This is not my statement of purpose
My punk rock unretirement.
Hi everyone. Wow! Thank you so much for being here. I didn’t know if anyone would see the post I made but I’m so glad that you did & I am glad that it resonated with some of you.
For those of you who don’t know, my name is J.Rae Warren. I go by other names too. Think of J.Rae like, the name of a collective house: some of the people you will meet here include Jessika Rae, Caleb, & Jacoby.
I have been making zines for 26 years. Holy shit, that’s a long time. But I started making zines when I was 14 & I am 41 now. I distribute zines, helped organize a zine fest, co-founded a zine library, & have taught classes about zines. My old zines are archived at libraries at Harvard & Smith, in DIY punk spaces, at the midwifery school I went to, & in an RV that used to tour the country with zines- I don’t know if it still does.
More than that, zines have always brought me connection. They were my lifeline in high school. I was penpals with a lot of people; I fell in love through the mail. Zines were my entry point into punk rock even more so to the music. When I was 16, I had a lot of penpals but I wanted more local friends so I printed up a stack of flyers about starting a Riot Grrrl chapter & handed them out at a Sleater-Kinney show. I collected the emails & phone numbers & set up a meeting at a Dennys. At a time when Riot Grrrl chapters were arguing about including trans women, we decided to be completely gender inclusive, which certainly made my baby gender variant self feel better. I do think there was something radical about a bunch of mostly high school kids of various genders making space to get together & talk about feminism. We were scrappy & we were non-dogmatic. We met once a week. Riot grrrl was pretty much over, but no one told us! We set up zine tables at shows & organized a benefit music festival for a rape crisis center. Some of us got involved with Anti-Racist Action & Food Not Bombs & some of us got involved with Trumbullplex, an anarchist housing collective & theater space. We played in bands together. We started a radical cheerleading squad & would go to protests with our garbage-bag pom pons & practiced at the local info shop, Idle Kids Books & Records. Some of us protested at Camp Trans outside the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, which had a policy of excluding trans women. A lot of us were involved with zines.
Anyone remember the Buffalo, NY band Evil Robot Us’?! Well, they had a song that went:
“Just sit around saying ‘back in the day’
Talk about the bands that used to be so great.
Maybe you used to try to make a change
But what have you done lately?
Now the bands are gone
& everyone’s moved away
If you don’t do anything but reminisce
Then you’ve got no right to complain.”
This is a song I loved as a young punk & then hated as an old punk, & now things have come full circle & I love it again. I am scared this is what I am doing, & I still think the telling & retelling of these histories & origin stories is important. Two of my friends are currently writing books about that time period which I guess is “history” that is still being written, & spaces like Trumbullplex. I want to be honest about our (my) mistakes & I don’t want to overlook the good things that we did either, the ways they have rippled out far beyond our sometimes small & insular subcultures & communities.
At Idle Kids Books & Records, we spray painted a mural that said “my friends & I are going to change the world” & we have. We are parents & line cooks & carpenters. A disproportionate number of us are therapists! We are herbalists & midwives & we collect disability benefits. Many of us are still writing. Some of us have passed on but live forever in stories & speedball ink & typewritten words. We are workers among workers & outcasts among outcasts. We work in animal rescue or for shitty corporations. We are high school teachers who feel awkward when they run into their students at shows. We are DJs & poets & strippers, or all of the above. We are pharmacists fighting with insurance companies. We are bartenders who insure the femme drinking alone gets home safety. We are lawyers & we are addicts on the front lines of fucking harm reduction. We are all teachers in some way. We are laying in bed, in too much pain & too dizzy to walk across the room but we have to keep writing, we have to keep writing.
I am trying make sense of my past & imagine a future for my selves, where we are a functioning collective where dishes are done & children are cared for. I want to write a new story. I want to say fuck the story I want to live. I want to weave & unravel my selves & make a stronger rope to hold us together. I want to stay rooted in the present moment while holding that the language of the body is time travel & the language of Story is time travel too. I want to be a whole ass person, not a series of coping mechanisms or symptoms. I want to show up as my full complicated self again. I want to fall in love over & over. I want to send you a postcard. I want to collaborate. I want love to direct my thinking & my actions. I want to build radical new visions of love & care.
Writing & the connections I have made through it have saved my life many times, & I am so grateful I am alive.
Time to start fucking acting like it.