Zine Fest Houston, This Saturday: Celebrate H-Town’s Underground Media, Y’all

Yeah, yeah, I know — as if there wasn’t already a ridiculously huge pile of stuff to do this weekend? Don’t sideline this one, though, because it promises to be damn cool.

This year’s edition of Zine Fest Houston will be happening this coming Saturday, May 16th, over at the ever-fun Caroline Collective, and will shine a light on the awesomeness of zines in general and local Houston-based zines in particular. I went to last year’s(?) out at The Shady Tavern and had a very cool time talking with the Kirke from Teenage Kicks (who does/did zines, in addition to doing the band thing ’til relatively recently) and (briefly) with the folks who do the very cool Film Monitor zine.

Plus, this year there’s some discussion/workshop-type things starting at 2:30PM or so, like a workshop on bookbinding(!), panel chats with good folks like the old Space City News crew, Lauren Trout from Arcade Distro, and Omar Afra from Free Press Houston (does that guy sleep? yeesh…), readings from various zines, and performances by Sew What, Dallas’s Texas Red Legs, “improv poet” Larry Lorrack, & others. Seems a bit more “scheduled” this time around, but as somebody who thinks this stuff needs to be highlighted & loved & improved upon, I think that’s awesome. Check the ZHF Website for the full list of what’s on.

Oh, and the absolute coolest part of the thing, to me, is the zine exhibition they’ll be running inside from 2-9PM, displaying tons and tons of locally-made/written zines and publications from, well, it sounds like all eras of this city’s zine-making history. And organizer Shane Patrick Boyle and cohort Jo Collier are planning bigger & better exhibitions like this, to boot — this Zine Fest exhibit is just Stage One for what they’re calling their Local Archival Project, the aim of which is to document & preserve Houston’s underground-press history. Big, big salute to y’all for that…

It’s free to check out the festival, and they’re charging relatively cheap prices for table space, so if you’ve got a zine or something, email Shane at “tables” at “zinefesthouston dot org”.