I started making zines as an amateur. I never imagined they would become my artistic practice, let alone my livelihood. That came much later, as a gift of all the years I spent cutting and pasting simply because I loved to. Even now, I still find myself in awe when I say that I’m a zine artist.

But if I’m honest, I’ve also felt the pressure that comes with turning something you love into work. The pressure to grow, monetise, produce, and expand. To measure success through visibility, opportunities, and outcomes. I imagine many of you know this feeling too?

That’s why, this month, I want to return to something that existed before all of that. Recently, I learned that the word amateur comes from the Latin amare: to love. Before it became associated with being inexperienced, an amateur was simply someone who pursued something out of passion. Someone who did things for the love of doing them.

What would happen if we approached this summer as amateurs? Not as experts or professionals, but as people who make, collect, learn, wander, and create because we love to do so!

What hobbies, curiosities, and pleasures might return if we removed the pressure of an outcome?

These questions have been sitting with me lately. Because while I love my work, I also know that some of the most meaningful parts of my creative life have happened away from algorithms and expectations. Most of them happened in my bedroom, making zines badly, trying to build language from scraps, and playing with my inner child.

For me, zines have always offered a path of return. They invite us back to ourselves, to our interests, obsessions, questions, memories, and inner worlds. Back to a type of knowledge that doesn’t come from productivity or performance, but from paying attention. That’s the knowledge of the heart. In a culture that encourages us to constantly look outward, zines ask us to look inward. To listen, notice, gather what matters, and give it form.

I’ve written before about zines as revolutionary letters to yourself.

When you make a zine, you’re invited back into the house of the real: a place inhabited only by you.

If you open the door, you open yourself.

Then, page by page, you start to scatter your thoughts in glue and paper. You arrange your questions, your desires, your memories, the good and the bad, into collages and poems, notes and images that slowly start to make sense.

That is why zine-making will forever feel radical to me. Not because it is loud, but because it asks us to value things that cannot easily be measured:

Attention.

Curiosity.

Awe.

Love…

This month’s zine club is an invitation to return to that place.

On 28th June, from 6–8pm BST, we’ll be exploring the theme Amateur Summer in our Online Zine Club, and you’re warmly invited to join.

Tickets here.

You can attend live or watch it in your own time after the session has been recorded and emailed to you the following day.

We’ve been gathering monthly online for over a year now, creating a growing community of zine-makers from around the world. Currently, the club includes members from the UK, the US, across Europe, South Korea, and beyond.

This is not a subscription. Each month, you can purchase a ticket through Eventbrite, which reserves your place at the live Zoom session and includes access to the recording afterwards.

I can’t wait to see you all again this month.

Your zine club host,

Ioana

I started Artizine Club because I wanted to build a regular community of practice: a space where people could return to creativity together, inspire one another, and explore just how expansive a zine can be.

At the time, I didn’t fully realise what would grow from it.

To celebrate turning 2, we screen printed our own merch at The Art House, our creative home in London. (This will come back for those of you who missed it).

Seeing familiar faces return month after month means everything to me. Our collective practice has not only built a community, but strengthened my own devotion to zines, storytelling, and making by hand.

It’s honestly one of the biggest joys of my life to witness the zines you all create. Truly, some of my favourite zine makers in the world come to Artizine Club, and I never take that for granted.

Over the last 2 years, we’ve collectively made nearly

500 zines together, experimented with 20+ folding techniques, and probably used hundreds of paper scraps, glue sticks, stickers, and magazine cut-outs along the way. Every month we kept proving that a zine can become absolutely anything.

More than anything, Artizine Club has taught me that creativity grows through consistency, not perfection. That people deeply crave spaces where they can gather, make things by hand, and share parts of themselves without pressure to perform.

I’ve watched strangers become regulars, regulars become friends, and tiny ideas become fully formed worlds in zines. Together, we’ve learnt that zines can hold grief, joy, confusion, humour, transformation, memories, dreams, and entire versions of ourselves.

Thank you for trusting me — and each other — enough to keep showing up month after month.

What we’ve built together feels so much bigger than a workshop ✂️

And if you’ve been looking for a creative community, wanting to reconnect with making things by hand, or simply curious about learning how to make zines, there’s always a seat saved for you at Artizine Club.

This May, we’ll be gathering again both online and in London to create Pocket Altar Zines, one of the most loved zine folds we’ve ever explored together.

As an offering for Mental Health Awareness Month, we’ll be making small portable paper altars: an intimate space for comfort, reflection, memory, grounding, devotion, softness, protection, or whatever you need them to hold.

Pocket altar zines can become shrines for your inner world, filled with images, words, symbols, affirmations, fragments, spells, reminders, dreams, or small things you want to carry with you.

Get your ticket:

IRL Artizine Club — 27th May, 6:30-8:30pm at The Art House
Online Artizine Club — 31st May, 6-8pm on Zoom.

Whether you’re returning or joining for the first time, I’d love to make alongside you ✂️