Publishing the Electric Dirt Zine

The Electric Dirt Collective is raising funds to publish the first issue of Electric Dirt: A Celebration of Queer Voices and Identities from Appalachia and the South. We're asking for your help to create this zine. 

With under-documented cultures and communities, there is often a gatekeeper. An archivist, sociologist, anthropologist, or historian decides who and what is  and who or what is omitted from history. Someone with access to higher education and resources that many folks, especially in our impoverished region, do not have. That does not happen with Electric Dirt. We rely heavily on submissions. The underrepresented and misrepresented get to represent themselves. We get to define Queer Appalachia and the Queer South with our own images and truths. By embracing a combination of contemporary technology and social media, we are in a constant state of documenting our culture, community, lives and history/herstory. Electric Dirt is a place for us to share those truths and find each other. 

We survive and even thrive through sharing tales of wildcrafting our queerness, foraging for pieces of ourselves within the intersections of coal mines and class, race and religion, food justice and colonialism. With your help, the first issue of Electric Dirt will be printed and ready to be shipped in the fall of 2017. We will be using Appalachian printers to contribute to our regional economy. The first run will cost $12,000 to print. This includes "green" printing, modest fees for collaborators, outsourced design costs, and postage to ship pre-orders and fundraising rewards. 

Why are we asking for double the amount needed to print the first run? We are committed to giving half of the funds raised through our crowdsourcing campaign to QTBIPOC led projects and organizations working in the regions we celebrate. We understand and acknowledge that there is privilege in our numbers as a collective and, for some of us, our whiteness. The regions we celebrate through this project have a  rich history of QTBIPOC making art and organizing around our culture(s). We are inspired by this work and we are mindful not to take limited resources from others in our community through our privilege. We believe that it is fundamental now that we share access to whatever resources we have: through our work, our projects, our social circles, our community, our bank accounts. We need to be able to share those resources and be open to restructuring oppressive systems that perpetuate white supremacy, especially the ones in our own lives. If we want the world to change, we have to be willing to change our own world. We will make the best zine we can with the amount we are able to raise, cardstock and length may vary, but we are committed to sharing the resources that we are able to gather during our fundraising campaign with our community.  


We appreciate everyone that is able to contribute or share our campaign. Check out our website www.queerappalachia.com and please get in touch if you have any questions. All rewards will be shipped in the beginning in the fall of 2017. We will update you with the specific dates as it gets closer. Right now we are planning a September printing and October delivery.