A nearly hundred-year-old grassroots publishing tradition is kept alive by local celebrants and acolytes
A pho restaurant, barbershop, and a chain boba spot inhabit the Dorchester block. Sam Potrykus’ office shares the same space as the Boston Little Saigon Cultural District. The inside is decorated with bright paintings. A computer occupies the desk, and it’s covered in stickers. One of them reads, “Ask me about my feminist agenda.” Dolly Parton plays softly from the laptop speakers. A stack of blue-inked newspapers rests on the end table: the latest edition of the Boston Compass newspaper, tied by white string—waiting to be read.
The Compass is one of the longer and enduring indie publications in the region, its organizers and volunteers writing and creating content for a subculture. Now a decade-and-a-half into printing, its pages include comic strips, articles about underground music, and happenings around town, delicately sustained by artists and writers. While countless publications have shuttered in Boston, the small but indelible Compass has managed to sustain itself through the economic hardships and industry ebbs and flows for 15 years.
Potrykus, now 36, began the project when he was in college. He studied history at UMass Boston, though he says he frequently skipped classes, and the early years of the paper were especially rough. It was all volunteer-run and required exorbitant amounts of sacrifice, including sleepless nights. In those years, Potrykus prioritized the paper over his health; it was the Compass above all.
Years ago, the newspaper was also hand-distributed by Potrykus and vols to establishments artists would frequent such as cafes, record stores, and college campuses. Now, they’re delivered via distribution boxes scattered all across the city. When it first began in 2010, the Boston Compass newspaper was a one-page zine. Then, it expanded to a four-page newspaper. Then, to an eight pager.
A long history of short publications
Zines (pronounced “zeens”) are independently published printed works, often taking the form of booklets or newsletters—and sometimes evolving into newspapers or magazines. They were originally created in the 1930s and 1940s by enthusiastic science-fiction fans wanting to share their views on their favorite stories with other fans, then became widely popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the popularization of the copy machine.
The punk rock movement of that period was the driving force in the zine resurgence. Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a feminist movement in the punk scene crystallized around the riot grrrl ethos. In July 1991, Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe published the first issue of a zine called Riot Grrrl, helping popularize the term and zines in general. Women, who were traditionally marginalized in the music business, found their voices in a surge of new feminist and queer zines. This extended the zine wave, along with a subsequent wave of zines published by people of color, until the rise of the Internet provided easier and even cheaper ways to reach like-minded people without the need for “dead tree publishing.”
Zines never entirely died, but they have become more of an art (and sometimes therapeutic) practice than a significant force in publishing in the decades since. Current zine audiences are extremely small compared to their last “golden age” in the 1980s and 1990s.
The classification of zines is fluid. A zine can be made with a pen and paper. There are one-time zines, meant to encapsulate an idea, spontaneously arising at an art fair, spun out of a social media page, perhaps advertised with a mysterious QR code on stickers or posters on random telephone poles and community bulletin boards.
And, of course, there are recurring zines that are common in college towns like Boston and Cambridge if you look hard enough. Like most discoveries (like a penny on a sidewalk), they can just, well, find you. Zines can vocalize a political perspective. They’re a medium to hold artwork like drawings, poems, or articles. And sometimes, they do both.
15 years of Compass
Like many zines (and small publications of all kinds), the Boston Compass focuses on exploring art and music. Though scrappy and persistent, its existence is financially precarious. Over its lifetime, the staff has shrunk. The newspaper’s circulation declined to half: 5,000 copies shrank to 2,500. Despite the downsizing, the biggest change in the newspaper’s 14-plus- year history occurred when it was finally able to pay its contributors, which, Potrykus notes, was long overdue. Everyone gets paid the same amount: $25 an hour. These days, the Compass operates under the nonprofit Brain Arts Organization.
“Even though we’re trying to branch out and grow, it’s just insurmountable, honestly. Our work defies the logic of profit,” Potrykus says. “What’s needed is sweeping societal change when it comes to respect for artists and art. To sum it up: access to resources. If institutions were willing to support our newspaper more, we could help more artists.”
Potrykus sits criss-cross applesauce. A self-described artist, archivist, and advocate, and musician, it’s been through his publication that he’s traveled all around the country, formed relationships, and met his wife, Emma Leavitt, who is the operations director for Brain Arts.
“Why do we exist? Because we’re not squares,” Potrykus says facetiously. “We must exist. The purpose of [our] newspaper is to amplify the culture and uplift our people. But why is it always about music and art? That’s just all we know.”
Much of the Boston Compass’ work focuses on identity, music, and activism. Compared with legacy outlets, the non-profit newspaper is not bipartisan and tailored to a general readership, instead finding its audience in fellow artists.
Editor-in-Chief Akbota Saudabayeva, 24, observes that the rise of digital media has led to the death of local newspapers. To Saudabayeva, there is a strange balance in wanting the Compass to be accessible, but in other ways, they want to shield it from big money interests.
On a deeper level, the Compass beautifies the city in a metaphorical and literal way, Saudabayeva explained. It pays artists for their creations, and the artists can see their work in a tangible medium throughout the city. Readers can grab issues from the distribution box, and within their grasp is a piece of ephemera that could be kept or hung.
“I definitely feel like I’m someone who’s involved in history-making and recording,” Saudabayeva says. “Being able to show people that our city is very worth living in, and is fortified by all the artists, speaks to that.”
Making connections through modern zines
Like the Boston Compass, smaller, new zines are bursting to express and capture a current movement. They are emblematic of what conversations are being had, thoughts, and beliefs that are circulating. Like the Compass, publications are aching to be included in a mainstream that has historically ignored them. While Potrykus’ newspaper has been alive for over a decade, many small, underground publications are also trying to break into the scene.
Seyun Om, working full-time as a graphic designer, is the founder of Itda Press. Sitting in a coffee shop, Om eats pastry while speaking. Her hair is a faded pink, and her fingers are decorated with silver rings. She started Itda last May, fresh out of Boston University. With her penchant for art books and typography, Om had realized how Eurocentric her design curriculum was. She wanted to explore cultural designs from Asia, South America, and Africa. How did their typography differ?
At the Boston Book Fair, she became interested in creating her own press. Specifically, she was inspired to become a multilingual, multicultural publisher, where she could “uplift other POC creators and showcase their work.”
Itda—translating to “connection” in Korean—offers to take completed manuscripts and design the layout, acting as the middleman between a writer and the print service.
“My next step is being more vigorous about acquiring people’s work,” Om says.
So far, she’s worked on one manuscript through Itda Press. Beyond that part of the mission, Itda hosts monthly bookshare sessions. At these events, people gather to exchange literature and novels, Om explained. It’s reminiscent of a swap. And for Om, it’s an excuse to flip through art books without purchasing them.
“It’s honestly a money sink right now,” Om says, adding that it’s funded by her full-time job. “I do it because I love it.”
Take-a-Zine, Leave-a-Zine
A tiered letterbox hangs by the entrance of Boston’s beloved Brattle Bookshop. There are neon stickers pasted on the clear plastic. On this day, there are two zines crammed between flyers: We Are Magic: Sigils for Trans Power, and A Preliminary Report from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine.
The trans power zine is minimal, full of sigils—inscribed pictorial symbols crafted to have magical power—and affirmations. The Palestine zine is denser, recording dates that museums, libraries, and archives destroyed since the war. The report is found online and available for individuals to print and make zines at home. When unfolded, these zines are the size of standard printer paper. There’s a small slit in the middle, which is how the page origamis itself into a booklet.
Community-run bookstands, often in the form of refurbished mailboxes, have been installed throughout Massachusetts as part of the Take-a-Zine, Leave-a-Zine initiative. It’s similar to little libraries where people share their books, but with zines.
“I think within the Boston metro area, [people are] thinking about gentrification and the economic imbalance, and how [these] artists exist in a city that’s not really set to support them in a lot of ways,” Doug Breault, exhibitions director of Gallery 263, says. An arts nonprofit, Gallery 263 is a participant in the project. “A lot of times,” Breault adds, “people make zines in a therapeutic way, but also in a community building way.”
The act of community building is seeped into the art form. It’s entangled with themes of identity. Self-expression is meshed into the craft.
At Brandeis University, Connections Magazine began as a collective for Asian students before expanding to all students of color. Sitting inside the university’s intercultural center, Co-Editor in Chief Alicia Wu says the student magazine was an outlet for students who simply wanted to create.
Connections was a rebranded continuation of the Eastern Tide (a student publication that existed in the ‘80s and ‘90s). The Brandeis Asian American Student Association, created in 1971 in response to the Vietnam War, created the Eastern Tide. Eventually the magazine—with its print-block aesthetic and written work by Asian American students—fizzled. The torch was passed to Connections.
Wu stresses the importance of Connections being for people of color, because “we’re at a predominantly white institution and because the publishing industry is predominantly white.”
Online zines and dreams
Many zines gather momentum via social media. Someone has a palpable desire to create something beautiful; so, an arts collective it is. They might gather the people they know in real life, then post an open call for staff members. For some online zines, that can lead to geographically diverse contributors.
This trajectory resembles how another Boston-founded publication, Dreamworldgirl, came to be. When the indie arts collective announced it was hiring, it received over 300 applications. The brainchild of Daphne Bryant, Co-Editor Emma Cahill says Dreamworldgirl started last April. The first issue took months to complete, and when it was finished, the staffers had to “pull money from their own pockets” to get the print issues made. The contributors were paid around $10 for their work. Since then, the staff has been working on a second issue titled Bitter.
Dreamworldgirl takes its aesthetic from the 1990s and early 2000s (think Seventeen magazine and TigerBeat), but flips the Kate-Moss-supermodel-era trope. Instead, it seeks to feature a diversity of identities and appearances. The magazine’s mission is to feature “writing and art by women and non-binary creatives” and from other marginalized groups. While some might consider this nothing new in our current moment, Cahill considers this the bare minimum.
And to Cahill, it’s everything she would’ve wanted when she was thirteen. “I was struggling, at that age, to see myself as someone who’s curvier,” she says. To her, the zine name represents, well, her dream-world girl, the woman she aspires to be in every facet of her life.
Cahill sits in Boston Common, near the site of Dreamworldgirl’s birthplace, Emerson College, where Cahill and Bryant were students. Cahill has a small stack of posters, all riffs on classic heartthrob boy band pics, but the models are masculine lesbians. It’s for a shoot that has since found its audience on TikTok.
“We’re giving people an opportunity to interact with the more difficult aspects of growing up, femininity, girlhood, and being nonbinary,” Cahill says. “It’s strongly based on riot grrrl culture and standing up for what you believe in.”
This article was produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven, news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
