Riotgrrl Zine & Video Collab in the Brooklyn Museum

November 13, 2023November 12, 2023 | Allyson Shaw

Myself and Laura Splan in the trailer park where we lived while making *Beehive*.
Film still from the video poem “Truss” included in **Copy Machine Manifestos** at the Brookly Museum.

Working in collaboration with artist Laura Splan in the mid-90s, I created a zine called Beehive. Issues of the zine will be included in the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum, opening this month. There will also be a short video poem called “Truss,” included in the show which I created, born out of this collaboration.

Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines is the first exhibition dedicated to the rich history of five decades of artists’ zines produced in North America. Since the 1970s, zines—short for “fanzines,” magazines, or self-published booklets of texts and images, usually made with a copy machine—have given a voice and visibility to many operating outside of mainstream culture. Artists have harnessed the medium’s essential role in communication and community building and used it to transform material and conceptual approaches to art making across all media. This canon-expanding exhibition documents zines’ relationship to various subcultures and avant-garde practices, from punk and street culture to conceptual, queer, and feminist art. It also examines zines’ intersections with other mediums, including collage, craft, film, drawing, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Featuring nearly one thousand zines and artworks by nearly one hundred artists, Copy Machine Manifestos demonstrates the importance of zines to artistic production and its reception across North America.

[above text from the Brooklyn Museum]

I have my own reflections about the zine from my perspective as a disabled, queer, working class woman working outside of mainstream culture looking back on this work.
You can read it at my Substack here.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first comprehensive publication to explore artists’ zines, co-published with Phaidon Press.

Beehive is included with with Niagra’s Destroy All Monsters & Kathleen Hanna’s Bikini Kill zine in Hyperallergic in a piece by Maya Pontone.

A Deep Dive Into the Underground World of Zines

My early zine work led circuitously to the ‘gathering of texts’ in the writing of Ashes and Stones. I have my own reflections about the zine from my perspective as a disabled, queer, working class woman working outside of mainstream culture, looking back on this work. You can read it at my Substack here.

Fitcher’s Bird in Sycorax Journal

November 23, 2021November 23, 2021 | Allyson Shaw

My Fitcher’s Bird Sestina is up at the beautifully edited Sycorax Journal. It’s one of a collection of 13 poems, all new versions of traditional bird-lore fairy tales. Fitcher’s Bird is a Grimm’s Bluebeard tale, and I have set it to the music of the sestina form. I have long been obsessed with the fractal like structure of sestinas, with their intricate feeling of spiralling return.

Ghost Missives Online Writing Workshop

December 3, 2020March 14, 2021 | Allyson Shaw

As part of the Winter’s Last program, I will presenting poetry as well as teaching an online writing workshop on January 29th.

Ghost Missives: A Writing Workshop Exploring Ancestors and Place

The nights are long and the veil is thin. We tell tales of the dead in verse and song and they tell of us in the wind, rain, ice, and stone.

In this collaborative workshop, I will facilitate the writing of letters in prose poetry to and from the ancestors. The writing will be rooted the Scottish landscape. To set the tone, the session will begin with readings specific to the liminal landscape, and move on to collaborative work. I will guide the group as they work with prompts or “Wilding Cards” I will have made up. These will be exchanged by the group. After some dealing and discussion we will get down to write using the prompts we all have. Writers will be invited to play with voice, speaking from the point of view of our ancestors, ourselves or the land itself. In the final section of the workshop there will be opportunity for further collaboration between writers as well as time to read and share with the group.

For more information on tickets and other presenters and workshops, go to the Tiabhsear Collective website.

My Poem “Moth” to be published in The Stonecoast Review

June 28, 2020 | Allyson Shaw

My poem “Moth” about the folk belief that moths were perhaps witches in another form, will appear in the Superstition themed issue of Stonecoast Review, number 13, available from this online bookseller.

Poem in the Monster Verse Anthology

July 28, 2015 | Allyson Shaw

I’m delighted that a poem of mine will be included in the Monster Verse, Poems Human and Inhuman anthology, to be published by Random House on September 15th, 2015. The anthology is edited by Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust.

About the anthology, from the Random House website:

Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.