Just a collection of miscellaneous mini-zines that I am uploading so they are all together somewhere. Click the images to download:
Miscellaneous zines (2024)
creative practice
FUCK THE UNIVERSITY (zine)
Sometimes it just needs to be said.
Zine made for friends and colleagues at risk of redundancy, October 2025.
New year, new zines
I didn’t make any resolutions for 2026, but one commitment I am trying to make to myself is to be OK with whatever I feel when things go more slowly that they used to, or than I hoped they would. If it’s a happy, lazy kind of slow: great. If it’s something that’s important to me or to the world, it is right to be angry about that, and to take a moment to ask: what then?
I’m also making a tentative attempt to be more consistent in documenting the things I’m doing and working on this year, whether that’s here or on my Instagram or on my work profile, in the acknowledgement that I’ll have ups and downs and that this is OK.
With that in mind, here are two mini-zines I made in January 2026. One uses a poem by Hedgie Choi and is a kind of ‘manifesting’ of the things I want for myself and for those close to me this year (IN THAT LIFE). The other documents some of my academic reading and thinking about zine-making, as I try to decide how to move forward with this work and my university work (AM I A ZINE MAKER?).
‘Notes on a Research Proposal’
I’ve had a piece published with Amy Brookes that was both a pleasure and a puzzle to produce. The first page is pictured here.
It asks:
How do we sustain creative work in the face of burnout, institutional crisis, the end of funding, the mess of life? Like the workshops that it addresses, this article [this ‘creation’?] is a deliberate attempt to resist closure. It draws on the ongoing work of our “Speculative Space” project, which uses “SF as a creative practice for engagement and critical reflection within GLAM space”—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This project has comprised a series of workshops oriented around site-specific small acts of collective making. Over the last three years we have gathered in the back rooms of the Winchester Gallery, the Women’s Art Library, the Whitechapel Gallery, Science Museum London, the Museum of English Rural Life, the Natural History Museum, and in the digital institutional spaces of Teams meetings. Each workshop was fragile and fleeting, and the record of the work which lingers in photographs, quotes, and ephemera is only an echo of the true outcome which was in the act of gathering, the trust engendered, and the space created for concerns to be voiced. How then to document this work, and to answer the institutional demands to validate its worth using the metrics of academic research and funding frameworks?
Read the article for free in the Open Access journal Imaginations, at the following link: https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE29736
“The Old House’s Bones”: Architectural Salvage and/as Haunting
This paper was originally presented at the 2024 International Gothic Association conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is republished here in slightly modified form.
This paper is a small part of a larger project on salvage. It is also an attempt at an approach and presentation style that still don’t feel like they are mine. I tried to write a paper about body horror and architectural salvage writing, and failed. This paper is haunted by something, and I don’t know how to exorcise it. As Avery F. Gordon writes in her book on haunting and the sociological imagination, “ghostly things kept cropping up and messing up other tasks I was trying to accomplish” (p. 8).
Instead, and in an attempt to stay true to the creative-critical methods I promised in my abstract, I’m going to share a few Gothic meditations on the things this failure to write what I set out to write produced, or what I have learnt about salvage and haunting through this failure. It is an experiment with salvaging that work, or with exorcising it. This paper is about architectural salvage. But it is also about salvage on a more personal level.
Salvaging the Victorians
This week I gave a creative-critical workshop at the Cardiff Hub of the 2024 British Association of Victorian Studies annual conference!
It was lots of fun to be back after having studied and worked at Cardiff University almost a decade ago, and I was blessed with a genuinely warm and lovely group of Victorianists (and neo-Victorianists) for the session. We had a fruitful discussion and they produced some really fun and smart responses to the workshop prompt.
STONE SÉANCE (and Gothic Communication)
Building off of Chera Kee’s recent post on the Internet Ghost Collective website, I too decided to write a short reflection on the workshop we just had, in anticipation of the Internet Ghost Collective’s special issue of Gothic Studies. We’re interested in ‘Gothic Practice’ and all that entails.
The Speculative Space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums
Launching later this month, ‘The Speculative Space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums’ project will comprise a series of creative workshops that explore the critical ground that exists between science fiction (sf) and Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) spaces and collections. It will consider depictions of GLAM spaces in sf media, existing collections and exhibitions which contain sf media, and sf as a creative practice for engagement and critical reflection within GLAM spaces, looking to the imaginative futures and alternate presents of sf to critically reflect on the futures of these spaces and institutions.
Retracing the Library
In November 2022, Noriko Suzuki-Bosco, Amy Butt, and I ran a workshop at Winchester School of Art called ‘Retracing the Library’. The workshop was part of the UK’s Being Human Festival, an annual event that showcases work across the Arts and Humanities.
We came together to try and find ways to make something new and collaborative out of our shared interests in artists’ books, critical making, science fiction, environment, and the institutional spaces we occupy. For the first workshop we settled on Winchester School of Art library as a location, both because Noriko and I are based in Winchester, and because the library here has a particularly interesting environment and history.
Over the course of two hours, participants traced the library’s journey from the overflow shelves at its current location, to the gallery space it was rescued from during the flood of 1999, to the moated glass Rotunda where it began life in 1965. In each space participants were asked to remake and reimagine the library in a way that was meaningful to them.