Week 40/2025: Zines!

Week of 29 September 2025

This was a very exciting week!

The baby peregrine falcons in the nest at 367 Collins Street in Melbourne hatched. The first one on Tuesday.

Now there are three little chicks for us to watch for the next six weeks as they grow and get ready to fledge. It doesn’t take long at all.

This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.

Small Press Zine Fair

On Saturday I went to the Small Press Zine Fair at the Hobart Town Hall.  This event is supported by the City of Hobart through the Creative Hobart Grants Program, and this is its 13th year.

I went last year for the first time and I met some people who I’d connected with online through a Tasmanian National Novel Writers Month group. I didn’t join the dots immediately but once I’d seen their contact details in the zine I realised they were the same group.

(In case you don’t know, National Novel Writers Month (or NaNoWriMo) was a challenge started in the US  in 1999 to write a 50,000-word novel in a month. I’ve participated four times since 2001 including in 2014 when I actually competed the 50,000 word challenge. The official program wound up at the start of 2025.)

This group produced Nano Zine for ten years. The first edition in 2015 included work from Tasmanian NaNoWriMo-ers, along with tips for doing the challenge, but with the end of the official NaNoWriMo program, this year’s was going to be their final one. The theme was to be “ten” and they did a call out for writing and artworks from the group.

I thought it would be cool to submit something. I didn’t have time to write anything but thought I might have time to make some photos related to the theme. Then it occurred to me that I have an entire archive of photos about something with a very strong connection to “ten”.

………………………….

They were happy to take them and I made the front cover!

Because the group is centred in Launceston I wasn’t able to attend the fold-fest (yes, these are individually folded) so the first time I saw it (and indeed the first time I met anyone from the group in person) was at the fair.

It was very cool (actually, it wasn’t cool . . . I’d forgotten from last year how hot it gets in the Town Hall Ballroom). There were around 75 stalls there showcasing zines of all styles, sizes, colours, single page black and white hand-folded zines like ours, full-colour professionally printed photobooks, and everything in between. And stickers.

It was huge!

I didn’t get to see everything there just because it was so busy and I was starting to get a bit overwhelmed by it all but I loved seeing my photo, discovering some new artists and catching up with some I already knew.

Lots of great ideas and maybe I should have a go at making zines too!

Habit tracker

Existing habits

• Go outside first thing (7 days): 5/7
• 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 2/7
• Hip exercises (5 days): 5/5
• Walk (7 days): 6/7
• Carry a notebook with me when I walk (6 days): 5/6
• Thinking time (4 days): 7/4
• Mid-day journalling (7 days): 5/7
• Walk 8,000 steps (7 days): 6/7
• 9.00 shutdown & dim lights  (6 days): 0/6
• Evening routine (6 days):  0/6

New habits

• Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 0/5
• Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5

Summary of the week

What’s making me think?

This idea from Oliver Burkeman‘s newsletter:

To generate ideas, get better at noticing. A truth I’d already been stumbling towards was clarified for me by Rob Bell, in his excellent audio course Something to Say: When it comes to amassing a stockpile of ideas to write or speak about, or otherwise to use in your creative work, by far the most important thing is just to get into the habit of noticing things and making some record of them. That’s it. Random quotes you encounter, quirky things people say or do, thoughts or feelings that occur to you, intriguing facts that cross your radar: practice a) realising that you’re encountering them, then b) making a scribbled note, taking a phone photo, anything at all to jog your memory of the moment.

Perhaps this strikes you as blindingly obvious! But it’s starkly different from a widespread focus these days on building tricked-out systems for storing or connecting your notes, getting AI to synthesise new insights from them, or storing material you encounter for digesting later on.

The way Bell describes it (and the way I’ve experienced it too) is that connections and insights about the material happen spontaneously, or when the work calls for them. But first of all, the subconscious needs feeding – and noticing is how you do that.

What did I learn this week?

The Georgia Mental Health Institute was used as Hawkins Lab for the TV show Stranger Things. It’s about to be (or is currently being) demolished.

According to Abandoned Georgia, the show was filmed in Building A, including the main lobby, laboratory, theatre, morgue, offices and the intricate network of tunnels beneath the campus.

Completely unrelated, this article “Lesbians and Palimpsests: On Beverley Farmer’s Alone” by Madeleine Gray tells us:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a palimpsest is ‘a parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing’.

More interesting, for metaphorical purposes, is what can happen after reinscription: sometimes, years after the initial ink has been ‘erased’ and written over, a ghostly trace of the original will arise from the parchment, and the two layers of prose will swirl into each other. English writer and literary critic Thomas de Quincey termed the symbolic iteration of this process ‘involution’, a term applied when our deepest thoughts and feelings ‘pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects […] in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’.

Interesting.

What did I notice this week?

’No loitering’ at the Marine Board building. Does loitering include photo making?

In the Frankenstein (1931) movie by Universal Pictures, the novel is credited to “Mrs Percy B Shelley”.

What was the best thing this week?

Getting a Distinction for my essay on Twelfth Night.

What am I reading this week?

• Unsettled by Kate Grenville
• Grendel by John Gardner

What am I watching this week?

• Hard Quiz
• Stranger Things Season 4
• Resident Alien 
• Doctor Who ‘Snakedance’

What am I listening to this week?

• Humanity Chapter 1 by Thomas Bergersen
• Kill Your Darlings Queer Critics podcast series about  Beverley Farmer’s novel Alone and Danielle Laidley’s memoir, Don’t Look Away.