About
Multitudes Zine Fest wants to make zines with you! Multitudes is a Manchester thing - we're holding a load of taster and intensive zine-making sessions across the city and surrounding cities and towns in 2023 and 2024: check our Make A Zine! page for dates and details. And then at the end of the summer in 2024 we're gonna get a year's worth of zines and zine-makers together for a festival.
We've been making zines and organising zine-related events for a long time now, and have noticed that zine spaces are often pretty homogenous (very white and very middle class, among other things) - and in ways that just don't reflect our own lives. We decided to make a zine space focused on Black, brown and global majority, neurodivergent, disabled, working class and LGBTQ+ zine-makers. Focused on those of us who, in multiple overlapping ways, aren't already at the centre of the publishing world, the literary world, and the art world.
Zines are nothing new - you can trace their roots way back to the pamphleteers that followed the invention of the printing press - and as they are self-published they can look and read and feel like a million different things. They are inherently anti-hierarchical and anti-institutional, and that's just part of why we love them.
Anyone and everyone can make a zine - all you need is a piece of paper and something like a pen.
We've been making zines and organising zine-related events for a long time now, and have noticed that zine spaces are often pretty homogenous (very white and very middle class, among other things) - and in ways that just don't reflect our own lives. We decided to make a zine space focused on Black, brown and global majority, neurodivergent, disabled, working class and LGBTQ+ zine-makers. Focused on those of us who, in multiple overlapping ways, aren't already at the centre of the publishing world, the literary world, and the art world.
Zines are nothing new - you can trace their roots way back to the pamphleteers that followed the invention of the printing press - and as they are self-published they can look and read and feel like a million different things. They are inherently anti-hierarchical and anti-institutional, and that's just part of why we love them.
Anyone and everyone can make a zine - all you need is a piece of paper and something like a pen.
Who are we?
Heena Patel is one of the organisers of Over Here Zine Fest, a zine fest focusing on Black, brown and global majority zine makers.
Mish Green is a writer and zine maker who most recently edited the book TransBareAll - new writing and art by trans and non-binary artists. Jasmine Gardner is a visual artist and co-director of Happening In MCR. Our beautiful whale and fish artwork was made by Louis Bailey at We Rare Things Prints.
Mish Green is a writer and zine maker who most recently edited the book TransBareAll - new writing and art by trans and non-binary artists. Jasmine Gardner is a visual artist and co-director of Happening In MCR. Our beautiful whale and fish artwork was made by Louis Bailey at We Rare Things Prints.
Wait - what's a zine??
A zine [pronounced like the 'zine' part of 'magazine] is an independently created low-budget publication that can hold whatever you wish - poems, personal stories, political tracts, comics, artwork, recipies or rants. It might be a single author thing or holding the work of lots of contributors. It can be handwritten, typed, cut and paste with scissors and glue, or assembled on a computer. It's like a mini magazine, a pamphlet, a love note. It might be a one-off thing, or a long-standing affair of many many issues. Either way, it's usually only published as a short print run, often printed on a photocopier.
Multitudes Zine Fest and our year-long programme of workshops is made possible by support from Arts Council England and Manchester Pride's Superbia programme.