After collaborating for a few years in trying to support the other’s writing, two theological peers with a shared passion for all things pop culture and the vision of a better world, they decided to embark on a mission to notice and name everything extraordinary in the guise of the ordinary.
Then two years ago for Pentecost 2018, a fanzine was born. One member of this pair is a Gen-X holdover from the 1980s and 90s fanzine movement, the days defined by scissors and scotch tape, by lots of caffeine and late nights at Kinkos. Expressing explicitly at the intersection of “theology, popular culture, and social change,” our collaborators found their niche and have evolved into a sort of practical collective for putting these things out there into the world.
Joined by a regular contributing editor in fall of 2018 for the Advent issue and consistently touched by the quality of each of their other collaborations, Ordinary Space is going strong as we face an uncertain future. This note narrates our mission going forward.
For one, we are not a business, but a small-scale collective. For the core collaborators, this a labor of love that functions on the principle of a gift economy; that is the publishers donate any of the expenses associated with production and distribution. All our work from the fanzine side is available for free. If you want to be on the mailing list, just give us your physical address. Everything is there in the spirit of the “creative commons,” but if you share, we do request that you note the source and give credit.
After a delay of many days, all fanzine content will be posted on our website; so, for example, content from the Advent 2019 issue is being posted in anticipation of the Pentecost 2020 issue. All our old issues should now be there online. We will follow this pattern into the future.
Beginning this spring, we begin “ordinary riffs,” online only content, short takes on new stuff. We are also piloting a video series, a kind of “pirate TV podcast” model on the old YouTube. The first took place about a month ago, with author David Dark. A portion of this transcript will appear in the upcoming Pentecost print version. Stay tuned for more of these broadcasts to drop, as we have time to produce them.
The entire project is mostly intuitive, driven by generous attractions and sacred passions, but we take our three-fold identity seriously in terms of how we produce our content. That is, most essays begin with some kind of popular object, be it music or movie, comic or podcast, book or blog, or often the entire identity of a popular person or project, and then interpreting it, speaking to it, through an interpretive lens that privileges social liberation and theological wisdom. We then like to spice that mix with visual art and poems from our array of contributors.
Please join the mailing list to receive the fanzine at home (by filling out this form):
https://forms.gle/BTkHLx37idTAbu2s7
Contribute? Questions? Please email us at:
ordinaryspacezine@gmail.com
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