Glasgow Zine Library co-director Chris Yeoh talks to Olivia Juett from our volunteer collective about zines, sharing and giving yourself permission to make.
For an event that celebrates print, Glasgow Zine Festival was very loud. Enthusiasm and encouragement echoed around the Briggait. People here love zines – and people love to talk about it. Far from the self-contained silence found in libraries, this engagement with printed publications celebrated a lively practice built on sharing.
Glasgow Zine Festival is a yearly event nurtured by the team at Glasgow Zine Library. The theme for this year’s festival was a celebration of physical media – the zines, the mixtapes, the posters and comics that take up real-life space and gather real-life dust. It follows an online trend of digital detoxes and analogue hobbies, as people look to disrupt their reliance on online technologies. But asides from being embeddedimbedded in the current zeitgeist, the theme of this year’s festival also drills to the core of what makes zines so special.
Ultimately zines are a form of communication, so what’s happening between the audience and the maker is a conversation.
Zines (pronounced “zeens”, from “magazines”) are self published, independent publications. Often produced with a DIY ethos and small print runs, they can cover a breadth of personal, profound or comedic topics. “Ultimately zines are a form of communication, so what’s happening between the audience and the maker is a conversation,” explains Chris, co-director of Glasgow Zine Llibrary and one of the festival organisers.
You can share thoughts online in an instant, but any interaction with this digital thought is filtered through algorithms and screens (which, in many cases, removes any real compassion and empathy). Chris and his team look to encourage the community around the printed zine format. “We want people to build connections, and talk about and make those connections not just through the thing that they’ve made, but the way that they made it and why they made it, because behind everything there’s a person.” At the zine fair, you can pick up a zine with the maker directly in front of you.
For Chris, zines are inherently about the process it takes to make them. “Zines stand apart from AI and the internet because they basically bring the creative aspect back to the person, and they tell people you’re in charge of what you’re making – you’re in charge of how you’re making it. It’s about the process, and ultimately you’re the ones deciding whether or not it’s actually good.” The physicality requires you to be patient and present throughout the whole making journey. Progressing through the steps from idea to completion are the only way the zine gets made. “AI is kind of the nexus of the worst excesses of late stage capitalism. It is a fixation on a product without any consideration of the journey.” Chris says. Zine-making is the antithesis to this.
What do I have control over? Well, my own creativity, or the way I feel about the things happening.
This direct, creative act can be incredibly cathartic. The more you work on a physical piece, the more you bring your thoughts outside your head and body, and gain the benefit of mental distance. Chris saw this in sharp focus in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic shook the foundations of what we consider ‘normal’. The zine library’s collection doubled. “People were like: I’m experiencing a gigantic world-changing issue that I have no control over, so what do I have control over? Well, my own creativity, or the way I feel about the things happening.” These outcomes resulted in a wealth of physical printed media that now has a home in the zine library archive. But for each person who created a zine, the catharsis lay in the creative process itself.
We all have the ability and the knowledge and the experience to be able to tell our story, but what we often lack is permission that we give ourselves.
Zines are small-scale, manageable projects. They don’t require complex equipment, or the approval of editors or publishers. The world of self-publishing thrives off people’s desire to tell their own stories, and this is why zines provide such a draw for people looking to tell potentially challenging personal stories. “We all have the ability and the knowledge and the experience to be able to tell our story, but what we often lack is permission that we give ourselves,” explains Chris. Zines can provide an accessible mode of granting that permission, and a format that gives validity to those perspectives. “You can make one copy of one zine that one person sees, and just because it’s only ever seen by one person, that doesn’t mean that it’s not like a valid form of expression. It’s more about deciding your own validity.”
Sharing the experience of zine making is a central aim of the Zine Library. They run zine making workshops with a wide range of support and community groups throughout the year, many of whom wouldn’t consider themselves ‘creative’ at all. Chris is clear on the intention: “This is the end goal – to let them know that the thing they have to say is completely valid.” Sharing the creative process is just as important as sharing the final, printed products at the Zine Festival. It’s a process of empowerment and vocalisation for participants.“We’re expressing [their perspective] in the form of a zine, but if they like, they could express it in the form of some activism or some wider way of thinking that helps them like manage the situation for themselves.” Zines represent a culture of self-expression and DIY initiative. Outside the format of a page, these same principles can be scaled to larger forms of action.
With this sense of possibility, it’s easy to understand why the enthusiasm at the festival was so palpable. Through making a zine, the maker is telling their story to themselves as much as any audience. Glasgow Zine Festival connected each personal creation with a lineage of zines that have been made before, and each stall with the potential of zines yet to be made. It felt truly generative in a way that encouraged individual, human voices. The conclusion of these printed conversations felt clear – this is your signal to make.
by Olivia Juett
You can follow the work of Glasgow Zine Library on their website. The library is open for in-person browsing on Fridays and Saturdays. If you want more information about making zines, the Scottish Book Trust has some resources on how to get started.
The SMHAF Volunteer Collective produced a zine offering a snapshot of how people experienced, challenged and connected with SMHAF 2025 and its theme Comfort & Disturb. You can view the zine here.
Olivia Juett is an illustrator, printmaker and workshop leader based in Glasgow. Mainly working with analogue processes, she enjoys looking at everyday details and unexpected moments of reflection. Her work is driven by observation, and recent projects have explored the ways we form connections with people, places and things.
