Kill the Gatekeeper Volume 2 is Out Now! (Did you get your copy?)

It’s here! It’s here! Blessed be, Kill the Gatekeeper lives to see another volume.

A little backstory. Last year, my friend and fellow writer Harmony Cox heard about a zine swap that was taking place at a local coffee shop. She LOVES zines and got me into them, so she suggested we make one together.

We decided to focus on uncool things the publishing industry routinely does that keep out marginalized voices. There’s soooo much gatekeeping in the publishing industry and being queer female writers, we experience some of that regularly––though not nearly as much as we’d experience if we were BIPOC. With the vision and focus for the zine set, we got to work.

We made all the collage art together at my kitchen table. We each wrote individual essays, then co-wrote an essay together for the zine’s content. We called it Kill the Gatekeeper and volume 1 was released in October 2019. It was a big hit at the zine swap!

Fast forward to 2020, officially the worst year ever. In an attempt at normalcy, the folks who organized the zine swap last year announced that they’d be doing a swap in social distance fashion this year. Zine makers were asked to drop off completed zines at the coffee shop, then the organizers would distribute and deliver the zines around to the maker’s houses all over town. Harmony and I signed up and committed to making Kill the Gatekeeper volume 2.

What we didn’t anticipate is just how hard making a zine while social distancing would be. For starters, we couldn’t be inside, so my kitchen table was out. We ended up sitting six feet across a table from each other in my back yard. Instead of making collage art together, we each had to make our own pages, then just put them together and communicate the vision by holding up the pages and asking for the other’s opinion.

Then there was the wind. This was in early to mid-October, so the Midwest was getting its seasonal windiness, which is a NIGHTMARE when you’re cutting up little pieces of paper for collage art and trying to keep your pages from flying all over the yard.

And because it was October, which means it was getting dark earlier and earlier, and we couldn’t be inside, we could really only work on the zine on the weekends. I’m self-employed and have a flexible schedule, but Harmony has a day job and normally has to work until 5pm. And we live on opposite sides of the city, so by the time she got off work and got to my place on a weeknight, we’d have an hour tops before it was too dark to work. Did I mention the lighting in my back yard is basically nonexistent?

Put simply, it was a logistical nightmare and took like three times as long to make the zine this year. And that was before I messed up the order of the pages and we had to do surgery with scissors to save the zine.

Volume 2 of Kill the Gatekeeper also has a slightly different vibe. It’s definitely still about gatekeeping, but we didn’t hold ourselves to only talking about the publishing industry this time. 2020 has thrown so much at us that it didn’t seem right. I wrote about getting laid off, my battle with Amazon and Kindle, and the struggle of writing when there’s a pandemic. Harmony wrote about going to Black Lives Matter protests and trying to be creative when the world is falling apart.

None of this has been easy––living in 2020 or making the zine––but it sure beats the alternative of being dead and not having a zine. I’m reaching for a silver lining here and perhaps grasping at straws, but that’s ultimately what Kill the Gatekeeper is about. Recognizing the gatekeeping practices, doing what you can to change them, and continuing to do the work anyway.

If all this sounds interesting to you, I’d love for you to buy a copy. There are even still a handful of copies of volume 1 left! In keeping with traditional zine culture, each volume has a limited run and once they’re gone, they’re gone. It’s analog-only and the content isn’t available online anywhere.