Making of a zine: This Way to the Garden

and the seedlings of a graphic memoir

I’m proud of myself: In March, I said I wanted to make a zine. Then I followed up in April that I’d found the perfect workshop to help me get going – Carolyn Yoo’s Zine Lab. I wanted to make some creative connections along with learning how to make a zine, and I accomplished both!

Honestly, the most difficult part of the entire process was tinkering with my printer’s dumb default margin settings.

Originally I was going to make a comic about “the slog of self care,” but I decided to simplify for my very first go. I ended up gathering sketchbook drawings and poems I’d already written that all connected around a similar thread.

The result is a light, happy reflection on a kind of realignment I’ve had since losing my mom at the same time that the pandemic brought me to Iowa and I started gardening. It’s called This Way to the Garden.

View the full zine here!

A few spreads from "This Way to the Garden"

I plan to make it available on my website shop soon, because I personally love having art that you can hold in your hands. But it is free to digitally read, share, and enjoy :)

I’m thrilled to have this knowledge of the process so I can continue making zines. I love how accessible it is, as opposed to a more prohibitively expensive hobby.

My next zine-related goal is to attend a small press expo or zine fair and connect with other artists and trade zines. But that is still probably a ways out, since my current focus is on the 6 month Graphic Novel Development Intensive I’m doing with the Sequential Artists Workshop.

Last summer, I said I was going to finish my memoir –

“I’ve set a goal for myself this year to finally finish writing the memoir I’ve been trying to write for the past few years.”

– well, I realized it’s meant to be a graphic memoir. So finishing is still a long way off, but this is a big step towards that.

As always, thanks for sharing in these moments with me.