For a week at the end of November/beginning of December 2021, the Red Rover Reading Series invited us* to take part in their “Reading Experiment in Progress,” described as “a 6-day experiment in community and generosity”. We* put out some fliers with a prompt for this zine and then came in one afternoon for an hour with all our glue sticks and typewriters and scraps of paper to put something together together.

*us! who is us: me, you, all of us. specifically, a variety of chicago artists and writers, generally, everyone who wandered through the cultural center during that week and came in contact with the readings and performances and installations going on

*we! here is some people from meekling press

Here was the prompt we proposed:
Write, doodle, draw, paint, sketch, collage, compose, collaborate, collect, communicate your vision of the world you are working towards. What does it look like? How do we take care of each other? What do we eat? Where do we live?

And here are the responses. It’s weird, it’s messy, it’s 2021, baby. Scraps of paper with wishes written on them and tossed to the wind.

Love,
meekling press

P.S.: The Red Rover Reading Experiment (the theme of which was “how can we create change in the world right now?”*) took place within the Lumpen exhibit called “Successful Failures” at the Chicago Cultural Center.

*and the world is changing right now whether we create it or not! big, powerful, necessary, painful, beautiful, and terrible changes, every which way.

come make a zine with us

Hi friends! Long time, no blog. We’re going to be participating in a great event at the Chicago Cultural Center this week, and we’d like you to join us if you can! We’ll be there on Saturday, December 4th from 1-2pm working on a zine project, and if you’re there too, we’ll have some typewriters and gluesticks and collage stuff to cut up and some other things probably, and we can make some pages together. (If you can’t make it this weekend, send us something through email or drop something off in a drop box we’ll leave down there at the exhibition site later this week.)This is part of the Red Rover Reading Series’s event “Reading Experiment in Progress”, a whole week of events at the Cultural Center — which is also part of Lumpen’s “Successful Failures” exhibit — featuring lots of artists from around Chicago. I’ll put more info from them about that below, but first some details about our project and how you can participate:

the prompt/theme of the zine!

Write, doodle, draw, paint, sketch, collage, compose, collaborate, collect, communicate your vision of the world you are working towards. What does it look like? How do we take care of each other? What do we eat? Where do we live?

a few guidelines

• Your page should be 4.25 inches by 5.5 inches (a quarter of a letter-size sheet of paper), or if it’s not, we’ll resize it to fit
• If you don’t want to be anonymous, please include your name on your page somewhere. If you do want to be anonymouse, that’s perfectly fine too.
• Have fun. We’ll probably reproduce the zine in only one or two colors and your page might end up looking a little different because of that.

how to submit a page to the zine project:

Here are your options:

1) Come join us on Saturday afternoon 1-2 pm to work on it in person together

2) Email a page that’s 4.25 x 5.5 inches big to meeklingpress@gmail.com (that’s a quarter of a letter-size paper)

3) Pick up a submission sheet at the Cultural Center XPO site (where all the performances are happening). We’ll have sheets and set up a box to drop them in by this Wednesday afternoon. Sort of a scavenger-hunt/wild goose chase option for you adventurous ones.

Red Rover Series presents
“Reading Experiment in Progress”

Mini live free events
November 30th-December 5th
at the Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington Street
in the NFO XPO of the Michigan Ave galleries
**covid protocols in full effect so please mask up**
https://tinyurl.com/redroverseries <<< Click here for the full lineup

Readings, performances, talks, rehearsals,
improvisations, meditations, writing sessions
+ more featuring Chicago writers & artists
as part of the Lumpen exhibit “Successful Failures”
https://tinyurl.com/successfail

Curated by Jennifer Karmin
& inspired by Red Rover’s ongoing collaboration
with 100 Thousand Poets for Change, our focus is:
How can we create change in the world right now?
https://100tpcmedia.org/