A few months ago I met the luddites. What was supposed to be “open hours” at the small studio I worked at suddenly became the official meeting grounds for a hoard of stern-faced, plain-dressed philosophy students who liked how “old school” printing presses and typewriters were.

The focus they brought working on their “what is luddism” pamphlet took away from the usual convivial vibe. I would lament to my friends how I was now overly self-aware of my use of technology in presence . How I could no longer endlessly scroll on my phone instead of working on my art. How much I hated it so much they were engaged in their conversations instead of constantly shuffling through their pockets to check for a notification that never existed like me. The more I complained about them, the more I realized that maybe we have converging interests.

I detested modern digital culture. The texts I sent to my friends would likely be forgotten the next week even if they bothered to read it in the first place. Tweets would disappear from consciousness as soon as someone sent out another. Heartfelt updates from people I cared about would be algorithmically hidden between 30 posts from “influencers” and advertisements. If I could get people to actually hang out in person, their heads would always face down as they got sucked into another feed.

Like the luddites, I recognized how technology was detracting from the lives around me. What will we have to show for ourselves if most of our lives are documented through throw-away instagram stories that will cease to exist in 24 hours? How do we gain back meaning and intention in it all?

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In 2025, I packed my life into a Toyota Camry. Since I stayed back, my friends were starting their “real” lives in cool cities while I spent most of my day:
1) Working the same job I had since freshman year.
2) Lounging around city parks long enough to see workers come and go from their apartments. 3) Watching whatever played at our local AMC.
4) Trying to stay awake during boring night classes in my pitch black room. I was aimless. So I left for a new program in Illinois.

My original plan was to specialize in the preservation of queer audiovisual materials. I was a giant vintage film nerd at the time and had spoken already to a professor in the department who made me giddy at the prospect. Somehow, very soon, I would realize maybe this wasn’t the path for me. At my orientation I would hear our department’s historical printing presses be tangentially mentioned and a few weeks later I would find myself on the connected club’s board. Around the same time, I would land a couple of jobs: one at our art library, and one instructing with zines for the main library. My life solely became about print culture.

Of everything I did, my favorite part was looking through our vault of rare and special archival materials. The initial thrill was the novelty. In exchange for making library content, I got to spend hours looking at and sharing cool zines that most people didn’t know existed in our collection. I would always go out of my way to pick the coolest, craziest, most colorful pages. Over time, my fascination diverged to be less about the presentation and more about the actual content. A turning point was reading a zine from someone who was in my exact program in 1999. The experience she had mirrored mine, from loving Liz Phair down to her describing the same train ride to Chicago I also took to escape it all. It was a unique thing, having a time capsule of someone else's life.

In the classes I taught, I always mentioned the value of alternative publishing for expressing one’s own experience and the unexpected connections that it could create. Maybe her thoughts on our sleepy college town wouldn’t have found the space in a larger magazine. She could have put it on the 90s version of Instagram (LiveJournal?), but that would have made it super unlikely for me to stumble onto the content now. By creating her own physical zine on her own terms, her experience was able to be preserved. Once I realized this, I wondered how this could intersect with my own goals in promoting lesbian history.

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I would make my first zine junior year of undergrad to document my trip down to the second installment of Florida’s “Sapphic Party” with some friends. I can’t say what exactly made me make it at the time (is it notable that I was “talking” with a campus zinemaker around that time?), but I know how it impacted me. It was cool to have a piece of media where my friends and I mattered; where I didn’t care if someone “got” the references that I put inside. I liked that it wasn’t just another set of relatively contextless photos to be posted on a feed. Most importantly, I liked that a part of my lesbian life was now tangible, to be held/shared/critiqued/archived for years to come. Weeks after finishing, I would drop it in a post office box to have a life outside of me.

About a year and a half later, I would get a strange request from a friend: to become penpals. Though I found the prospect quaint, I thought “why me?” When we were coworkers, we would pass the time exchanging campus lesbian gossip while I prayed no one would interrupt us by daring to ask a question. Time passed, she left, I was gossip partnerless, and we mostly stopped talking. Nevertheless, I sent her a letter.

I had always been a pretty guarded person. In my adolescence, I had learned that it was easier to approach most things in life with a sense of emotional detachment. Over letter, however, I found myself divulging everything: my optimism with my new program, the difficulties leaving my friends back home, and my anxieties with my burgeoning dating life. Writing the pages by hand forced me to fully immerse myself in expressing my feelings without being distracted by the constant notifications or endless apps I could easily switch to for swift dopamine. It was similar to the solace I would find at the press where I would need to use both hands and all my attention to make prints.

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At the time I’m writing this, my life is overflowing with paper. There’s the mini zines I find in my pockets from friends and the letters covered in stickers I need to respond to. Before I file my hands through the folders in the archival boxes at work, I run to the mirror to see if there is any letterpress ink on myself from working on my art. I go to the post office to flip through the stamp book while speaking with the mail lady. It's stressful at times. Things would be easier to send in a pdf through email. It would be quicker to send my friend a text than a postcard. Though you can’t find texts secretly tucked in between the pages of a zine for someone in 40 years to find.

If this blog can be anything, I hope it will be a call to action. Make shitty zines about your friend group and share them wide. Send your friends super long letters and a couple extra goodies to make the super long wait even more worth it. Use your job’s button maker to spread the dyke agenda through decorations on the lapels of your whole friend group. Who knows where it could end up next?

Jade Smith is a humanities-loving, zine-making, lezbrarian-in-training femmedyke based in Illinois