But I’m a Cheerleader… LEAP Festival Fortnight Zine Workshop (2018)
As part of the Leap Festival Fortnight Edinburgh Zine Library ran a zine making workshop to create a space for LGBTQIA+ folks to explore their experiences of sport through zines. As a queer person, a keen sportsperson and someone concerned with wider questions of inclusion, visibility, queer culture and community health, this was a particular area of interest for me.
I put in a successful application for £50 of funding for the cost of materials so we were very happy with the array of stickers, stamps, pens, paper and branded pritt sticks we had to work with.
During my residency with Cornwall Zine Library, Lee, who helps run it, told me about a workshop they had run where they had participants making mini-zines. At the end they photocopied enough of each zine that every participant could leave with one of everyone else’s in a wee bundle. This seemed like a really great idea – partly because of the way it connects to the sharing and community nature of zines, and partly because it introduces an additional element of thinking about reproduction and distribution to our workshops, both of which are a fundamental part of zine making. I also really liked the idea of people seeing a zine through from start to finish. The funding from LEAP made reproducing everyone’s zine at a free workshop financially possible. If we do this again in the future (which I think we will) we may have to ask for contributions towards the cost.
I decided to incorporate a simple powerpoint into the start of the workshop. This had worked well in a previous workshop (on making spell zines) and during a talk/workshop given by Holly Casio and Kirsty Fife I had attended a few weeks before. I liked how the powerpoint gave some structure to the introduction. It helped introduce newbies to ideas around zine making, as well as give some context to why we decided to approach this topic through zines. It also anchored my otherwise quite free flowing style of facilitation and chat, and meant when we were breaking into groups to discuss things people had a reminder of the focus of the discussions. When we started zine making, I left the penultimate slide up so people could refer to it for ideas.
It was an element I definitely plan to use again. I found it threw me off a little bit to begin with, but once I settled in it became more of backdrop to my normal workshop patter and I think it was really helpful. EZL member El was co-facilitating, and it worked really well to have both of us leading because it demonstrated the ways that zine making in this context wasn’t about having finished answers or being able to say definitive things about ‘LGBTQI experiences in sport’ but was about discussion, asking questions, exploring our own experiences, sharing our knowledges and understanding and complicating. El is also thoughtful, passionate about queer culture, always remembers to talk about things I forget, and brings new things to the discussion I haven’t thought of, so we are a good facilitating team.
There was some great discussion – on things like how participation statistics often don’t measure the ways LGBTQIA+ folks do participate or ask the right questions, on how sport is the site of multiple intersections of identity and experience, on whether we have to leave our sexuality at the door of the changing room, on visibility and ‘safe’ or positive visibility. We brought in some conversations we’d been having about the promotion materials, which used images from representations of LGBTQI folks in sport in films and tv, and considered assumptions about the ‘LGBTQI experience’ and shared cultural references. It would have been great to have longer to allow more discussion, as people really got stuck in.
We delayed photocopying the zines until the last minute to give people time to finish. I think telling people we planned to reproduce the zines at the end made people think realistically about what they could make in an hour and meant we ended up with more finished zines than we normally do at workshops. We overran by half an hour in a flurry of folding and cutting, but everyone left with 10 zines (and it gave everyone a taste of the panicked night before a zine fair!) Everyone seemed really pleased to have finished zines, and to be able to share their zines with others.
