Hope.

This is a difficult thing, linguistically, to explain clearly. Formerly known as Hope. Formerly known as Hope the zine. Formerly Hope. Formerly the Zine Hope. Hope Lives On. Formerly Hope is the tragic-est, Hope Lives On is maybe most accurate but also cheesiest.

Back in the day, all those days, I had a zine. First there was Ethel. That was 1993-1996. Then there was Hope. The last issue was a year ago April, and... maybe I outgrew zines, but I don't think that's quite it. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to make use of the medium--in this Day and Age. But man I miss cut and paste, and putting my typewriters to work...

Donna (formerly Muffie, and before that Muffie My New Gun, just as I was Elissa Ethel, and then Elissa Hope, and Lauren was Lauren You Might As Well Live, aka Lauren YMAWL, then many other incarnations when she kept changing the name...) and I were talking about how we want to keep trying. And some people are. Valiantly. But even those zines which live on have morphed in their own ways... Emily Larned and Molly Kalkstein and many others are making beautiful art books now, and even their zines are something more or something different. Certainly more grown up, but not just that.

My zines were always more writing than image. So while starting a blog was not nearly the tragic transmogrification of zine to technology that many others' would be... still sad. I've had many conversations with many zine friends about how so much of the joy of zines is (was) handing them to people, carrying them around in your pocket, getting them in the mail.

But. Since I don't make them, I don't get to hand them out. So. Here we are.

There was another blog before this one. But it is called "Still in Brooklyn," and soon I won't be anymore. And I'm ready to not be.