In her article Be a Zinester, Anne Elizabeth Moore writes: "Be aware when reading a history of zines that for every single sentence you read committed to paper by a devotee of some subject or another, a different sentence was uttered somewhere and never written down. It was more accurate than whatever you just read, and more beautiful, and spoke more directly to you and your experiences. You can think of it as lost, gone, and unavailable to history-or you can assume it is there, still, somewhere."
Wow. Talk about a great way to end an article. Not only does her statement speak to the importance of zines, but it speaks to the overall importance of being heard and exercising one's voice. Historians will never get it exactly right, because there will always be a certain bias or generalization or neglected segment of the population. Someone or something will always get left out. It's the unfortunate and inevitable nature of it all. But zines allow for those same people to be heard, opinions to be expressed, and subcultures to be defined, while maintaining a certain amount of accessibility and flexibility to the process.
If it's not through zines, I hope that people continue to find creative ways to be heard and to express themselves. As for me, I'm excited to continue learning more and more ways to get my own voice out there, whether it be through zines or other methods. In the meantime, I can't stop thinking about that single sentence, the one that may or may not be gone forever, and part of me can't help but think maybe, just maybe, the point of it all, the point of being a writer in the first place, is in small part to find those lost sentences, those lost voices, and make sure they are finally given that chance to be heard.
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