2005 MasterMind Awards

Fenton discovered zines as a high school student in Chicago in the late '90s. Self-published, non-conformist and usually highly personal, zines had been around for years; it was one of the stalwarts, the punk bible Maximum Rocknroll, that first fired Fenton's love of the format. When she moved to Denver, the self-described "library geek" quickly fell in with Jamez Terry and Kelly Costello, who'd just opened the DZL in a small shed behind their Baker-neighborhood rental home. Fenton became an ardent volunteer, and when Terry and Costello left Colorado last summer, she assumed leadership of the library.

Since the DZL had already run afoul of Denver zoning laws, Fenton looked for a new location that would accommodate its traffic and schedule of events. After considering several sites, she and her volunteers moved the DZL into the first floor of the non-profit Other Side Arts center on Platte Street in July 2004.

"We wanted to be more autonomous but still have it be a free space," Fenton says. "There's a lot of room here, and it's very much community-oriented. It's been a good fit."

Today the DZL houses over 5,300 zines from around the world, all catalogued on its website, www.denverzinelibrary.org. The range of size and subject is staggering -- everything from tiny, hand-folded chapbooks to thick, full-sized paperbacks covering such diverse topics as art, food, history, religion, animal rights, feminism, travel, music, family, politics, poetry, sex and science. Each zine is available for loan, but most visitors choose to pull up an easy chair and flip through a batch while enjoying a cup of coffee graciously provided by the library. A donation jar sits next to the coffeemaker; the DZL is entirely volunteer-run, and its rent and expenses are covered solely by contributions.

But the DZL does much more than simply archive this cultural paper trail; it propagates it. With a community computer on hand and a used Xerox machine on its way, Fenton wants to emphasize the library as a place where people are encouraged not only to read zines, but to make their own. "We want to open up access and resources to people," she explains. "The importance of zine-making is having an outlet. It's amazing to see all the different people who come in and use the library. A lot of people are coming in to start new projects. We have all these supplies to make zines with, and zinesters on hand willing to teach."

Although the new millennium has seen the rise of online "e-zines" and blogs, Fenton feels that the print version is more vital than ever. "It seems like over the past ten years, e-zines and blogs have functioned as outlets for people, but people are still putting zines out, and zine communities are very strong," she says. "I think that has something to say about their importance. Too many people spend too much time behind a computer. There's something to be said for typing up a zine, assembling it, formatting it, copying it, stapling or sewing or gluing it together. There's this whole process to zine-making that's lost when you just type up a blog. They do share some functions, but the do-it-yourself thing is particular to zines."

The community aspect of zines has always been one of the medium's greatest strengths, a fact Fenton never forgets. In September 2004, the Castle Rock Library invited Fenton and her comrades to hold a zine workshop for high school students. "These kids didn't know what a zine was," she recalls, "so it was pretty interesting to see how they took the whole thing. It was a lot of fun. We want to continue doing things like that."

The DZL is trying to do more outreach work, too, particular at area charter schools like P.S. 1, and to branch out into the growing subgenres of audio and video zines.

"Being more active in the community is a direction we want to take the library in," Fenton notes. "There's a lot of community-building involved in making zines. You put something down on paper, and then you hand it out to people. It breaks down barriers. It allows kids or young adults or anyone to take control of the media and be part of it. They learn to put themselves out there, become more involved and not just see themselves as an audience."

There are many reasons the Denver Zine Library deserves the first MasterMind Award for Literary Arts: its focus, its energy, its determination and its potential for community service, fostering a medium in which many vital young writers can build confidence and momentum as artists. But Fenton sums it up best herself: "I think the library and the whole process of zine-making functions as a tool of literacy. It's all about reading, writing, exchanging and sharing."

MasterMind Award, Visual Arts