Zine Share: Inventing Hope

Zine head

Dear Friends,

I made a thing!

I’ve self published a zine of writings from this newsletter called Inventing Hope: Essays and poems on people and place from “The Ministry of Imagination”, which collects nine pieces from the past few years that, to me, connect this way and that to form a cohesive body of reflections on my home. Below, I share the introduction, which tries to explain why I made this and how I thought about its thematic glue.

Importantly, I wanted to make a physical thing that you can hold in your hand, shove in a backpack, or lay on the coffee table like a coaster. (I’d love to see it dog-eared and all stained up with mocha coffee rings and littered with cookie crumbs.) Let me know if you’d like a copy, and I’ll do my best to get one to you. Reply to this email or private message me with a mailing address. Local friends, hit me up!

As always, thank you so much for your kind attention and reading,

Jeremy

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Introduction to Inventing Hope

The essays – essayettes¹ rather – collected here were originally written and shared as occasional email “letters” sent to a handful of friends and family during the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. I began writing them without any clear idea of what they would be about, or whether any thematic center would hold them together as a cohesive series. (Eventually, I transitioned the email missives to a newsletter platform and called it “The Ministry of Imagination”², which suggested a kind of fantastical quasi-institution for creative practice.) As it turned out, the conditions of the first couple of years of the pandemic kept me closer to home with a lot more unencumbered time, which was often spent walking at the nature center across the road from my home. And that habitual time in the meadow and by the river occasioned a great deal of reflection – and writing – about the meadow and the river and my experience of this environment.

After three years of writing and sharing into the digital ether, I’m also interested in how a curated selection of those newsletters might add up to something more than an erratic, chronological series of posts. Generally, I’ve included the writings that best express and explore my connection to my immediate environment – the meadow, the river, the forest, and the human and non-human creatures who inhabit it. A rumination on a very specific place in central Vermont. I looked for connections and threads across the writing, how individual pieces echo each other, expand on similar ideas, or document an emotional and intellectual journey regardless of chronological order. I’ve given the collected writings a new shape that means something to me; maybe you will see that shape, and other unintended shapes, as well.

I’m also interested in presenting these selected writings as a physical thing, a printed zine that can be passed hand-to-hand, or left on a coffee shop table, or mailed to a friend halfway around the world. I made my first zines when I was 15 because it was a large part of the skateboarding and art subcultures I belonged to – it was how me and my friends documented our lives, ideas, and antics. I’ve kept making zines as a part of different art and design projects over the years, or just for fun. Make a thing yourself, make it cheaply, make it now, and give it away.

A project like this is a way to bring some closure to the last few years of my writing, to document a period of time, put it to rest, and evolve perhaps. I hesitate to call this a pandemic project, but in many ways these collected writings are absolutely framed by my experience of the pandemic. The isolation, fear, and uncertainty of the early COVID-19 lockdown instigated those initial letters and then, as the pandemic normalized and our response evolved, my writing must have been a way for processing the aftermath. My hope in collecting these essays and sharing them in this way is that they may become a reference point for our collective memory of this time, if only expressed from my very small and limited point of view in rural Vermont.

1. Gratitude to Ross Gay, whose excellent collection of essays, The Book of Delights, first introduced me to the term essayette.

2. I borrowed the phrase from the theologian Walter Brueggemann, who writes about the essential role of the prophet to imagine new futures through poetic language in The Prophetic Imagination: “It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” (Emphasis mine, and, no, I am definitely NOT a prophet!)