Page from Under the Saturday Night Lights: War Memorial Stadium by Emily Litzinger, shared with permission
Over the past two years, the Laramie Plains Civic Center has hosted two successful zine fests. The UW Honors College Library’s “Zine Collective” has grown into a lively and consistent creative community. Different groups across campus have started experimenting with zines as a way to share artwork, research, personal experiences, and ideas. Part of what seems to be drawing people to zines is the opportunity to gather, make things together, trade stories, and spend time creating in the same physical space.
The Wyoming Zine Exchange (WYZE) grew out of conversations between University of Wyoming librarian and Honors College faculty member Janice Grover and English faculty member Phillip Goodwin, two self-described zine nerds who began noticing growing interest in zines and community centered creative work in Laramie and the broader Intermountain West. Together, they began wondering whether that same excitement for creative exchange, local storytelling, and in-person community building might resonate in other Wyoming communities as well.
Page from “Crossing Prexy’s” by Tabitha Long, shared with permission
WYZE invites people living in, working in, or simply traveling through Wyoming to document and share their hyper-local worlds by creating a zine. The emphasis of the project is on how places are actually lived in, interpreted, and remembered by the people who experience them. A zine might grow out of the routine stop your carpool takes before work, the critters watching while you fix fence, or the strange little circuit you move through every week without thinking much about it. It might come from the smell of sagebrush after it rains, a community fundraiser, a local superstition, county fair season, or the handwritten sign that everybody in town has silently agreed not to remove. No single story can hold Wyoming. What makes this project exciting is how many ways Wyoming can be lived at once.
Zines are especially well suited to this kind of storytelling because they are flexible, personal, and self-defined, meaning the creator decides what kind of story they want to tell and how they want to tell it. Zines leave room for contradiction, humor, awkwardness, experimentation, sincerity, nostalgia, and strong opinions. They also create opportunities for people to represent themselves on their own terms. In a state where communities are often described through broad stereotypes, zines offer space for specificity and complexity.
Page from “VABulous” by Kaiya Hurless, shared with permission.
Part of what makes zine culture meaningful is that it is participatory. People are not only consuming culture. They are making it, trading it, discussing it, and building relationships around it. That sense of exchange and community-building is a major part of what WYZE hopes to encourage across Wyoming libraries and communities.
Right now, WYZE is still in development, and many parts of the program continue to evolve based on community interest and feedback. The current vision is for participating libraries and organizations to shape programming that fits their own communities while receiving shared support through a flexible “program-in-a-box” model from WYZE. Ideas currently being explored include free zine kits, workshop guides, passive programming materials, displays, lesson plans, promotional templates, guest speakers, and a statewide WYZE yearbook featuring selected zine pages submitted by
participants.
There is still plenty of room to shape what this becomes, and feedback from libraries, schools, educators, and community organizations across the state will directly influence the structure and direction of the program. If this sounds interesting to you, WYZE hopes you’ll help us build it.
Learn more about WYZE and complete the interest survey at: https://uwyo.libguides.com/WYZE