Zines and Handmade Books
Fine Arts as Global Perspective - HNRS 2113

Instructor(s): Amaris Ketcham , Raychel Kool

Course Description

Maybe it starts with an alphabet; maybe a fold grows into a spine. Maybe the manuscript is built by chance, boredom, or challenge. Maybe the material doesn’t last but the message has enough time to travel the world. This course approaches the book both as a form of art and a means of communication. Students will learn the fundamentals of making books by hand, including an introduction to the tools, materials, and processes needed to craft their own books. Each week we will fold, cut, and stitch new books. As word, image, and page come together in unique ways, we will investigate the meaning of the book and our methods of communication.

Texts

Books We’ll Read:

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore,

Text in the Book Format by Keith Smith, and

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston.

Requirements

Each week we will discuss what a book is and what it could be, and we will demo how to construct a new kind of book. Additionally, you will be asked to write both creative and analytic work—those books are mere containers, after all. Book-making assignments will not be provided in advance, but each assignment will require you to think and act creatively when it comes to text, image, and material.

Books We’ll Make: ephemeral, dimensional, collaborative, books. Zines, flagbooks, accordions, some with stab-stitch bindings, and many more, even some that might be edible. Many tools will be provided, hence a $15 course fee; however, students are asked to provide some of their own supplies.

About the Instructor(s): Amaris Ketcham , Raychel Kool

Amaris Feland Ketcham occupies her time with open space, white space, CMYK, flash nonfiction, long trails, f-stops, line breaks, and several Adobe programs running simultaneously. Her books include A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains, Glitches in the FBI, Best Tent Camping: New Mexico, and Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary (forthcoming). Her work with Poetic Routes has been adopted by the Albuquerque City Planning Department, as a way to use poetry as a means of understanding neighborhoods and community character throughout town.

Amaris is the Faculty Advisor for the nationally acclaimed arts and literature magazine Scribendi. In addition to teaching the ins and outs of literary publishing, she teaches nonfiction and poetry comics, narrative journalism, handmade books and zines, and creative placemaking. She has painted murals throughout Albuquerque, acted in a radio drama about the Badlands National Park, and taken students on multi-week camping trips along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Amaris is currently the Chair of the Student Publications Board.

Raychel Kool is a senior majoring in Honors Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts. They're an Honors Roadrunner and the managing editor for Conceptions Southwest, and they were last year's managing editor for Scribendi. Raychel's zines have been featured at the Albuquerque Zine Fest in 2024 and 2023, by Indie Northern Kentucky, and by Porch Beers Press. They've also led several zine workshops for the Stay Together Appalachian Youth Project. Raychel's other creative work has been published in volume 36 of Scribendi, by the Rural Assembly, and in an upcoming anthology by the University Press of Kentucky. Raychel is a big fan of audiobooks, sun tea, and porch sittin'.