The Greenbrier Valley now has a place to highlight the art projects that don’t end up on local shelves or walls in the community.
Claire Jarvis and Hannah Pence created Zinebrier, an easier to produce magazine highlighting work by local artists. After putting out a call for local art for the Greenbrier Valley community, Pence and Jarvis began putting the zine together with the loose themes of spring and the loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.
“The feeling behind the zine was pushed by the pandemic,” Pence explained. “We couldn’t touch each other or see each other or hold each other for so long. We all watched our lives on the internet. I wanted something we could hold. You could hold the community in your hand. Physically in your hand.”
The goal is not to present clean art, made by highly proficient and technically perfect artists. Instead, the zine is looking to capture the grittiness of works in the process of becoming. The more casual style is built for doodles, poem fragments, photos, coloring book pages, and incomplete digital art. As a result, the many artists that contributed got to show off completed work and a peek behind the creation process.
“A lot of our friends that submitted work in the service industry and they’re all so talented,” Jarvis said. “It’s kind of disheartening sometimes when you work in the service industry, especially if you worked through the pandemic. You have people treat you like shit. You’re like ‘I’m more than this job.’ I just wanted to celebrate our friends who are talented and work hard and really showcase them.”
“We don’t really have a space for how weird we are,” Pence added. “We don’t have a gritty, grungy place for that. I always felt like it was missing from here.”
The cover art was illustrated by Emily Sullivan, but it wasn’t designed to be the cover. Pence explained that after she submitted it, it was picked for the cover for being both striking and being one of the many times Sullivan’s art style appears in the zine. Jarvis noted that “she submitted so many cool things,” and “she has a bunch of little doodles on the bottom of pages.”
The zine’s cover |
The pair met while working with Greenbrier Community School, moving boxes from its previous location to the current location. Jarvis had previously seen an established community zine and wanted something similar to flourish in Greenbrier County.
“I worked with a zine in Greensboro, I’ve only lived here for two and half years,” Jarvis explained. “Local bands, local restaurants, stuff like that. I saw the editor’s side of that, but I didn’t know what all it could entail. I wanted to start one too, but I was pretty shy about it. I wanted to see this cool thing happen, but I didn’t want to be in charge of it. Because the community is so accepting, I thought that if I messed it up, no one would be that mad at me.”
Pence continued, saying they “were processing the pandemic together. … Claire mentioned she’s always wanted to do a zine here. I hadn’t lived here for five years, but this has always been my community and I wanted to do one too. We let that sit for a year, until it felt like it was okay, we’re all getting vaccinated, we’re all going to see each other soon.”
Because initial discussions began as COVID lockdowns began, when vaccinations began, the pair once again began planning the zine’s theme to highlight the return to normal. However, this did not quite stick.
“We got a lot of photos of the vaccination stations and site, but not really a lot of COVID-specific art,” Jarvis said. “I did like that it more so became spring-themed.”
The same loosely-themed feeling is also what the pair hopes to cultivate with the next issue.
“We put [the first issue] out there as the spring issue. We got a lot of things that were spring-oriented, and I think that [with the next one] if we say it’s going to be released on Halloween, it will inspire people to make it spooky. But it doesn’t have to be at all with the theme!”
The selection includes work from Keslie Tyson, Diane Hall, Magdalen Karrs, James Addison, Mark Trent, Kristen Rehak, Colter Lewis, Lyla Smith, Brehana Scott, Francis Xavier Nelle, Marguerite Kemp-Sherman, Toby Garlitz, Ender James, Tulip Parsons, Indigo Graves, Larry Berger, Diane Hall, and photos from this writer.
To learn how to donate to the next Zinebrier issue or get a digital copy of the first issue, reach out to Pence and Jarvis at maryhannah.pence@gmail.com or heyheyckj@gmail.com.
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