Staples, Ink, and Nerve: Why Small-Town America Is Publishing Itself One Zine at a Time

There's a folded stack of paper sitting on the counter of a laundromat in Carbondale, Illinois. It's got a hand-drawn cover, smudged ink on page four, and a print run of exactly 75 copies. It covers local drag performers, a poem about losing a family farm, and a recipe for venison chili from someone's grandma. Nobody paid to put it there. Nobody asked permission. And somehow, all 75 copies were gone by Thursday.

That's a zine. And if you haven't noticed, they're everywhere again.

The zine — short for "fanzine," born out of science fiction fan culture in the mid-20th century and turbocharged by punk and riot grrrl movements in the '80s and '90s — is having a genuine, grassroots, no-algorithm-needed renaissance. And it's not happening in Brooklyn or Silver Lake. It's happening in places like Appalachian Ohio, the Mississippi Delta, and small cities across the Great Plains, where mainstream media has largely stopped showing up and local voices have decided to stop waiting for an invitation.

The Gatekeepers Didn't Come to Town, So the Town Built Its Own Gate

Let's be honest about what traditional publishing looks like for someone growing up in a town of 4,000 people in rural Nebraska or the Tennessee hills. Literary agents aren't exactly beating down the door. Local newspapers have been gutted. The glossy magazines that line the checkout aisles at the grocery store might as well be dispatches from another planet.

For a lot of people, especially young people, that silence became a prompt.

"I just got tired of reading things that had nothing to do with my life," says Dani Reyes, a 24-year-old who started a zine called Dry Creek out of her kitchen in a small Oklahoma town two years ago. Dry Creek covers queer life in rural America — the kind of stuff that major outlets treat as a novelty story every Pride Month and then forget about. "I wanted something that felt like it was written by someone who actually knew what it's like to drive 45 minutes to a gay bar and then drive 45 minutes back and not tell anyone where you went."

Reyes started with 30 copies and a borrowed photocopier at her local library. She now distributes over 200 copies per issue, mostly by hand, through a loose network of coffee shops, bookstores, and friendly strangers she's met at farmers markets and community events.

Handmade Doesn't Mean Small Reach

One of the biggest misconceptions about zines is that their physical, low-tech nature limits their impact. In reality, the handmade quality is often the whole point — and the reach can be surprisingly wide.

Marcus Webb, a 38-year-old printmaker and community organizer in rural western North Carolina, puts out a zine called Hollow that focuses on Appalachian art, music, and working-class culture. He prints about 150 copies per issue at a local print shop and trades them with zine makers in other states through what he calls "the mail network" — an informal community of DIY publishers who swap issues and build each other's readerships the old-fashioned way.

"I've got readers in Montana, in Louisiana, in New Mexico — people I've never met who found Hollow because someone mailed it to them," Webb says. "That feels more real to me than 10,000 Instagram followers. These are people who actually held the thing."

That physicality matters in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to feel. A zine has weight. It has texture. Someone made a choice about the font and cut the paper and folded it themselves. In an era when most media is frictionless and disposable, that intentionality is its own kind of statement.

More Than Nostalgia — A Real Tool for Real Communities

It would be easy to frame the zine revival as pure nostalgia — a retro aesthetic choice for people who like vinyl records and film cameras. But that reading misses something important. For a lot of communities, zines are doing genuine cultural work that nothing else is doing.

LGBTQ+ youth in rural and small-town America, Indigenous artists documenting their own histories, immigrant communities preserving languages and traditions, disabled creators building spaces that mainstream media rarely makes room for — these groups aren't making zines because it's trendy. They're making them because the alternative is silence.

In Tulsa, a collective of young Black artists started a zine called Root & Rise after noticing that local coverage of their neighborhood focused almost exclusively on crime statistics and development projects that were pricing people out. "We wanted to document what was actually here — the barbershops, the churches, the kids doing incredible things," says co-founder Janelle Okafor. "We wanted to be the record."

Root & Rise is now in its third year. They've expanded from a single photocopied booklet to a quarterly publication with contributors across the city, and they run workshops teaching other young people how to make their own zines.

The Algorithm Doesn't Live Here

There's something quietly radical about a medium that doesn't care about your engagement metrics. Zines have no comment sections, no analytics dashboards, no sponsored content. They can't be demonetized. They can't go viral in the conventional sense. They exist entirely outside the attention economy that governs almost everything else about modern media consumption.

For creators burned out by the performance demands of social media, that's not a limitation — it's a relief.

"I don't have to think about what the algorithm wants," says Reyes. "I just think about what's true and what's worth saying. That's it."

Of course, many zine makers do use social media to spread the word about their work, and that's a legitimate part of the ecosystem. But the zine itself remains stubbornly offline, stubbornly physical, stubbornly local.

Where to Find Them (and How to Make Your Own)

If you want to find zines in your community, start with the obvious spots — indie bookstores, coffee shops, community centers, libraries with a progressive bent. Many cities have zine fests or small press fairs where creators gather to trade and sell their work. A quick search for "[your city] zine fest" will likely turn up something within driving distance.

And if you can't find one? Make one. Seriously. All you need is something to say, a way to print or copy pages, and something to hold them together. The barrier to entry is basically zero. That's always been the point.

The zine revolution isn't about overthrowing anything. It's about filling in the gaps — the stories that fall through the cracks of mainstream media, the voices that don't fit the format, the communities that have been waiting a long time for someone to ask what they think. Turns out they didn't need to wait. They just needed a staple gun.

NEPV Entertainment Network is committed to amplifying the stories of communities building culture on their own terms. Know a zine maker doing interesting work? Reach out to us at nepv.org.