Image by Flickr user donkeycart At an Australian zine festival.

Updates are at the bottom:

Creators and fans of the independent maga-"zine" format have cause to celebrate, the "Southeast Zine Fest" is aiming for its first event on Saturday, October 20, 12-6 p.m.

The official aim of the event is to, "highlight zine makers and distributors throughout the region at a day-long gathering at Charleston's nonprofit arts organization."

The event will be free and held at at Redux Contemporary Art Center, 136 St. Philip Street.

The Festival is also looking to raise $1,200 by Kickstarter.

You can pre-register here.

Here's more about the festival from a release:

With the Southeast Zine Fest, Susan Cohen and Margaret Pilarski aim to make zines in the region more accessible, give a voice to local zinesters, and raise awareness of zines in the Southeast and beyond. "By bringing together the zine devout and the zine curious for a day of distribution, production, speaking, talking, and lecturing from inside and outside of Charleston, we hope to turn the Southeast Zine Fest into an annual event," says Susan Cohen. "We're thrilled to bring together so many communities that we're involved with — local creatives, DIY enthusiasts, writers and artists. Southeast Zine Fest will be a new platform for local and regional voices," says Margaret Pilarski.

We’ll have speakers, workshops, demos, live music, food trucks, and more. Currently, Alison Piepmeier, author of Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, is slated to speak. Workshops being scheduled even include one that will be kid-friendly, so bring the fam. 

And besides good vibes, we'll also be creating the very first Southeast Zine Fest zine! Attendees will be able to submit a page of their creation for the communal zine, which we will print after the fest and distribute to our backers and within the Charleston community. 

We hope you can support the Southeast Zine Fest, whether you register for a table, show up on Oct. 20th, or (most importantly in the lead-up) pitching in a few bucks so we can make this happen. We're hoping that this will be an event for Charleston's creative and DIY community for years to come, but we can't do it without your help!

 

Update October 3: Two snippets of good news for the organizers of Southeast Zine Fest as well as those anticipating the event.

First and foremost, the Kickstarter fund is just $85 dollars away from it's goal. Secondly, Zine Fest organizers Susan and Margaret will be speaking about their passion project to a sold out Pecha Kucha 15 crowd on Tuesday, October 9.