By Products of the Editing and Layout Process.

On Thursday July 22, we had our last work meeting. I collected all of the drawing and writing, asked that everyone send me digital versions of their work, if they had any. I downloaded a free trial of Adobe Photoshop and have been scanning and playing around. I got a really cool idea this morning about using a map of Queens as a unifying factor.

I don't want to unveil too much of what I've been doing. If I do, no one will need to see the exhibition and no one will even need to buy the finished zine, because they can see it all on line. I createand gatehr these snippets that i think point to the eventual style of the finished zine. From now unitl August 21, our unveiling of Twelve Lives In Queens County, I'll share snippets without giving too much away.

Name Change

I've been meaning to change the name of this blog for weeks. It became clear that there would have to be twelve collaborators in the project. I've known this since late June but for some reason kept postponing the change. So finally, the name is changed but the intention is the same.

I haven't been paying attention to the blog.

I've been really negligent about writing in the blog. The project has me very busy, I do one thing and I find ten more things to think about and to do. Being somewhat organizationally impaired, I find mmyself thinking when I should be sleeping.

Last week I began photographing people for the cover of the zine and for the postcard to publicize the exhibiton. Because I had to change the meeting time, I also didn't get to see as many of the participants as I usually get to see. Thanks to the magic of e-mail, I've gotten to see most people's progress on their individual pages.

I'm looking for a printer. I downloaded a couple of trials on programs to help me with the layout.

I'm adding photos of Amanda, Bob, Dena, Joey, Juan and Teli. These are most likely the photos for the cover. But that's all the previews any body gets. You can't see it til it's finished!

Yikes!

These are the photos I thought I added to the other post!

The Exquisite Corpse Will Create a Remarkable Zine.

These are some photographs of our second session July 1, 2010. Sandra Arias, one of our Zine project participants, took these photos. With these photos, she told the story of our group and our work very nicely .

The objective for this work session was to encourage collaboration between participants.

We began by playing the Surrealist Parlour Game, Exquisite Corpse. I deliberately gave Parlour its arcane, archaic spelling for a reason. You know, that's the game where you fold the paper into four parts and then everyone draws a different body part and writes a different word. It is a collaborative game where you never know whats going to turn up. From there, everyone chose someone they wanted to work with for the rest of the session. I tried to get writers and visual artists to connect with each other, rather than have two writers or two visual artists work together.

Whats great about this project is that people are learning from each other and doing lots of new things. Goodness knows, my computer skills are improving. Just to post stuff on a blog and have it make some kind of sense, is an adventure for me.

It was also not such a hot day as our first day.

We've had our second work session and I haven't finished posting photos of the first. We did a lot of talking, looking and writing. Some of our interchange was, as one of group said "A Line drawn in the sand about what life in Queens is." We had a lively interchange.

I'm posting photos here by Aurore Maximin, one of the participants in the project.