Wess Daniels got a pack of Quak­er zines in the mail. That’s right, phys­i­cal paper:

A few weeks back, I got some mail from some­one I didn’t know. As I opened it, these cute lit­tle book­lets fell out, and a let­ter addressed to me: Hel­lo, Mr. Daniels. The let­ter writer, Pacif­ic North­west Quak­er Natal­ie Ram­s­land, told me a lit­tle about how she came into zine mak­ing and why she was send­ing me some of her zines.

That’s very cool! I zined back in col­lege: “The Vac­u­um” ran every Fri­day for most of two years. When I was doing a non­vi­o­lence web­site in the mid-90s it seemed nat­ur­al to apply this mod­el and I acci­den­tal­ly start­ed blog­ging, com­plete with mir­ror­ing it to an email list (I wrote “Fif­teen Years of Blog­ging” eleven years ago, whoa!). Now my blog auto­mat­i­cal­ly goes out by email on Fri­days. There’s such an obvi­ous through-line between the 90s zine and my ongo­ing blog­ging (and obvi­ous­ly we have week­ly con­tent cycles for Friends Jour­nal too).

I love the idea of paper zines com­ing back though their lim­it has always been that the best dis­tri­b­u­tion is local and miss­es those of us out of the geo­graph­ic loop.

Zine-makerNatalie also has a Sub­stack, which I’ll be read­ing eagerly.