During my college years (back in the 90′s), I was big into zines. You know, those hand-made, hand distributed, mostly photocopied magazines that focused around a singular topic. I had two of my own. Mirror Imyaj, a personal zine that I filled with musings of my mind and daily life. The name was suggested by my friend Sanjay and from there I made maybe 4 issues. (Imyaj is my name spelled backwards… clever isn’t it?) Eventually it became the digital name of my online journal here at Shades of Maybe.

The other one, Twisted Realities, was a fiction zine. I scoured the internets and my college for short (flash) fiction, poemtry, and essays with an edge. I was huge into postmodern fiction and wanted to create an outlet for my voice, and to publish others who had similar ideas about weird writing to mine. Twisted Realities had a two-issue run, mostly because it was hard to scrape up stories from others. But I was fortunate enough to have works by friends, as well as Lance Olsen, in the collections.

After I graduated college, I was asked back to WSU Vancouver to speak about my experiences of putting the zines together at one of my professor’s english classes. The class even used my zines as reading material.

Sanjay just emailed me the below photo of him holding pristine copies of Twisted Realities. Apparently, he thinks they’re worthy keepers and that one day they’ll be worth something. I’m amazed and happy that, in the two limited-run editions of 50 each, someone else, besides me, kept their copy. Thanks for the trip down memory lane S!