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Zine Post-Mortem
1st April 2004, 8.25pm

I was talking with my friend Jo last night about the workshops we've been teaching this week: she at the Melbourne Jewish Museum where she's been teaching high school kids how to make their own comics as part of the current Art Speigelman exhibition; I at Albert Park and Elwood Colleges teaching zine-making workshops as part of the celebration that is National Youth Week. After a day of it, both Jo and I were wiped. Well and truly. The sensation of being beaten up is the closest I can get to the physical exhaustion that comes from trying to keep teenagers occupied, entertained and focussed on independent creative practise for more than an hour. A few years back I was carted around six different Canberra high schools for six consecutive periods to read poetry to them in their respective libraries. That night I could hardly stand. And all I was doing was reading poetry, for Shiva's sake. At least this time it was only two hours per day for two days.

I think my favourite group was the one I tackled today at Elwood. They were a bit younger, which always seems to make them a bit calmer - free from the frustration both physical and mental that seems to beset every human once they turn fifteen. It started rough, with half a dozen or so of the kids opting to do the DJing workshop instead once they found out we weren't going to be making badges, but once they were gone the rest of us sat around in the art room, cutting up old magazines and comics and sticking them down on little blank A5 booklets. One boy, wearing a "Lose Weight Fast! Ask Me How!" badge (he wouldn't tell me where he got it from), made a zine whose name changed from Shazam to Meanwhile Nevertheless after he saw that I'd called mine Africado Chicken Laptop Homicide Squadron. One girl made a zine about dogs and bunnies. Another girl made one called Ugly Duckling, full of cut-up Donald Duck comics. The supervising teacher made her own zine, too, called Lerv. It depicted the stages one goes through in attempting to snare oneself a man, using only pictures. Another girl made one that was entired composed of glossy perfume ads and articles cut straight from a Vogue I'd brought in, then pasted wholesale into her own booklet. Well, I did tell them that making a zine was the same as making your own magzine.

I've got one more Youth Week zinemaking workshop left, at the Port Melbourne town hall this Saturday. I'll also be flogging some of my zines and comics there - the new Jutchy Ya Ya will be in attendance, as will copies of Jerry the Nerky Lizard, Rude Boy and The Fish. Details of the workshop are in the gigs section, and in the wee interview with yours truly appeared in this week's InPress, which you'll find over in the Press section.

And that's all for today. Tired now. Go sleep now. Buh-bye now.

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