Archiving The Vegan Punk: A Personal Account

I grew up in Cranbrook, BC. It’s a small town that functions much like a rural community and my neighbour—like many people who live there—hunted. He did so frequently and, as the stuffed animal heads hanging in his garage can attest to, effectively. With the best intentions, he offered me deer jerky one hot afternoon in August after we’d moved to the neighbourhood. “No thanks,” I said. By this time, I’d mastered the tone of saying no to meat. Firm, so as to not invite any questions, but friendly, so as not to appear rude. It didn’t work; he insisted. Finally, I had to tell him what twelve-year-old me hated telling people at the time: “I don’t eat animals.” He pointed his finger and told me you’ll waste away.

I gave up meat because of Lisa Simpson. Not entirely, of course, but she was a large part. She embodied the coolest person on TV I’d seen up until that point. She was smart and courageous and the moral compass of the Simpson family, so naturally I thought it made her pretty badass when she refused to eat lamb chops. Although Lisa wasn’t punk herself, not in an overt way at least, she represented something anti-hegemonic, anti-commodity, and anti-patriarchal to me. For fourteen years, the through line of my subcultural activity has undoubtedly been the refusal to consume animals. Surely, there are philosophical and political and environmental books on the topic of veganism. But what about small-town vegans, vegan punks, queer vegan zines? There is little to no archival work on this front, Sistah Vegan being the welcome exception to this rule. The ethos behind eschewing animal products and supporting animal rights is often contradicting and, for likely every vegetarian and vegan, contains multitudes. As one of the people interviewed by Ross Haenfler in his book  Straight Edge, Jenny expresses that she “[thinks] every element of my life philosophy is very much interconnected. They all sort of fit together like puzzle pieces. The connection I make between [straight edge and hardcore] and political activism is sort of that whole attitude like you see something wrong, fix it.” I wish I could share this sentiment, that my politics and philosophies fit together like puzzle pieces. I do see a connection between feminism and boycotting meat and punk shows, but I think it’s more complex than a simple through-line. These tensions make subcultural activity, particularly ones that overlap like this, fundamentally more difficult to archive.

In high school, I drifted towards the small Cranbrook punk scene. I found a core group of friends who introduced me to punk music and shows. They showed me that apathy can be focused and that sentimentality is useful. Punk validated resistance towards the status quo. We were a ragtag team of kids but they were, and are, “cooler” than me. Although I played drums, had my lip pierced and my hair dyed orange, I never felt radical—I felt that it was staged, commercial. There is something uniquely humorous about attending a punk show, getting bruises from the mosh pit, talking lyrics and albums and politics, and then having your father pick you up in a green minivan. The idea of not selling out was extremely important to me, but more so to my friends. Although they were willing to buy overpriced RVCA and Element brands from the one board shop in Cranbrook, I got flak for dressing too “preppy.” Once, I wore a gifted shirt from Abercrombie over skinny jeans to an Underoath show. It took years to live that down. It was, in many ways, an ultimate fuck you to my friends’ consumption practices. Abercrombie stood for worker exploitation, sure, but even more evilly it stood for mainstream. I was a poseur. This subcultural activity lead to zining. So, how would I feel about having my own zines archived? First, it might be necessary to provide a brief overview of some zines I have been a part of. There was The Recycle Bin, an earnest fiction rag that was not much in the way of radicalness. I was a contributor to Cranbrook-based zine Dinktown. At UBC, Juawana Grant and I wrote a zine called Vegan 101. In the (co)creation of these zines, I was not a poseur. Alison Piepmeier posits that zines are inimitably personal, forming a tangible connection between text, reader, and creator. Peipmeier writes that “zines investigate intimate, affectionate connections between…what I am calling embodied communities, made possibly by the materiality of the zine medium.” In other words, zines forge communities. The Recycle Bin took itself seriously. This was a zine created out of Mom’s printer paper—nothing fancy. Plain white or a beige with faded flower prints.  I usually combined the two. Almost no one wanted to read my stories. I deposited them in mailboxes mostly, sometimes stuck them in kid’s backpacks. One ninth-grade teacher read a story of mine and greeted me cheerily one morning. She said that I could write books if I wanted to when I was older. (I was thrilled but tried not to show it.) We formed a connection over that sloppy ink and paper, and it was her praise that got me through many years. Zines are also special, in part, because they embody place.

Dinktown was a small zine that circulated throughout Cranbrook in 2009 and 2010. It was part parody, part authentic. I added mostly recipes, some pop culture criticism, coverage of local punk shows, and some satire that I was too cowardly to put my name on. People liked it. It cost $2 at some of our local coffee shops. When we Xeroxed it, it often had inky stains on it, and when we handed it out it smelled like each of us but mostly like KRC where we held our meetings. Would it be the same if it didn’t hold those pieces of us with it? Not entirely. Vegan 101 was a simple, one-issue zine Juawana and I created. We didn’t sell it, but had stacks available at Naked Café in downtown Kelowna, at some of our plant-based workshops, and at documentary screenings. This one, like the others, was made on cheap paper with few materials, filled with doodles and scraps and messy stapling.

The first question, then, in considering what it might mean to have my own zines archived, is how would this activity be archived? What would it require? Subcultural activities emerge from countercultural ethics, from anti-hegemonic ideals and hopes. These activities are often temporal, and as such the very act of archiving freezes the subcultural activity in a packagable way. I’m not so sure subcultural activity is as easily understood as that, but in order to move towards a nuanced mode of archives, we should aim for some definitive features of subcultural archives: digitization, interviews, self-reports. For me, I would want a multiplicity of my writings to appear online. Not just my articles in Dinktown or Vegan 101 or the other zines that never really went anywhere, but also a self-reflexive note from myself now. The most important factor would be, in my mind, a conglomeration of my own thoughts, my friends’ and community members’ thoughts. This would not require a tracking-down of everyone involved, no, but other voices that can confirm or, perhaps more importantly, contradict my own. These are invaluable.

Surely, an archive should strive to be fair and honest—that seems a reasonable request. But some questions emerge: What does it mean to be fair and honest? It is tempting to say unbiased, but is that possible? Likely not. For these reasons, I think the archiving process itself should be as self-reflexive as ostensibly possible, and the voice of the author(s) and other community members should be the focus. That way, future scholars/readers of the archive have ample content to work with and less room to “fill in gaps” that may or may not exist.

Secondly, what does it mean for zines—and the tangibility of zines, which Piepmeier has argued is immeasurably important—to be archived digitally? Peipmeier acknowledges that “in a world where more and more of us spend all day at our computers, zines reconnect us to our bodies and to other human beings.” I believe this. I think there is an incomparable joy to print, to paper, to scents and ink and glue and tape. When Juawana moved to Montreal, we planned to continue zining. We intended for a feminist-vegan zine told through correspondence—emails, postcards, letters. It would be comprised of stories of our lives, her new adventures, fiction, non-fiction. A mishmash of experience. And yet, it never came to pass. If she was here, not just in the Okanagan, but with me, if we could touch both each other and the products to create a zine, we would have done this. I’m confident of this. There is, as Peipmeier has expressed and as I concede, something to be said of the physicality of the zine, and by extension, an archive.

Of course, an archive can only contain copies and these copies are not infinite. Digitizing, however, makes them so. As I mentioned with Dinktown, surely something gets lost in turning a zine from something you can hold in your hands to a downloadable PDF. Zines are often part of counter cultural production and powerful anti-hegemonic ideals. It makes sense that, for me, many of my ideals grew out of ethics that resisted the status quo in many intersecting ways (thanks, Lisa). Kate Eichhorn describes anarchism as “a way of life in favor of egalitarianism and environmentalism and against sexism, racism, [speciesism] and corporate domination.” Archives do an immense service in making this temporal thought available to the public, cataloging punk pedagogy for scholars and readers. Zines are to communities as books are to libraries; that is, zines not only belong in communities, but help foster them. The best way to touch the most people and form the widest communities is, of course, through archives that have the farthest reach—that is, digital forms. There is a connection, here, between my life as a shy punk, and that of a vegan feminist. Peipmeier talks about this important connection between anarchy, anti-capitalism, and zine-making.

Most zine creators reject the commercial aesthetic because they reject the ideology of commercial mass media; rather than positioning readers as consumers, as a marketplace, the zine position them as friends, equals, members of an embodied community who are part of a conversation with the zine maker, and the zine aesthetic plays a crucial role in this positioning.

Alison Peipmeier

We can see then, that this digitizing runs the risk of a marketplace while striving to be an embodied community. How does one avoid the former while fostering the latter? How important is this? Does mere duplication embrace the “ideology of commercial mass media”? Put another way, can content trump form?

Eichhorn says that “archives and special collections have become increasingly integral to…legitimizing knowledges and forms of cultural production that may otherwise be dismissed and imagining other ways to be in the world at a moment when the political and economic situation continues to erode our ability to imagine radical alternatives.” Although this, in some ways, contradicts Peipmeier’s points of the role of the zine aesthetic, I lean towards the importance of cataloguing what Eichhorn calls the imagination of radical alternatives. My hunch is that this cataloguing becomes even more vital the quieter and more radical the resistance.

So, ultimately, while the romantic in me mourns the loss of the tangible artifact of the zine and all the irreplaceable abstracts therein, the digitization of zines such as these for the sake of archiving works to both Peipmeier’s and Eichhorn’s ends. When a zine is archived digitally it makes its cost of admission negligible, furthering the positioning of readers from consumers to partner. It also makes the archive more broadly accessible not only from a financial standpoint but from a geographical one as well, undoubtedly removing the “special” from special collections, yet another arbitrary delineation that would separate those from the specialized knowledge they seek. A digital zine is, of course, at odds with the DIY aesthetics of the crudely crafted paper-and-staples punk zine. Yet Dinktown should not be reserved solely for those in the original Dinktown, but for people in small towns everywhere. Growing the zine ethos beyond those physical attributes will only make the subversive messages within them that much more effective.

By Britt MacKenzie-Dale