way around the school. They were like, ‘We’re gonna run it. Come help.’ I was so relieved, and here we are now, almost four years later,” Koferl said.
As opposed to hierarchical E-board positions, the collective designates their board members to be club organizers.
Third-year music major Miles North is also an E-board member. “I really think it’s important to have this kind of thing around, because zines have a history in political activism and punk spaces. They are anti-authoritarian and rebellious in nature because they’re completely unofficial. They’re not done through publishing houses or anything like that. You just make it yourself, copy it yourself, distribute it yourself. So it’s completely uncensored information. There’s really no way to censor it unless you censor yourself,” said North.
Club organizer and third-year astronomy major West Allen detailed his inspiration for zine making. “I tend to make a lot of zines about science and very specific things. I usually make a couple zines about astronomy because I feel like it is not taught often enough in school. In my experience, when it is taught, it’s usually sandwiched with earth science, and they just talk about the solar system, and the sun’s in the center, and we’re one of the planets and that’s pretty much it. It’s just a very blanket statement, and because a lot of people live in cities where they cannot get a good view of the stars, I think it’s important to go and try different methods of essentially sharing science with everyone.”
E-board member and second-year psychology major Maddie Pascalli explained the emotional aspect of this organization and what it has meant to her thus far. “I am in a very weird transitional period of my life where I’m discovering a lot of things about myself and putting that into words for the first time. I like having a space where I can take myself more seriously through expression. I can just let my mind roam. I just really enjoy the space and I’m trying to put myself in more activist, leftist spaces because it’s something that I’m having increasingly more and more of an interest in and something I’m caring about a lot more and more.”
The Zine Collective and Library meets every Wednesday at 6 p.m. in the Create Space, which is on the second floor of the Sojourner Truth Library. If you want to learn more about the collective, you can check out their Instagram @npzines.