Written by Lee Arden

A smattering of colourful zines by trans and non-binary authors lie scattered on a tablecloth with a floral rose pattern.

As a Dick’s collective member whose life revolves substantially around zines, I am here to respectfully but insistently ask that you consider becoming a weird little freak about zines too.

Zines embody a do-it-yourself/do-it-together ethos of embracing imperfection, bypassing gatekeepers, and demanding that the world acknowledge your silly little book whether they like it or not. As a group of people who were handed certain bodies and types of clothes and places in the world and decided “no thanks 🙂 i’m gonna do something different,” trans people have all the risk factors for making and enjoying zines.

AND, there are a lot of great zines available to borrow from Dick’s! The inclusion of zines in libraries is a great boon for readers, because zines are often printed in small runs and not available widely or for a long time. Some of the zines we have are hard to find, and I feel so lucky to be able to borrow them and to help make them available to you.

Today I’d like to tell you about three zines in the Dick’s catalogue that hold a special place in my heart.

Der Eydes

Der Eydes, Vols. I & II, lie on a scattered array of other colourful zines. Their covers are off-white with hot pink and blue illustrations, and the one on the left features a figure with short hair, thick-framed glasses, and a button-up shirt, while the one on the right features a pennant flag with Hebrew lettering.

From Montreal artist Cesario Lavery, Der Eydes is a serialized comic in two volumes (so far) about the unexpected ways we can find ourselves connected to histories, families, and stories.

Walking home from work one night, Lavery finds an old book in a free library. On taking it home, he discovers that the book is filled with ephemera belonging to its original owner, Chaim F. Shatan. Looking into Shatan’s life leads Lavery to connect with some of both Shatan’s family members and his own.

Risograph-printed in blue and pink, Der Eydes is a lively, moving story of Montreal past and present, and the ways they intertwine, and of Jewish diaspora and resistance. It’s a story about falling head-over-heels into an unexpected connection with someone you’ve never met, and chasing that connection down, wondering at how surprising and happenstance life can be. It points to the ways that history across diaspora and displacement will always be fragmented, and the bittersweet joy of putting some of those fragments together while knowing that others will always be lost.

Der Eydes is unfortunately not currently in print or for sale, although people are working on that (👀). For that reason, it’s part of our non-circulating collection, which means you can’t borrow it, but we will often bring it with us to events for you to browse. But I wanted to mention it anyways because it’s a really special one– all the more reason to come out to one of our events!

Der Eydes Vol. 1 at Dick’s; Der Eydes Vol. 2 at Dick’s

BITEZINE

Bitezine, Vols. I & II, appear surrounded by an array of other colourful zines. Vol. I features a pink background with a red, line-drawing of various femme figures, and Vol. II features a turquoise background, with a darker turquoise illustration of a thin, three-breasted mermaid-type figure.

Bitezine is one of the zines I’ve been most excited to read in the past couple of years. First of all, it’s beautiful: tiny, perfect-bound pocketbooks, with gorgeous cover art, and printed from cover to cover in one colour per issue, creating the feeling of something intimate and precious.

But inside, the zine is expansive, filled with a rich variety of nonfiction, poetry, visual art, and interviews from emerging (and occasionally well-known) transfeminine writers, in both French and English, sometimes sliding between the two in one piece d’une manière tellement montréalaise.

Bitezine is published by TRAPS, the transfeminist “autonomous collective of mutual aid, sisterhood, and political action”, whose projects include a mutual aid fund and an active roster of social events by and for transfemme/transmisogyny-affected people in Montréal. Money made from bitezine also helps fund this work.

The first issue includes memories of a friend who has died, an essay about being trans in prison, and a blackout poem made from the DSM criteria for gender dysphoria. The views on transfemininity and transfeminism are expansive in genre and feeling and style: it doesn’t ask that you think or feel any one type of way, but instead presents you with a whole ecosystem of ideas and lineages and possibilities.

While issue 1 (2023) was more general, issue 2 (2024) has a focus specifically on bodily autonomy. Issue 2 was originally conceived as a guide to DIY HRT, but the editors decided to spin off that project and (hopefully!) put it out later, while publishing bitezine #2 as, rather than a handbook, a collection of art and recollections about the many ways to have and think about bodies. It’s about medical transition, sure, but also rehab, magic, and growing up in a lesbian separatist commune. And it also has that famous Sybil Lamb story about DIY orchiectomy, and that in itself is worth the price of admission.

Bitezine is published by Coop de solidarité Agenda, which also operated the short-lived but wonderful Librairie Agenda. They write that they “aim to build material resilience for transmisogyny-affected people by providing wages and financially supporting authors and initiatives through books and zines sales.”

Bitezine is now up to Volume 3, and I bet after you borrow the first two issues from us, you’ll want to pick up a copy of Vol. 3, which is on the theme of “Romantiques et renouveau”.

Bitezine Vol. 1 at Dick’s; Bitezine Vol. 2 at Dick’s

Fucking Trans Women

A bound copy of Fucking Trans Women lies on a scattered array of other colourful zines. Its black-and-white cover pictures a tall femme figure with cowboy boots and a feathered bob. She stands with one hand on her hip and a whip in the other. Her trench blows open to reveal a unitard, while small black shadows of people run around by their feet.

I had to include Mira Bellwether’s Fucking Trans Women is one of my favourite zines of all time, and really represents to me the best of what zines can be and do. I strongly recommend it for anyone who fucks, or is, trans women.

This zine is probably most known for naming and popularizing muffing, the penetration of the inguinal canals of someone who has or has had testicles. This is in itself a vital contribution to the world, but I also really love the ways, more broadly, that FTW encourages its readers to think of their bodies and their lovers’ bodies with flexibility and curiosity, outside of the usual social scripts that govern the way we think of what different body parts are for.

Bellwether writes a lot in the zine about choosing not to assume that someone whose penis isn’t hard isn’t turned on or enjoying sex, and that there are a lot of fun, hot ways to enjoy a soft penis (I’ll note that I am following the zine’s lead in the anatomical terminology used.) She also writes about not believing that “all there is to good sex is good communication”, and that skills and knowledge actually often matter quite a lot, which was one thing that really stuck with me from my initial reading of this zine.

From about 2012 to 2016, I ran a zine distro in Ottawa. In 2015, I bought an optimistic 25 copies of FTW from Mira, and when I wound the distro up, I had a bunch left over. I carried a bag of them around in my backpack for a while, and put one into every Little Free Library I came across. I hope some of them found good homes.

Mira died of a stroke related to lung cancer, in December 2022, at only 40 years old. Writing about her, and FTW, after Bellwether’s death, Sloane Holzer wrote,

“Throughout the zine, Bellwether stressed that this work was only a starting point. Despite multiple calls in the work for submissions and reader contributions, very few came. According to multiple people who knew Mira, both at the time of FTW’s publication and in the decade plus since, this was the response to the work that made her the most incensed. It seemed to be easier for the zine’s readership to treat the work as gospel than it was to do the kind of messy reflection she had done, the kind of work she was daring her audience to do.”

I relate very strongly to this frustration, and reading about someone I admire so much articulating the same experience made me feel a strong sense of kinship with her. If you like zines it is, unfortunately, your duty to make zines. If you appreciate someone’s scrappy determination to tell their story, and the work that results, I actually believe you’re at least a little obligated to increase the volume of idiosyncratic art in the world.

When you search “zine” in the Dick’s catalogue, you’ll find a wealth of cool stuff you can borrow. You should borrow some zines! Even more than other media, I think zines really want to be shared and passed from hand to hand.

When we table at events, Dick’s also often sells zines to raise money for causes close to our hearts, such as the Sudan Solidarity Collective and Mubaadarat, a collective supporting LGBT+ people in Montreal from Arabic-speaking regions.

If you’re interested in donating your zines to the library, either to become part of its collection, or for us to sell to raise money, please get in touch at dickslendinglibary [at] gmail [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you, and we can’t wait to see what you make.

Dlog is the Dick’s Lending Library blog. We welcome submissions of book reviews and reactions, guides like this one, that survey a form, genre, or theme of materials in the Dick’s collection, or other topics relevant to trans, non-binary, Two Spirit, and gender non-conforming readers and writers and organizers in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Please get in touch at editorial [at] dickslendinglibrary [dot] com if you’d like to get involved.

Written by Ess Astifo.

I’m in the process of recovering from Canadian assimilation and my medicine is books. So the first thing I do when I find myself in the stacks is look for Arab literature. I’m always seeking out narratives that can speak to the disjointedness of my seven spice experience. My search results yielded this olive oil green artist book–Where Grape Leaves Grow written by Anna Daliza, and designed by Michelle Kuan and Emi Takahashi. The leaves of the cover fold up neatly like the dolma my mother would stuff and wrap methodically, one after the other, calling me over to help.

The text follows two speakers, one lettered in black ink and the other in blue. The former may be a family elder, a kin figure from the homeland, and the blue, a budding new leaf, the newest generation earthed on foreign land. The sparse yet deeply intimate opening exchange sets a funerary tone. Someone or someones have been lost and with them the origin story and cultural connection of our young blue speaker. Stamped between the dialogue of youth and elder are typewritten inscriptions of the chronology of Phoenecian to Lebanese Maronite, of whom Daliza’s family descend from. The pages grow into the telling of the origin story that our young speaker has been thirsting for.

I’m not Lebanese, like the writer Anna Daliza. I’m Assyrian-Iraqi, but Daliza’s family story is not far off from mine and I feel the same thirst. Both our families are of Christian ethnoreligious minorities, both ladled into the Arab soup, and both descendants of ancient civilizations. Our stories are that of loss and displacement. In fact, no move to Turtle Island is purely vibes-based. Your relation to this land is also one of displacement–either your own or someone else’s. Whether indigenous to this land and forced onto reservations or pushed out of your birthplace due to political turmoil, anthropogenic environmental disasters, or settler colonialism, your story likely involves movement for survival.

Where Grape Leaves Grow may be Anna Daliza’s debut book, but her writing is that of a practiced storyteller. The text’s historical account parallels, in story and structure, the past and present of her family story, their migration, and loss. As I write this, Lebanon is receiving its umpteenth military assault by a genocidal settler state; a state that prides itself on being a refuge to the exiled and which has consequently created millions of diasporians through its project of forced displacement. In addition to this text’s temporal performance, it explains both a local history and one mirrored by countless other regions and families. I too am a first generation child of Arab parents forced from another place where grape leaves grow, but this story still reads like my own. Daliza, in writing her own family and territorial history, writes many of ours. Like her, many of us did not have the privilege of being passed down our histories, oral or written. My parents left Iraq and their families behind with a few articles of clothing and a plastic bag of photos. In losing her family members, Daliza also loses access to their memories, cultural, and historical knowledge.

But in a move of self/lineage preservation, Daliza remedies this absence by birthing this book, her own self-published artifact; in crafting her own family mythology, she gifts many of us a blueprint of our own. Where familial memories are lost, we can turn to historical accounts and where archives fall short there are always the stories your elders have repeated a thousand times with untired verve while they sip tea on the sofa, belt unbuckled after a feast of upturned rice. This book is for those of us who live in the liminal space of neither here nor there and who are searching to uncover what was before in order to feel firmly rooted in who we are now. With the guidance of this intimate record, maybe I too will write my story.