Chapter Twenty-Three Cincinnati Viral
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Local Students Build Community and Break Barriers with Teen-Led Zine Lab
By Sam Russel
And so it is perhaps fitting that it was Mal Flowers and Emerson Pike who found its purpose.
Students at Holmes High School, they too were the odd ones out: This year, their school’s funding was cut, and as is so often the case, arts programming was the first on the chopping block.
Their literary magazine, Collage, was canceled after a fifty-year run.
“I considered self-funding it,” says Donna Merritt, teacher and longtime staff sponsor of the magazine.
“I’d been supporting at least half of the cost on my own for the last couple of years because I believe in what it gave those kids.
But I couldn’t shoulder it all by myself, and so we had to let it go.
It broke my heart, telling them. Some of those kids didn’t have anything else to go to. ”
Left out in the cold by their school’s funding, unable to be supported by the teacher who kept them afloat for as long as she could, it looked like the end of Collage.
But instead of allowing this to be a defeat, the students came together to make something new, and from the magazine’s ashes rose MixxedMedia.
“MixxedMedia is something totally new,” says Emerson, the managing editor of the project.
“Instead of being confined to the traditional format of a magazine—which a lot of us thought was growing stale anyway—we took it in the direction of a zine.” A zine, she explains, of their own design.
“I liked that there’s an element of punk-rock, do-it-yourself spirit to it.
Because that’s where we found ourselves, you know?
Pushed out by the institution, so we had to make it work with what we had ourselves. ”
For MixxedMedia, that was the back room of a local community space, a public library card, elbow grease, and a whole lot of talent.
“It’s much more informal,” explains Stella Willen, whose serialized fantasy novel is a monthly feature in the zine. “And definitely not as polished as Collage was. If I’m honest, I thought it was a bit of a mess at first, but I really love the process we’ve developed here.”
“We meet several days a week—to work on our pieces, to figure out the layout for the zine, to put them together,” says Nylan Hassan, a poet and photographer for the project.
“It’s entirely on us to get it all done, which is different, I think.
Our old teacher used to do a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff. ”
“There’s definitely been a learning curve—and a lot of papercuts,” jokes Parker Washington, who makes comics. “But it’s been heckin’ rad to build this together. It’s a lot more responsibility, and a lot more time, but we get to make it whatever we want.”
Whatever they want is currently a thirty-two-page zine, released monthly, that features prose, poetry, personal essays, and dramas, as well as photography, art, and experimental forms, each of which is folded by hand and sold for $2 at their school and select local businesses.
* Recently, the offerings have expanded to include single-page mini zines on subjects ranging from Covington’s coffee culture to queer vampire romance, which they sell at local events to fund future print runs.
Without the oversight of a school-funded program, these rebel students have flourished, expanding both their staff and the subjects they cover.
“I put that down to Mal,” says Emerson. “They’re our editor in chief, but they’re also the heart of what we do.
I joke that as an editorial team, we have two brain cells between us and they’re both Mal’s, but really—we couldn’t do this without them.
They have the sheer get-it-done ability to make things happen.
It’s like they were made to do something like this. ”
“I didn’t really want to do this,” confesses Mal, the project’s editor in chief. “But I had to, so I did. And I think out of that necessity, we’re making something really Important. With a capital I.”
And Important it is.
“I was ready to give up,” says James King, a literary fiction writer. “Collage was my safe space, the place I fit in. It’s hard to find a place like that as a queer person, and as a fat person. Mal and Emerson make space for people like me—even when the school wouldn’t.”
Community and growth are at the heart of what MixxedMedia does, and the office they’ve set up in the back room of the Haus, fondly referred to as the MixxedMedia Zine Lab, teems with both.
“It just seems like a cool place to be,” says Alex Sanchez, an essayist who joined the project after the release of its first issue. “I think it’s going places.”
“I want MixxedMedia to keep going,” Mal confirms. “Sometimes I wish it didn’t have to—that we hadn’t been canceled. Colleges take official, school-sanctioned activities much more seriously than hobbies. But if there’s not a place for us there, I want to keep building one for us here.”
And they have: the back room, formerly a storage space, is now alive with color and chatter and the smell of fresh coffee.
The furniture is still cobbled together—a collection of mismatched chairs, a secondhand toaster, an old Carnegie table rescued from the local library—and the decorations are decidedly handmade.
But what it has now is purpose—and a community of kids who find theirs within it.
“It feels like our space,” Kodi Jones, a mixed-media artist, shares. “Something that we made. And no budget cuts can take that away.”
*Since the writing of this article, the school administration has prohibited MixxedMedia from being sold on campus as a violation of its no-soliciting rule, further limiting the group’s ability to fund their project.