Creative Chats With Guest Megan Ramette (The How and Why of Zines and Watertown Zine Fest)

This is a recording from a series for the podcast at the Mosesian Center for the Arts called Creative Chats. This conversation was with Megan Ramette of the Watertown Zine Fest team and we dug into everything zines and Watertown Zine Fest.

Hear about:

- What is a zine and why it matters

- The culture and ethos of zines

- Reasons to create and how to start

- The origins and impact of the Watertown Zine Fest

- Insights on tools, printing and the history of zines

Come out to Watertown Zine Fest, Saturday, October 18th, 11am - 4pm!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Creative Chats Context
• 1:02 Meet Megan And Zine Origins
• 2:51 What A Zine Is And Why It Matters
• 4:49 Sharing Culture And Digital Archives
• 8:40 Reasons To Create And How To Start
• 11:31 Inside Watertown Zine Fest
• 15:14 Stories Of Impact And Inclusion
• 18:24 Zine Heroes, Anonymity, And History
• 22:02 Personal Creation Journeys And Advice
• 25:05 Tools, Templates, And Printing Tactics
• 28:06 Format Aesthetics And DIY Charm
• 29:18 Event Details And Invitation
• 30:16 Wrap-Up, Links, And Community Shoutouts

Transcript

Matt: 0:07

Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This episode is a recording from one of the monthly creative chats events that I do over at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. We invite a creative person on to talk about something related to creativity and the creative life. This was from the October event. These events happen on the first Friday morning of every month. So if you want to come out, you can check out LittleLocalConversations.com for the next event. November one is going to be with documentary filmmaker Margot Guernsey. But this episode was with Megan Ramette, who's a librarian and part of the Watertown Zine Fest team. And we chatted about everything zines, so get right into that conversation. 

Matt 0:53:

Cool. Well, welcome to Creative Chats. For those of you who haven't been here before, this is part of my podcast, Little Local Conversations that I do about Watertown. And this one is specifically for artists in Watertown and talking about creativity and bringing people together to talk about it. So you in this room already know, but our guest today is Megan Ramette, and she works at the Watertown Free Public Library and very involved with zines and the Watertown Zine Fest, which is coming up. If I get this edited in time, maybe out before the Zine Fest, maybe not, but we'll see. But yeah, so do you want to just introduce yourself, say a little bit about who you are, and then we'll dive into the world of zines?

Megan: 1:30

Awesome. Sounds great. Hi, everybody. I'm Megan. I may be a familiar face to some in the audience. I've worked at the Watertown Free Public Library at the circulation desk, and it is a wonderful community space. And over the last several years, I've become really involved with Zine Fest. Our annual fest happens every October. It's grown and grown, I think more than I ever would have imagined in the last five years. This is our fifth year of Zine Fest, which is very, very exciting, huge accomplishment. And I became involved in the world of zines through the punk hardcore DIY community in Boston. I have such fond memories of seeing shows at the Democracy Center in Cambridge, basement shows in Allston, and always seeing these like handmade pamphlets at merch tables and wondering what is that? That's not a shirt, it's not a sticker. And realizing that these were incredibly valuable art pieces, personal reflection pieces that accompany a show. And ever since then, I was hooked. I've been a zine collector in my personal life, a zine maker as well. And with the library, it's just been incredible to kind of have something that I care about so deeply in my personal life become enmeshed in my professional life as well. So I'm very excited for a chat about all things zines.

Matt: 2:41

Yeah. So maybe we should just start off with, you know, what is a zine? How did it come about? Like what's the ethos of it? Because it seems to be a whole kind of underlying philosophy kind of around it, right.

Megan: 2:51

Definitely. So I think the easiest way to describe a zine is it's a small pamphlet, it's handmade, it's often self-published. It doesn't go through mainstream publishing channels like a book or a novel would. And they can take any kind of form. They're incredibly free form as a media. They can be nonfiction and instructional, they can be educational, they can be political. They could also be very personal. So they could be a reflective diary. They could be a personal story. They could be a recipe collection. If you love your grandmother's sauerkraut recipe and you want to see it flourish and you want to share it with people, you can make that into a zine and you can also tell a story about what it meant to be in the kitchen with your grandmother. Zines can also be poetry, art, collage, comics. They can take so many forms, but the ethos behind them is really having this personal media that you yourself are creating, you're copying, you're sharing. And yeah, it can be a little bit intimidating to have such a free form media, but the world is truly yours when you're making a zine and sharing it with folks.

Matt: 3:52

Yeah. And then so sharing it, what is the culture of sharing it? Because that seems to be its own type of thing too. Obviously, with a physical medium like that and kind of the digital age, how does, how is that working?

Megan: 4:03

Yeah. So it's been really interesting. I'll say at least when I got involved with zines, I would buy them at shows. I would buy them at basement shows to support the bands. And it would be really cool to meet up with folks who are also really interested in zines and talk about what we had in our collections and kind of have almost like a lending library amongst ourselves. I also saw spaces start to pop up like Papercut Zine Library, which was also housed in the Democracy Center. And that has an incredible collection. Since the Democracy Center has unfortunately closed, they've actually moved to digitizing their entire collection. And so over time, I've really seen zines go from sharing, whether by hand, through mail, to becoming digital archive pieces almost. And that, of course, spreads the reach of them. It makes them more accessible for a lot of reasons. And the whole culture around sharing zines is kind of similar to making them. It's kind of subverting traditional channels. It's not thinking about money. It's thinking about sharing. It's eliminating barriers to access for information, for stories that aren't typically shown or shared in traditional media. I was talking with the director yesterday actually about zines and them as such a powerful tool. And I think one of the most effective ways that we were talking about was how they are like this rapid response piece. If something is happening around you, if you have a really strong feeling about something, if you just have an urge to share part of yourself, you can do that right away. You don't have to submit a manuscript. You don't have to wait a year for a publishing date. You don't have to meet a publishing quota. Like it is this creation that you can make instantly and you can share it the next day.

Matt: 5:40

Yeah. Gotcha. And so why would someone want to create a zine?

Megan: 5:45

Yeah, I think someone would want to create a zine to talk about their experience. I really believe firmly that, you know, everybody is the expert in their lives. Everybody knows their story. Everyone's story is unique. And I think that it takes an incredible amount of bravery and courage to talk about one's story. And by doing that, people who have similar stories, similar experiences can really find kinship and community in that. And I think that that is a real driving force behind zines is because they're off of the mainstream, there's a level of personalization, there's craft. And I think that somebody would want to make a zine to just share something. They're passionate about it. They would want to educate people.

Matt: 6:26

Yeah. And but how does someone learn how to make a zine? You know, like learning how to write a song, learning how to make art, like how does someone learn how to make a zine? Can they just do it on their own? Do they learn from video? Is it traditional, like, hey, I'll teach you how to make a zine?

Megan: 6:38

Yeah, yeah. I think there are so many different ways. I definitely learned how to make my own zines from just reading a ton of them, reading all different formats, seeing what kinds I was drawn to, like collage type, handwritten, made on a computer and copied. I think now, especially with more and more zines being archived, having this like digital expansion with zines, like you can watch YouTube videos, you can talk to creators at Zine Fest. One of the really cool things that we have at Zine Fest is we have a space called the Hive. So that is a space completely dedicated to just making your own zine at the Fest itself. And that is really cool because you can go from the marketplace where you're going table to table, seeing all kinds of zines that are there, into a more quieter room with paper, scissors, pens, stamps that is a little like off-the-beaten path. So you can just kind of take a moment and reflect and you can see the zines that have been made and you can try your hand yourself.

Matt: 7:33

Yeah. Yeah. Well, since you mentioned it, why don't we talk a little bit about the Watertown Zine Fest, like how that started and what's its purpose and how it was kind of a big deal. Yeah.

Megan: 7:42

Yeah. Yeah. It's our fifth year of Zine Fest, which is an incredible achievement. It started back in 2021 with our head of teen services, Carrie, in conversation with our then assistant director, Caitlin. Like, what if we had a zine collection? How cool would that be? And the answer was, yeah, let's do it. As zines are, you know, these vehicles, these tools for stories that aren't commonly shared, they're an incredible asset to a public library. Libraries are so much more than books. I'm sure a lot of people would agree. Libraries are vital community spaces. They're sites for education, for exploration, for connection, and zines really embody that. And so getting the green light to have a zine collection, the next question was well, what if we had a fest? What if we had some way to bring together local creators, people who are curious, who have maybe never thought about a zine before, never read a zine? What if we brought that to the community? And it was incredible. 

Megan: 8:34

One of my sort of first tasks with Zine Fest was bicycle outreach. So I biked in like an eight-mile radius around Watertown, posting flyers, giving flyers to local businesses, really encouraging people to come by. And it was great. It was really fun to like see my flyers out in the wild. And we had, I think I wrote down the number here. Our attendance for the first Zine Fest was about 450 people, which is a huge accomplishment. And since then it has grown leaps and bounds. In 2022, we were awarded the John Cotton Dana Award, which I think it was Newsweek. It was a publication that referred to it as like the Oscars of Library Awards. It was a very prestigious award for our sort of like grassroots marketing campaign. The interviews that we did with papers, the highlights that we got through like more local publications and streams, flyering outreach, the art that we did. And so that kind of reflection, that award, was just really validating for something that was so grassroots and like kind of scrappy, but also incredibly meaningful to the community. And I think that kind of like bolsters the zine ethos of like, just try, just start and see what happens. And you never know what kind of impact it'll make on the community. So this is our fifth year. We had an incredible number of applicants. We have had people table from Vermont, Washington, DC. Some people who visit, it's their first time at the library. They've never been to the library before. And it's an incredible introduction to like the power of this community space and this community event. So we're very excited. We encourage everybody to come.

Matt: 10:10

Yeah. And do you have like a favorite story from any of the previous Zine Fests that kind of shows its impact?

Megan: 10:16

Oh my gosh. So many. It's so hard to pick just one.

Matt: 10:21

You can share a couple.

Megan: 10:22

Yeah. Yeah. I would say we had a couple of regular tablers, the CZL Kids Collective and Belmont Day School. These are kids who are coming to Zine Fest and they're sharing their zines. And just seeing them come into the marketplace and seeing tablers and this incredible breadth of zines was awesome. They learned about bartering zines, which is kind of a common thing that a lot of the creators will do. They'll trade their zines to each other. And the kids were so excited to learn about that and had their single page paper folded onto itself. So it was a four-page zine, just ready in hand, and going to tables and saying, Well, can I trade you my zine? Can I get your zine for my zine? And that was just so encouraging and so exciting for me to see like a much younger generation be so involved with zines, but also be so excited and be so welcomed into the space. It really shows that like this is something that is just self-reinforcing. This community is so strong. People are so welcoming to like kids and teens. And that has really stuck with me for a while. And, you know, we have plenty of other stories of people who are coming to the library and they're saying, usually I feel like I'm on the outside. I feel like I'm a marginalized person in a space. But coming to Zine Fest, they're like, I'm not. I'm with familiar people. And that is so powerful. I think, especially zines that have themes around like mental health, zines that are LGBTQIA plus. When people see themselves reflected in the work in the collection, that is such a meaningful piece of connection. That's why the library has zines. That's why we have zine fest. And hearing stories like that just really makes it feel like it's all worth it.

Matt: 11:57

Yeah. So are there any other stories of it being like wider impact? Or like there, I don't know, in the world of zines, is there like a Taylor Swift of zines? Are there people who are like the big, the movers and shakers, you know, that are having wide impact in the world of it, or is it all kind of just small pockets?

Megan: 12:12

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it varies. There are some zines that, you know, have been going for like 10, 20 years, like compilation publications. There are some large zine distros. But what I think is cool is like the most zines in my collection are by anonymous. At least in my collection speaking personally, like there's no one person that I've been like tracking, zines that I've been buying. Some zines have been made anonymously and shared anonymously. And I think that that is another really cool aspect of them that you can share something so personal and so vulnerable anonymously, not with a pen name, just to get your story out there and to share it.

Matt: 12:48

Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So anything else on the topic of why zines are important that we haven't hit on yet?

Megan: 12:56

Yeah. I think one thing that I'm seeing, at least at the circulation desk, which is really interesting, is in conversations that I've had, is a real interest for people returning to physical media. So that could be DVDs, it could be CDs, something that is tangible that you yourself own, that you build up a collection, you have your own kind of like curated bunch of physical media. We live in a time where things are streamed, where we're paying subscriptions, where we don't necessarily own what we have. And I think that zines are a really cool analog piece of media. And building up one's own personal collection just exposes you to so much more, so many more stories. And that's the cool thing. That's the place where libraries come in, right. Is you can take zines home. You can browse topics that you wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. And maybe you find an artist or a creator or a style that really resonates with you. And then you go home, you tell your friends, you tell your neighbors, and you start building up that collection of your own. And so I think zines are like, I personally, I'm just so excited to see zines be so popular because like they have been around for decades. I think the earliest zines were in the 30s and 40s in Harlem. A lot of sites for black writers to write and publish freely, they evolved over time through like sci-fi. Sci-fi had a huge impact in zines, especially with Star Trek and like fan conventions and people writing fictional stories about their favorite characters or writing reviews of episodes. And they've taken so many forms. And while my familiarity with them is through punk and hardcore, they have just a lasting history and a really rich history. And I think in this kind of time where a lot more people are interested in returning to physical pieces of media, zines have always been there and are continuing to thrive.

Matt: 14:44

Yeah. Are they related to like chapbooks at all? Like the same idea there, right?

Megan: 14:50

Absolutely. Yeah. I think zines and chapbooks are like really great kind of like sibling publications because a chapbook is often like handbound or a different type of physical piece than like a book or a novel. But absolutely, since we have cable access here, thank you so much. I brought one of my most beloved zines to the talk today. It is called Sucker Punch the Sky, and it's a poetry collection by William James. And this zine has traveled with me, it's very coffee-stained, as you can see, through all the moves of different apartments. But William James did spoken word poetry at hardcore shows. And we would see, you know, one or two bands perform. And then in the downtime, this guy would come up onto the stage and just recite slam poetry, all about punk, all about community, all about how these spaces and moments together are so crucial and how we all have the responsibility to foster that wherever we go next, that sense of connection and belonging. And so this is absolutely a zine and a chapbook. Kind of morphs the two together. And I think again, that's one of the like really cool things about zines being so free form, is they can take on different forms and different subjects.

Matt: 15:59

Nice. Yeah. Cool. So maybe we could talk about the creation of it now. Like so you said before you weren't like creating your own zines. And then were you a creator in any kind before you started creating zines? Or were zines kind of your first step into creating?

Megan: 16:14

Yeah, I think zines definitely would be. After a while, after lots of years of building up zines myself, I found myself reflecting and asking this question of like, why not create? Why not try? What's keeping me from that? And a lot of it was just like doubt in my abilities and my story. And I think that is such a hurdle to art. It's kind of, you know, putting the cart before the horse in a way of if I had had like a massive backlog of like short stories or paintings and was asking myself, like, do my stories matter? Do my creations matter? I could physically see evidence of that. I could see years of work and iteration. But asking that question off the bat with like nothing in my back pocket, it's like, of course I'm gonna feel a little bit uncertain. Of course I'm gonna feel nervous. So the more I read zines, the more I talked to zine makers, the more I saw friends of mine create their own zines and how they changed and evolved over time. That really inspired me to just try, to just do, to put words on a page, to try my hand at collaging and know that like the first draft is not the final draft. It's not going to be perfect. It doesn't have to be. And so really reflecting on, I think, the pressures that one can put on themselves when it comes to creating. And zines were just an incredible outlet. Like there are so many things that I care about in my personal life and I'd love to research. And so zines were a really cool way for me to mesh the two together.

Matt: 17:37

Yeah.

Megan: 17:37

Yeah.

Matt: 17:38

And I know you've talked to people before about overcoming that themselves. So what type of advice do you give to people who haven't created before, but like zines and they're interested in creating? And, you know, this is goes across all forms of creative mediums. Like, how do you get over that first step of creating that first thing?

Megan: 17:55

Yeah. Yeah. My friends and I actually have a joke relating to this. It's more so related to Dungeons and Dragons, which I'm a huge fan of. It's been a huge part of my life for over a decade. All of us at the table take copious notes of the sessions we're playing through. And it's so exciting when one of us has like a brand new notebook. It's like clean, it's spotless. We're so excited to have it at the table. But there's that sense of nervousness around writing the first sentence. Like, what if my pen breaks? What if like ink spills everywhere? What if I get coffee on my notebook? And so we just embrace that and we do a ripped page. So we'll get our new notebook, we'll just rip a page in it to kind of release that fear, release that inhibition that, like, okay, the notebook has been ripped. Now we can just create. We can write freely, we can overcome that barrier. And I think that really relates to zines of like, just try, just do. Go to a zine fest, talk to a zine maker. I think that is a huge part too. People who are so passionate and so excited about zines are so willing to talk to them, talk about them, talk to people who are not familiar with them as a medium and just want to know more. So I would really encourage you, viewers and people here, to just try. Take a single piece of paper, fold it over itself, hot dog way, hamburger way, and then again, and just see what comes to mind. Like it doesn't have to be perfect. It can be little scribbles, it could be animals that you see throughout the day, it could be your grocery list for the week. It could be some snapshot of your life. And it doesn't have to be perfect. It just is important to create for oneself, and that's so valuable.

Matt: 19:23

Yeah. I mean, are there any stories that you have, either yourself or other people, where the act of creating the cells you see in it changed them in creating that zine? Or do you have any particular stories from the zine fest or again yourself and your circles of obviously yourself you just mentioned, but other people of stories of you see in a transformation of having that space to create?

Megan: 19:42

Yeah, there's one that comes to mind. It's related to something that I participate in in my personal life, which is helping organize a community fridge in Brighton. And we have been really fortunate to partner with a group called Take a Zine Leave a Zine. What they do is they encourage people to set up a zine box in their community. So that could be at a cafe, it could be outside of a school, it could be at a library, but often they're attached to community fridges. And they're small mailboxes, basically like a metal mailbox you can get at Home Depot. It's about this tall, this big, has a lid to open. And the purpose of them is to just have zines freely available in your community. And I think the really cool thing about having a zine box attached to a community fridge is people are going to the fridge for food or for some other necessity, but they're also getting this opportunity to find like art and find educational material. And I think that is just really exciting. And I think that that really changes like what these access sites are. I think it's so crucial to see art as necessity. Art is so important to culture, education, community, and combining the two in one place is just really cool.

Matt: 20:51

Cool. Well, are there any other thoughts you want to make sure we hit on before I open up to questions? Because I'm sure there are some people who have some pointed questions out here.

Megan: 20:59

Sure thing. Yeah. I think if it's okay, I would just be excited to show a couple zines from our collection. So these are a couple of my favorites. This one is called How to Start a Prison Book Collective. What prison book collectives do is they help people who are incarcerated access books behind bars. There are a couple chapters, a couple different organizations throughout the country. But this book or this zine is a really incredible instruction manual, basically, on what is a prison book collective? How can you form one with your friends? What are the things that you have to be mindful of? And I think it's just an incredible resource. There's also one that I love called Decolonize Punk. So this is highlighting BIPOC bands and punk zine. And it's this really beautiful like snapshots, long-form reviews and pieces, poetry. So it kind of has like all of the things, all the pieces of zines. And then my last favorite one is called Long Gone Illegal Punk Venues in Boston. So this one definitely like strikes a chord with me as somebody who went to a ton of shows in Allston and Cambridge, and reading through this zine in particular, I was like, I remember this venue. I remember this one. I was so excited to see it sort of like immortalized in this form. And I brought it back home to my friends. And I was like, they're talking about gay gardens, they're talking about trouble ahead, all these venues that were so important to us. And seeing more knowledge about that, seeing it written down with this person's experience at these venues, just to me was like the power of zines, connecting experiences, and feeling community around something.

Matt: 22:35

Yeah. Almost feels to me like small blogs when they first started. Like the physical form of blogs.

Megan: 22:40

Definitely.

Matt: 22:41

What blogs used to be.

Megan: 22:42

Yeah, absolutely.

Matt: 22:43

Yeah. Cool. Well, I want to open up to questions because I'm sure some people out here have some good thoughts on zines to ask. Anyone have a question to ask out there?

Speaker: 22:55

Hello. Can you tell us something that you learned in a zine that you had absolutely no idea about and you were stuck to learn?

Megan: 23:06

Oh my gosh. That is such a good question. Yes, so I learned a ton about bicycle repair. Very niche. But I checked out a zine from the library's collection about how to repair a bike. And I've been cycling around Boston as long as I've lived here, but I've always felt very like intimidated going into bike shops and having people who have so much knowledge about the bicycle. And I felt like my questions were always too silly or would like somehow reflect on me. And so having all the information that like I would need at a glance in this paper format that I could literally have while my bike is flipped upside down in my basement, while I have all the tools around me and I'm trying to make sense of this repair was awesome. And like, yeah, I just felt like the power in this tiny booklet is so cool. And the fact that it made me more confident, it helped me learn about parts of the bicycle so that when I did go to the bike shop, I felt better prepared. Yeah. So I would say, I would say bike repair for sure. 

Matt: 24:11

Nice. Any other questions?

Speaker: 24:13

I think I'm getting tripped up on like the physical format of it because I'm so used to creating digitally. And if I make a draft of something, then I can delete it. And then eventually there is a final draft, and I press print and it prints as many copies as I want. So could you talk a little bit about the process of creating it? And like then, does somebody make a final, like, this is it, this is my zine, and I'm gonna run it through the photocopier a few times and then staple it? Do you have to unstaple it to copy it? Like just like how? 

Megan: 24:43

Totally, totally. That is a great question. So for me personally, with my process with zines, I actually do work on the computer. I really appreciate, I think, similar to you, being able to type up a draft, walk away from it, come back to it, make edits, print out a copy, see how it's laid out. And one thing that's helpful to me is people have made online zine templates, whether you're working out of Google Docs or a Canva or even Photoshop. The sharing ethos continues for the creative process as well with zines. So people are like awesome when it comes to that. And typically what I do is I'll have a file that has the layout for different panels of a zine based on whether you want it to be like a half sheet format or even smaller than this, like a single piece of paper that you would fold, fold again, fold a third time to kind of have a four-page booklet. And when I'm working on my zines on the computer, I will definitely iterate on the topic. I'll drag in pictures. Sometimes I'll print out a copy and collage just to see what that would look like in the draft format. But when I'm ready, when I feel like my zine is exactly what I want it to be, I hit print and will usually print both sided and fold over. A really helpful tool to have is like a long arm stapler or a bookbinding stapler so that you can actually like spread the zine out and have the staples in the sides of the spine. Otherwise, friends who are like comic creators are, I think, much more comfortable with like pen and paper and sort of having the piece of paper in front of them, drafting by hand, but also making multiple drafts. And when it comes time to like print and copy, yeah, putting one side on a copier, flipping over, copying again, and letting the printer do its magic. And I know back in the old days of zines, plenty of friends had like a friend or a friend of a friend or roommate who worked at Staples or Kinkos. And if an extra zero was added to the print code, oh man, what a bummer. Now you have a hundred zines or a hundred flyers. But yeah, so that's like a little fond memory with printing zines at least. But the creative process online is just as valuable as by hand.

Speaker: 27:03

It's that controversial at all in zine culture. Like, oh, you're doing it on Canva, so that's not as it's not as punk as me doing it with my hands.

Megan: 27:16

Totally, totally. I would hope not. I don't think that there is. I think the importance is like the product itself and the like emotional creative process that goes into it. I think like, you know, people work with the tools they're most comfortable with, most familiar with. And I don't think anybody would be like, oh, that was a Canva template. It would be like, oh, cool, you brought your Zines to Zine Fest. That's awesome. I'm so excited to see what you have. Yeah, yeah.

Matt: 27:41

It is interesting. I'm sure that's part of the aesthetic in the old day. Like you can see the edges on the photocopy, like it's not perfect. 

Megan: 27:48

Definitely. Yeah. And I absolutely have a fondness for that of like a misaligned Xerox copy or a staple that cuts off the title or seeing the edge of the zine itself and like the corner of the paper in the copy. So yeah, absolutely. I have like the softest spot in my heart for those zines that are like photocopied lovingly, page after page, and printed.

Matt: 28:09

Nice. Cool. Well, any last thoughts before we wrap it up for the podcast audience? We can still keep talking afterwards.

Megan: 28:16

Yeah, yeah. I just want to make sure that I have my dates right because I would love to end this podcast, you know, inviting the people here, inviting viewers at home to come to Zine Fest, our fifth annual Zine Fest at the Watertown Free Public Library. It is happening Saturday, October 18th from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is an incredible community event. It is expanding to the second floor of the library this year, which we're very excited about. We have a marketplace, we have table talks where you can learn about zines from zine makers. And we have the zine hive where if you feel so inclined, if you feel so inspired, you can make your own zine at the event. And whatever its format, whatever its subject, whatever if it's finished or if there's one word on the page, that's your memento from Zine Fest. And that is something that I hope will like drive people forward to create.

Matt: 29:01

Cool. Well, thanks for sharing your thoughts today. Thanks for being part of the team running Zine Fest at the library, and thanks for everyone who came out.

Megan: 29:09

Thank you so much.

Matt: 29:11

So that's it for my conversation with Megan. I'll put a link in the show note to the Watertown Zine Fest page where you can check out information about Watertown Zine Fest that's coming up tomorrow if you're listening to the day this comes out. It'll be Saturday, October 18th, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. And even if you listen to this afterwards, the Watertown Library has a great Zine collection, so you can go check that out if you're curious. And if you'd like to hear more of these episodes, again, if you'd like to come out to a Creative Chats event they’re once a month on the first Friday morning of every month, next month is going to be with documentary filmmaker Margot Guernsey. You can check out information on that event at LittleLocalConversations.com. You can also find all the other episodes I do in the Creative Chat series, but also just regular interviews I do with people doing interesting things in the city. You can also sign up for my weekly newsletter there. And if you'd like to help support the podcast, there's a support local conversations button in the menu. One thing I do want to mention is next week I'm gonna announce the Little Local Holiday Giveaway, where anyone who supports the podcast, who becomes what I call Little Local Friend and supports a podcast on a monthly amount, will get a chance to win one of many gift cards or free things that I'm getting from local businesses and organizations to hopefully drive more people to A support the podcast, but also B, get out in the community and do some holiday shopping or some holiday experiences right here in Watertown. So lots of cool stuff to be given away. So if you're not already, you can sign up to become a little local friend on the website, click on that support local conversation button, and I'll have more information next week on the holiday giveaway. 

Matt: 30:41

Alright, and to wrap up here, I want to give a few shout-outs. First one goes to podcast sponsor, Arsenal Financial. They're a financial planning business here in Watertown that's owned by Doug Orifice, who's a very committed community member, and his business helps busy families, small businesses, and people close to retirement. So if you need help in any of those areas, reach out to Doug and his team at Arsenalfinancial.com. I also want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. So I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and massculturalcouncil.org. And a couple more shout outs to promotional partners. First one goes to the Watertown Business Coalition, they're a nonprofit organization here in Watertown that's bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen the community. Find out more about them at WatertownBusinessCoalition.com. And lastly, promotional partner Watertown News, which is an online newspaper focused purely on Watertown. It's run here by Charlie Breitrose. It's a great resource, so go check that out at WatertownMANews.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.