I first met Dal when I (Seleena) was tabling at Sheffield zine fest some years ago where we chatted zines. She’s also tables at Over Here and her infectious enthusiasm for creating and nurturing is something we loved instantly, so when she asked us to bring Over Here for a mini pop in Sheffield, we couldn’t say no!

We asked Dal to share some words about what Zine making means to her…..

As I’m gearing up to collaborate with brilliant Over Here at ‘We’ve Got Food at Home!’ Zine Fest, as part of Migration Matters Festival, I’ve been reflecting on my transformative zine making journey. 

Back in January 2020, just months before the covid pandemic locked us in our homes, I experienced the transformative potential of zine-making. I created a zine called ‘Wild Ink’ as part of my autoethnographic research for a masters in therapeutic writing exploring my identity, creativity and wildness using therapeutic zine-making methods. I wanted to understand the intersections of these in relation to my creative exile, and eventually, my creative return.

For me, zines are a bit like a cooking pot – they can be a holding space for the many complimentary and contradictory ingredients and experiences of our lives with the potential for stirring up some fresh and surprising flavours, challenging normative expectations and disrupting assumptions, both within ourselves and others. The multi-layered multi-media format encourages creative freedom, revealing epiphanies and revelations with the potential to map out new connections and possibilities.

The process of making Wild Ink zine felt like a therapeutic (and anarchic) “third space”cooking pot, an entirely new space that helped me to better understand and assert myself by negotiating cultural production on my own terms outside of traditional frameworks or institutions. Crucially, I was rejecting interpretation or analysis by an expert. 

When I began making Wild Ink I knew I felt stuck and I knew I wanted to heal. It was an intuitive, creative and healing process, as if the zine was making me. The physicality of the cutting, tearing, sticking, pasting, re-arranging images, documents and words resonated with Toni Morrison’s idea of ‘pieces’ from memories sparking my creative process and ancestral memory. Audre Lorde’s description of, “…a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…” which is full of ‘ancient and hidden’ transgenerational memories, source material for creativity and power rooted in “… unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling” hung in the air around me as I made my zine. 

Guided by Audre Lorde’s words and wisdom from Toni Morrison, I managed to create a space where I was spontaneously able to develop my own alchemical language to express the ‘moveable feast’ of my identity, giving me the opportunity to experiment with re-historising on my own terms.

Making the Wild Ink zine became an experimental space to unravel aspects of my life and myself which had been hidden, smothered, colonised and suppressed for most of my adult life. It was my chance to re-historise. As an intuitively guided process, by the time I’d finished the zine it felt as if it had exploded into my life like a huge masala-mix firework, sending fragrant sparks far and wide, across timelines, histories, memories and landscapes. It felt healing, illuminating and cleansing.

Since then I’ve made many zines, ran workshops and tabled at Over Here zine fests. Zines and the community around them have made a huge difference to my life. I’ve made friends, comrades, community and collaborations. And I’ve only just begun. Will you join in too?

This blog post contains extracts from articles originally published by the brilliant project Synergi. 

Dal Kular (she/her) is a creative facilitator, writer, mentor and mixed-media maker. Her creative social practice centres ancestors, healing, liberation, abolition and joy. She’s inspired by Black/Global feminisms, Mother Earth and social justice. She lives in Sheffield. www.dalkular.com