San Francisco Zinefest 2009 – yay hurray

Rock Paper Scissors was out in full effect at the San Francisco Zinefest 2009! Many, many thanks to the S.F. Zinefest crew for putting on a wonderful event that brought many creative types of all kinds into the beautiful settings of Golden Gate Park. There was a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes to bring the Zinefest to life that most of us would never see.

It was pretty cool talking to random tourist families who would come in and ask, “What’s a zine?”  We got several e-mails from people who had never heard of a zine before. Hopefully they will go on and create cool zines at one of our zine jam workshops…

We heart the contributions. Microcosm publishing from Portland sat next to us and gave a whole stack of wonderful stuff. We did the Oakland O-town dance to celebrate, clapping and cheering, maybe next year we’ll bring pom-poms! It was cool talking “zine shop talk” about stuff from the 90s, stuff goin on now and the great future ahead.

The box kept getting more and more full–so that by the end of the day we had a huge bunch of submissions. It’s going to be really fun cataloging these and perhaps putting them online.

The most fun was explaining that much of the activity was from random volunteers and visitors much like yourselves. For instance, the Marker Art Party which became this gigantic zine pictured below was the product of some random conversations one afternoon between several volunteers. Here, one of the participants eyes a drawing he made that night.

We got to speak a lot about our upcoming zine workshops which you can find on the Rock Paper Scissors calendar. They’re free, friendly and full of lots of cool people who want to help you finish your zine.  Sign up for the events list… you’ll be hearing about all sorts of cool things going on.

Viva SF Zinefest!