Recipe to Remember: An Exploration of Self-Publishing Creative Agency

As a poet, I have learned some of the ins and outs of traditional poetry publication—which is anything but conventional—through other research endeavors. Majoring in creative writing at Pace University has given me access to a plethora of resources regarding ways to publish, including the atypical route of self-publishing zines, through the Pace Zine Library. Zines are an ultimately free creative outlet that many artists use to display multimedia work and produce a publication of a different, more homemade quality than that of traditionally published work. The traditional, more harrowing approach to poetry publication is to break out by publishing in magazines and competing in contests. While this route is arguably the best way to get your name out there in a more official way, I find interest in the underground route of zine creation because of its radicalist nature. In addition, I wanted to discern the differences between producing a poetry zine and a poetry collection for competitions—the differences in the actual publication process as well as the scale of controlled nature of the creativity in the project itself. Zines are separated from the rigidity of the capitalism of the traditional publishing world, and thus become an outlet of full expression. For this project, I have created a zine and explored the world of self-publication and zine culture through articles. I came up with a short series of love poems and a creative concept for this project. The poetry zine Recipe to Remember serves as a tribute to young love that is as foundational as an old family recipe book. Along these lines, the zine is formatted as a pseudo-recipe-book with poetry instead of recipes. This is an old-school photocopy zine, that was made by hand using physical materials created and collected by myself. I came up with a tangible product of my own work for the first time, thanks to the Honors thesis.