Hush Baby Collective is an Arizona-based, multimedia zine publisher with a focus on feminism. This Friday, the zine is celebrating the release of its fourth issue on mental health awareness with a show featuring local bands such as Draa, Nova Joven, The Ricardos, Language Barrier and Molly & the Molluscs. I had the opportunity to catch up with Hush Baby founder Ryan Mellor and ask her a few questions.
Last semester I met up with Hush Baby at the Phoenix Zine Fair, back when you only had one zine out. Now you're about to release the fourth issue at Trunk Space this Friday, and you show no signs of stopping soon. In fact, it's morphing from a zine into a full-fledged magazine. What's the whole experience like?
Watching Hush Baby Collective grow with each edition is a mixture of
anxiety, accomplishment and gushy love. This project was founded off
the desire to collaborate and bring local creators together and now I
get submissions from around the country and a few out of the country. It
continues to amaze me that because of the Internet, someone in the UK
or Australia can find the Collective and also collaborate with us. I'm
so excited to see how this little collective evolves as it continues to
grow.
Hush Baby is a feminist zine. Each issue adopts a theme such as body positivity and the fourth one deals with mental health awareness. These themes can sometimes be "triggering" or "problematic," but also encourage valuable discourse throughout the community. What is the Hush Baby stance on all this?
For each edition we choose a theme for the artists to focus on because we feel that providing a platform for addressing relevant issues in our community is important. We seek to create a safe place for expression, even if the issues discussed are difficult to swallow.
So far we have talked about feminism, body positivity, self love/care and now mental health awareness. We also released a collaborative zine with Fem Static (another local feminist zine) called The Survivor Zine which focuses on the highly triggering topics of rape culture and domestic violence.
We
hope to educate about the themes we cover through storytelling and art.
So far, I have received amazing feedback from some of the contributors
who say creating something for each edition is therapeutic and can
motivate them to create more art! If this zine can inspire even just one
person in that way, that's all we could ever hope for.
The first issue of Hush Baby was notable because it consisted entirely of female contributors. However, this was quickly dispensed starting with the second issue when you began accepting submissions from everyone. For the fourth issue there is more than thirty contributors. What's the experience like working with such a wide range of artists and writers?
Working with so many different people is an amazing and rewarding experience. Each of the themes are pretty open ended so the message conveyed by each zine is usually unexpected, in the best way. We get tons of different mixed media from a pretty large pool of diverse artists and to me, that proves the power of independent publishing.
There are so many artists, writers, performers, and so on who seek to get their work out there and through DIY printing and (maga)zine publishing they can make their perspective known. Also, I've met so many local artists and made lasting friendships that maybe wouldn't have manifested otherwise.
If someone is interested in Hush Baby, there is of course an awesome release show this Friday, but what else can they do to get involved?
Hush Baby Collective is always seeking new contributors for upcoming zines. You can find us on pretty much any social media platform (look up hushbabycollective on tumblr, Instagram and Facebook.) Also, you can email us at hushbabycollective@gmail.com with any questions! Getting involved is as easy as getting in contact with me (Ryan Mellor), really it's that easy!
Reach the reporter at lsaether@asu.edu or follow him on twitter at @looooogaaan.
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