This part begins in the early 2000’s:

I started making zines in 2008, inspired by Ayun Halliday’s East Village Inky, a meandering, personal memoir, comic of a Midwest mom living in New York City with her two toddlers. I had also moved from the (“idyllic” Swiss) countryside to the (“bad” part of the) city and had two young children. (I put these words in “quotes” because neither was either.)

I was a USAmerican living in a small attic apartment in a Swiss city with my Swiss husband and our two small children. Man was it rough.

For 3+ years I tried to make sense of life (hilarious, I know) and wrote and published a shapeshifting zine called koo•ki•kascht•li, which I later shortened to koo•ki.

koo•ki issue #10

I published 13 issue of koo•ki mostly about trying to make sense of being a mom of young children.

koo•ki•kascht•li refers to the Swiss German word for kitchen cupboard, which is widely considered one of the most difficult words to pronounce in Swiss German. The shortened koo•ki sounds like kitchen in Swiss German. I always felt like I was being pulled back into the kitchen by my apron strings. Anyway, I love the play on words depending on which language you speak.

That zine is one of the things I am most proud of creating. And others seemed to like it too. People actually paid for it. I had subscribers. I sold it at a local bookshop (shout out to Bider & Tanner to whom I remain loyal to this day by ordering a quarter-ton of books and card decks every year).

Qatar, 2009

When we moved to the Middle East the mail thing (I just deleted a truncated 3-paragraph tangent on this) was much too complicated to sort out when I was having a hard enough time as it was deciphering which container on the shelves was sweet cow milk and which was sour goat milk—not that it wasn’t clear, I just somehow kept grabbing the wrong one.

(Total Tangent: I once bought 6 liters of the latter in a series of ill-advised shopping trips. So we invited everyone we knew over for a bbq and I transformed the sour goat milk into labneh, something I had never heard of before, and everyone was so delighted that I continued to make labneh for the next 5 years).

Onward. That was the moment I switched fully from paper format to digital format and called the blog Just Kooki.

zine turned blog

For 5 years I wrote about living in Qatar. This blog led to me being hired as a travel writer & columnist for a few different online and print publications. But mostly it kept me off the ledge of a very serious bout of depression.

This is where we jump to Switzerland, 2014:

Five years later when I returned to Switzerland with my two daughters, I stopped any tangentially related zine-making. The three of us were busy doing a complete and absolute nose-dive into the abyss of what-the-fuck is this thing called life paired with a side of let’s-dabble-in-general-debauchery and finished off with a heaping how-the-hell do we get through this minute?

After ten years of living back in Switzerland, I finally started finding my feet here. (I gotta be honest, the transition would have been the stuff zines are made for. Moving back to Switzerland, the place I consider home, was excruciating, much more than moving to the Middle East.)

One of the ways I coped was by playing around with some digital zines. I never shared them, or finished them for that matter, but quite liked them (ie they make me and my daughters cry when I read them).

Unpublished zine

One of my favorite covers from an as of yet unpublished zine.

This is the part where we slowly arrive at the present, 2024:

I discovered hand drawn, one-page zines via Austin Kleon and Malaka Gharib. I love the total not-at-all-artifical-ness of a hand drawn zine. The squiggly lines. The moments of hesitation visible in the pooling of ink.

I started making one-page zines for myself over a year ago. The perimeters of this format helps me structure big ideas and thoughts in bite-size bits. I found making one-page zines was incredibly soothing to my mental health. At the time I finding my way through the tail ends of a cPTSD diagnosis. menopause, and transitioning from my adopted role of always-available-and-incredibly-flexible mother, wife, and friend and was moving somewhat blindly through an everybody-out-who-isn’t-me phase.

(PS: I do not recommend trying this on your own; it causes massive disruptions and eruptions. I had the support of 4 professionals—a psychologist, a somatic movement specialist, an astrologer, a psychic—and it was still messy.)

unpublished zine

a zine about what I did during a month of not being on social media

Basel, Dec 2024

Standing in the kitchen I told my husband I had just shared a zine publicly for the first time in 10 years, And would you believe, I started crying, sobbing, actually. It wasn’t just a zine; it was an indicator that the past 10 years of taking care of myself had reached a turning point. That I was beginning a new cycle. And, here we are.

The zines I publish are not polished and perfect. I could do that. But what I want even more is to inspire people to make and do cool shit. I want to show there is an alternative to AI, to filters, to endless apps and editing and all that external stuff. These zines are made using: