WATCH! Summer Farah Makes Zines
This month on Writers and Their Cherished Hobbies, I delight in talking to incredible poet (and friend!) Summer Farah about making zines and collages
Good morning, wonderful people. I’m writing to you this morning from the sweltering mouth of DC summertime. The past month has been a streak of thick humidity, but today, a rare blessing, is only a high of 75. In fact, DC hasn’t seen a first week of August this cool since the mid-80s, so today I am grateful. Grateful for the weather, grateful to be home amongst my beloveds, and grateful to be talking today to someone who is not just an tremendous writer, but a dear friend: Summer Farah.
I followed Summer on Twitter for a long time, appreciating her poetry and her jokes about the great show of her life, Supernatural, before we became friends. I remember receiving her chapbook of Mitski-themed poems and being so delighted by it. Eventually we became mutuals, then began dm’ing about what Nintendo Switch games we were playing, our shared love of Samia Finnerty, and we became fast friends after that. We were fortunate to meet up in real life for the first time this year at AWP in Los Angeles.
There is so much I could say about Summer—her intelligence, how fully she commits herself to the things she’s passionate about, her strength as a literary critic and interviewer, but thankfully all of that is plainly evident in our conversation below.
Of course, for the uninitiated: Writers and Their Cherished Hobbies, or WATCH!, is a mutual aid effort that seeks to interview writers and artists on the hobbies they keep separate from their primary creative practice while donating to important causes of the interviewee’s choice. New interviews release on the first of every month. All the money this newsletter receives is turned around and given back to people and communities in need.
Here’s her bio—
Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. She is the author of I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024) and The Hungering Years (Host Publications, 2026). A member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and the National Book Critics Circle, she is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.
—and here’s Summer talking zines and collages.
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Jonny Teklit: I love collaging, but I don’t do it as often as I imagine my most idealized self would. Sometimes I think I would do it more if I did it digitally instead, but then I don't think I have any of the skills or know-how when it comes to digital collaging. So to start this interview off, I'd love to know more about your history with digital collaging. How long have you been making collages? How often do you do it? What drew you to it in the first place?
Summer Farah: My general introduction to collage was probably similar to most - preschool? elementary school? Being given an abundance of magazines, glue, scissors, and told to map out my dreams. I've always wanted to be a visual artist but didn't really have the patience for honing my ability to draw, and so collage really appealed to me, this alternate way of building images, the opportunity to confuse logical space, the rough edges, the materiality of it. At the same time, I'm really bad at cutting and am not good at saving potential materials!!! I started making digital collages, instead, when I was ~10 or 11, when I ran a Disney Channel fan YouTube account, mostly making videos about Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana, sometimes other Disney stars, and eventually Twilight before I hung up the video editing software for good. To customize my channel, though, I followed in the footsteps of other fan video YouTubers, with collages of my favorite photos of the stars I loved. I would painstakingly erase the backgrounds of Miley Cyrus photoshoots on MS Paint, moving images back and forth on an over-large canvas (since MS paint didn't have layers!) to build up what I wanted. I would spend literal hours doing this! Playing in art/design software is kind of the only time Time fades away for me, honestly. Today, I have better tools, focusing on poem-zines, distributing them mostly in-person. The folding and putting together of zines is where the materiality of collage comes back into play for me, and I like the hand-to-hand exchange of the object.
JT: Where do you source your images from and what's that process like? Do you only search for images while you're making a collage or is there a folder on your computer that you periodically save images to for whenever you might need it? If it's the latter, do you organize it in any particular way?
SF: I use a combination of photos I take myself, photos friends take, and public domain archives! Even though my practice isn't beholden to any copyright issues (because I'm not really publishing or selling them, just distributing them casually) I like the practice of using public domain images. It gives me something unexpected to work with alongside my personal photos. The Smithsonian has a big public domain archive, as well as Wikimedia Commons, and my new favorite, the Public Domain Image Archive (enter "infinite view"!). I'm drawn to vintage-y botanical stuff, Renaissance and earlier paintings, space photography from NASA, etc. It's really fun to go down a rabbit hole with random keywords, or explore curated collections, and try to use what you don't think you need. I think digital collaging takes some of the spontaneity out of collaging because you have the entire internet at your disposal, and so I try to find ways to invent restrictions. I am the least organized person in the world, so everything just lives in a big folder :) I'll write down where certain images come from, though, on a sticky saved to my desktop, just in case.
JT: Who/what have been your digital collage teachers? Did you teach yourself by trial and error, tinkering around in an app's drop-down menus, or did you turn to a long and reliable Youtube playlist of tutorials. And what, if anything, has the act of collaging taught you?
SF: I taught myself everything, honestly! I really do not like sitting through YouTube tutorials and haven't taken any formal design courses. It's been years of tinkering, mostly on Photoshop/Photopea. There's definitely a patience that's been cultivated in me, and a care for detail. Erasing those small little pixels of background in between strands of hair is actually a rewarding exercise. I am not very put together, often careless - but collaging centers me, focuses me in a way nothing else really does. Most of what I've learned is just by looking. Collage is a pretty popular technique in fanworks, and so the truth is, Tumblr is kind of my biggest teacher, even today.
JT: Who are some collage artists that you really enjoy? Or, are there any collage pieces that you particularly love and/or think about often? OR, even thinking beyond the strictly visual—if we think of the collage as an act of layering multiple images, sounds, and/or textures together in order to make a New Beautiful Thing—are there other artists/musicians/writers/creatives that you think really nail a sort of collage effect in their work?
SF: For contemporary artists, I really love the work of Bianca Jarvis! Her subjects - gardens, domestic interior spaces - are really in line with what I'm interested in. I like the blurry quality, the colors! Sarah Ghazal Ali introduced me to Najeebah Al-Ghadban recently, whose work is sooooo interesting - the fragmentation of the body, the white space...freaky!! but not too disturbing. How can we cut the self apart and provoke thought but not inspire horror? I find that in her work. Romare Bearden was the first collage artist I was introduced to, and still love looking at his work for ideas for composition, color! Just a few days ago, a friend sent me The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland, which are my new Study priority. It's almost overwhelming how at peace the different elements feel with each other in that series, a maximalism that is orderly but not boring, abundant but not distracting. My honest favorite collage piece, though, is one collaged/lettered/illustrated by Samia Saliba, a sort of broadside of Solmaz Sharif's "Social Skills Training". It hangs above my nightstand.
I think films that combine animation and live-action are what fostered my collage-sense the most! So, Mary Poppins, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and one of my most formative influences, Space Jam... What appeals to me about collage is a sort of wrongness that still works.The slapsticky tone of these movies get their comedy from that out-of-place feeling, and the technical prowess comes from that accomplishment of fluidity-despite-strange-too. I recently watched Anchors Aweigh, a 1945 film starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as sailors with a weekend off, where the plot is Gene Kelly is trying to help Frank Sinatra get laid. It's pretty awful! One of the most amazing sequences is Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry the Mouse, like of Tom & Jerry. What is collage if not to build opportunities like that?
JT: How, if at all, has collage-making changed and/or affected your relationship to your writing?
SF: It definitely informs my writing practice! For a while, after I fell out of fandom spaces, making collages was relegated to birthday cards. I wasn't really doing it as an abundant creative practice anymore until 2022-ish - specifically, I wanted to accompany my poems with art, turn the poems themselves into visual art. The first drafts of the poems that would become I could die today and live again live in an abandoned .psd file, with collages of video game screenshots and stills from The Green Knight. I wasn't satisfied with what I was capable of formally with those poems through just words? and felt like I needed more. Ultimately, those poems became a chapbook instead of a zine, and are definitely better for it (my attempts were ugly) - but that experimentation phase, of knowing I needed more was definitely important. It helped me push myself in imagining how the words could propel themselves differently - ultimately, I think anything interesting about the form in those poems comes from playing in design softwares. I made collages to accompany poems in my Mitski zine, but those felt sort of independent of the poems themselves, more of an homage to my start with collage than integral to the reading of the poems. But, the process of putting that zine together did get me to start the mini-poemzines I do today - I wanted to make things that were more economical, and so I learned to do the 8-fold 1-pagers.
Making those really gets me to focus on the language, since I'm often breaking lines or form in order to get the words to fit properly on the page. There are poems I've ended up editing while putting together a collage page, realizing how the language was lacking as I tried to complement it with visuals. Adding something to the poems sort of challenges me to ensure they do, in fact, work on their own. Collage almost feels like a notes section, or answering an interview question, or presenting a close-reading. The visuals elaborate on or contextualize the poems, giving you something else to hold on to, and the form of the single-poem-zine slows down a read. It attunes me to where I may want those moments of slowness from my readers when the materiality of turning a zine page is absent, and pushes me to figure out how to manifest it in the more normative presentations of the poem - form, punctuation, otherwise. As someone who often defaults to prose poems, making zines filled with collage to accompany my poems has trained my visual sense in a new way.
JT: Is there something about zine making that you're always talking to others about, that you want more people to know?
SF: I really love the histories of zine-making along radical political movements, underground art scenes, and fandom spaces. The first lesbian publications in the US were zines! I get so much political education from zines! The happenings of Star Trek conventions were first written up in zines, alongside fanfiction and art, distributed cheaply through the mail! So many alternate histories live in these shitty little books, and so much of the worlds I inhabit now first came alive through zines, I'm really thankful to MAKE THEM TOO!
JT: Finally, what is the cause you would like WATCH! to support this month?
SF: Please send funds to Gaza Poets Society, the premier organization in Gaza that supports the young poets and writers in their community.
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Thank you, Summer! I love you! Summer’s debut full-length collection of poetry, THE HUNGERING YEARS, comes out via Host Publications in 2026. Her collection of poems inspired by The Legend of Zelda, I COULD DIE TODAY AND LIVE AGAIN, is out now via Game Over Books and can be purchased by clicking here! Proceeds from each sale via that link go toward The Sameer Project, which has been working tirelessly to bring food and nutritional supplies to the besieged families of Gaza. Furthermore, Summer also has a zine for sale that you can buy with proceeds also going to the Gaza Poets Society. Otherwise, you can keep up with Summer and her work by going to her website: https://summerfarah.com/
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Thank you so much for reading. Be well, be safe. See you next month.
with warmth,
Jonny
jonnyteklit.com
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