Girl Crush: Mimi Nguyen

Mimi Thi Nguyen is a zinester I was introduced to somewhere in the year 2000 through the now retired Pander Zine Distro:







From zinewiki:

Throughout the 1990s, Mimi Nguyen published the zines Aim Your Dick, Slant (later changed to Slander) and edited the compilation zine Evolution of a Race Riot (later shortened to Race Riot). She contributed to zines such as How to Stage a Coup, Hard as Nails, and Sty Zine, in addition to being a regular columnist for Punk Planet and "shitworker" for Maximumrocknroll.

She is currently an assistant professor of gender and women's studies and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She co-edited Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and co-writes Threadbared, a research blog on the politics of fashion and beauty.

Mimi's zinewiki page

http://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/

Zinesters

I wrote this a while back:

A "zinester" is defined by ZineWiki as this:


"A zinester is a term for any person who creates a zine or runs a zine distro

The term zinester is preferred by some zine creators who don’t consider themselves writers, authors, or artists, the latter implying some minimum level of education or skill, or distance from their audience.

Also, unlike traditional authors, zinesters are free from editors or publishers that would regulate the content of their work."

I have been a zinester since 1997. My own zine, "Broken Arrow", was published in 2002 and "Broken Arrow 2" in 2003. I am not sure if any distros still have this zine, but it was met with a lot of positive feedback.

It was a perzine ("perzine" means personal zine- a zine in which you write about your personal life, similar to a diary or journal). It was filled with diary entries, articles, anecdotes, and pictures of my family and of myself when I was growing up.

One topic that has become a part of my life again is professional wrestling. I was really into it when I was a girl in my "tomboy" days, and I found myself drawn to it again. I started paying attention to the various independent wrestling companies that I am close by to, I started a wrestling blog of my own, and I have been immersed in indy wrestling ever since. I follow indy companies across the country and across the world. One of my dreams is to be able to go to London, Spain and Japan to see a wrestling match and take a ton of pictures and blog about my experiences.

For now, I am concentrating on traveling the United States so that I can meet the different companies.

My next zine I hope to write will be about my journeys visiting different venues and interviewing the owners, promoters, bloggers and wrestlers. Every single one of them have a story about how they became interested in this business, and I love sitting and listening to every one of them. Most sound the same, some are amusing, some will bring a tear to your eye. The squared circle holds the history of a lot of men and women. I plan on sharing that history with my zines.

My writing done my way. The only person reaping the benefits is myself and the distros I might ship zines to. This is why I love being a zinester: it is one of the purest forms of free speech there is.