Tuesday 31 January 2012

Hair and Glass


Flippancies
By Laura Rosenbaum, laurenrosenbaum.com, etsy.com/shop/LauraRosenbaum
From the very cool cover art, to the pages printed to look like school notebook paper, the stitched binding and the marvelous stories themselves, I loved everything about this litzine. The subtitle for this zine is "four short stories about girls flipping their hair". It seems like a pretty odd starting point and one might wonder, how can someone write one story about girls who flip their hair, let alone a whole zine of stories? But Rosenbaum pulls it off, effortlessly writing stories about life as a girl in middle school or high school. Her characters are fresh and believable and you can clearly picture each glossy strand of flipped hair. Here is an excerpt from the story titled Meryl:

            "Other girls on the bus wear their bobby pins in sport, but I wear mine out of dire necessity. Their bobbies pin back their wispy bangs creating a swoop, like drapes across their foreheads. Mine are strategically inserted into zones of conflict, regions of turmoil, where they must act like police officers keeping the peace and containing escapees and rioters."

Shards of Glass in Your Eye! #5
By Kari Tervo, shardsofglassinyoureye@gmail.com
In the intro for this issue Kari explains her love for the last page of magazines and decides to try and make issue #5 a whole zine of "last pages". Kari writes her zine with a witty sense of humor and mixes longer non-fiction pieces with short little tidbits of randomness, like a picture of some guy on break on Rodeo drive or a list of amusing homeopathic cures. Her two longer pieces are about thieving dry erase markers in a dorm (and if you've ever lived in a dorm, you know how important those markers are) and why it's best she doesn't drive.