New Brunswick, NJ the home of a diverse and large DIY music and arts scene. The scene is so renowned that recently, New Brunswick basements were ranked fourth on a list of top places to see live music in New Jersey. One of the latest additions to this DIY movement is Letters From Bummer Camp Press & Distro (LFBC), a DIY zine publisher and distributor founded, curated, and run by Rutgers alum Alyssa Rorke.
Alyssa the queen of zine//photo by Jessica-Joan Causing
Rorke’s passion for zines was born, in part, from her dissatisfaction with the rigidity of academia and traditional publishing. When you DIY, she says, “your voice doesn’t get bogged down and filtered through a formal publishing process.” Instead, when you create a zine, you are writer, editor, designer, and publisher. That’s a lot of power over the finished product and freedom to be unapologetically yourself. One of the aspects of creating a zine that Rorke finds unique is what she calls “the freedom to make mistakes.”
What causes academics to cringe gives Rorke joy: “I love seeing typos in zines. It’s like seeing imperfections in someone’s skin and remembering that they’re human. Growing up in school there were always assignments and such that you could fail automatically for spelling one thing wrong, or having an apostrophe in the wrong place. The only thing you’re learning in that scenario is how to beat yourself up for making stupid mistakes. The way I see it, if you’re creating something yourself, you can’t lose.”
In fact, DIY publishing and zines are so far from the realm of academia that while she studied Journalism at Rutgers, zines only came up as a topic of discussion through her own research. In a class called “Beauty and Feminism in the Media,” Rorke remembers that her research led her to “a clip of a Kathleen Hanna interview in which she compared zines and blogs, and while I don’t usually agree with her politics, it really resonated with me. That was the first time as an adult with opinions that I measured the value of the printed word against the digital word and I realized the former somehow had more integrity. While anyone could type out a tweet of something they heard someone say on the street, it takes dedication and passion to write something out and take it to a copier.” And yet, the topic of zines was never considered a serious facet of journalism.
She decided to begin making zines as a response to this exclusive nature of academics and publishers. “At the end of my college career I became increasingly interested in poetry,” Rorke reflects, “and started producing a lot of work. Throughout that year following graduation I submitted writing to countless journals and lit mags, with very little success (the one publication that accepted me during this time was a new lit mag aimed at LGBT youth called ‘Iris.’ I’m very proud of this). I had writer friends who had been published a lot and I started to pick up on the fact that a lot of this revolved around who you knew, or who knew you. It’s cliquey, almost. As soon as I came to this realization I threw up my hands and said screw it! Who needs ’em? I will publish MYSELF.”
So, in February of this year, Rorke put out two zines of her poetry, and the rest is history. She began carrying her work, which was then under the name “bunkmate,” around in a shoebox to shows. Then, she got the idea to expand her “shoebox distro” to include other writers after being invited to tour with her friend Katie Bennett from free cake for every creature in June. “[Bennett] told me to bring zines to sell,” says Rorke. “The idea for Letters from Bummer Camp came to me silently during the quick week that passed between this initial invitation, and the day we left for tour.” The tour led them to Atlanta Zine Fest and finished at Philly Feminist Zine Fest. In Atlanta, Rorke met Dakota from Pioneers Press and admired their table, which they recall was “stacked with some really great informative and entertaining publications and while it looked a little overwhelming, I saw what Dakota was doing and I realized I wanted to be part of something like that.”
It was on this trip that Rorke came into her own, as a poet as well as a zinester. She remembers, “I gave poetry readings at about eleven basement/punk/acoustic/solo DIY organized shows along the coast between New York and South Carolina. On this trip I read for strangers, record store patrons, friends, personal idols, and a group of seven people in a living room in Southern Appalachia.” The overwhelming positive response to her work gave Rorke the confidence to come home to New Jersey and use all her poetic momentum to realize her dream, which she says was to “bring together artists, writers, and creators” with LFBC.
Phillip Laudino reading//photo by Alyssa Rorke
On August 31st, Rorke celebrated the launch of LFBC with a show featuring local poets and musicians. Rorke read her own work, along with Philip Laudino (whose chapbook “Really Fucking Pretty” can be read here) and Hannah Roe with poems about student organizing. The night featured music from Merkin, Warm Tape, and I Tried to Run Away When I Was Six. Also at the launch, LFBC debuted its first compilation zine, which Rorke describes as a “scrappy lit mag” featuring work from 18 artists and writers, half of which are from Rutgers or the New Brunswick DIY community. In the wake of this brilliant beginning, Rorke is excited to expand her distro’s reach, and says, “I will be tabling zines at various upcoming underground arts events in town. While I prefer to make these sales in person, I also want to reach as many readers as possible so I plan to launch a supplementary online store through the blog very soon.”
Hannah Roe reading//photo by Alyssa Rorke
Warm Tape performing//photo by Alyssa Rorke
The DIY and zine community is continuous no matter the actual location because of the shared philosophy. Rorke says, “People are constantly traveling, moving around, and sending writing and music and all sorts of creative work between these communities that the lines between them start to bleed into each other.” In her travels this summer, she recalls finding herself “so lost in conversation that if I didn’t know any better, I would have thought I was home in New Jersey.” She finds that DIY, the confidence that you can create anything on your own, is really catching on throughout the country.
When I asked Rorke how she thought DIY philosophy affected other areas of her life, she replied, “DIY philosophy doesn’t affect different parts of my life, it IS the different parts of my life. It’s the second job I have to look forward to in the evening. It’s my plans for the weekend. It’s what I’m listening to in my car stereo. It’s what I’m reading before bed. This is a culture that is not dictated by a capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist ruling class. It is a culture that is constantly being created and recreated and I hope to be surrounded by it indefinitely.”
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