Premiere issue of ::drum roll:: the Backstreet &... Zine!
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click to download your copy!
It’s here: the very first issue of the Backstreet Arts &… Zine!
Backstreet is the free, open art studio a couple of blocks from my house in lovely, historic downtown Newnan. It was founded eight years ago by the wonderful Kim Ramey, and I can say that because she has no power to make me take it down.
Anybody — including the likes of you or me — can walk in that door and make art: oils, acrylics, watercolors, pencil — leathercraft — fabric arts — stained glass — bookmaking and collage — and of course, writing. All for free.
I always hesitate to call my Tuesday morning sessions a “writers group,” because attendance is sporadic and membership hit or miss. Over the last few months, though, our regular members have become very productive, and when somebody on social media posted about their ’zine it occurred to me that we could do such a thing.
I named it after the never-got-past-the-idea-stage music festival from 20–30 years ago, the Newnan &… Festival. [See more here.] So like the Newnan & Opera, & Jazz, etc., concept, our zine will include anything produced at Backstreet: poetry, art, fiction, essays, photography, etc.
We will publish quarterly, and some of those issues will be themed. For example, the next issue, due in December, will center on the theme of GROWTH.
It’s been a while since I laid out a literary magazine. I was editor of my high school magazine, and sometime in the 1980s I was handed The Line Creek Review, East Coweta High School’s literary magazine, to manage. Since I was the media specialist and not a classroom teacher, I set some conditions: I would not have a class, but a homeroom staff of five students (since only five kids have ever done the real work on any student publication); we would not put out a single issue at the end of the year, but monthly; and we would not be selling ads to pay for printing, we’d photocopy issues in the office.
A bold idea — a zine, of sorts — and that bold idea carried us to best in state at the annual literary awards, for three years in a row, at which point all the major players in the state had caught on and were publishing multiple times a year themselves.
One other thing: After our first win at state, the school system asked me if my staff would do a county-wide elementary magazine, albeit an annual. Sure, I said, if you buy us this new computer and the page layout software everyone’s talking about. And that’s how I got my first Macintosh computer and PageMaker 1.0.
Here’s volume 1, number 1 (Aug 2025) of the Backstreet Arts &… Zine. You can pick up a physical copy at Backstreet, and if/when local merchants who have been offered the opportunity agree to host us, then I’ll announce those as well.
