I Hate This Part of Texas #7/Keep Loving Keep Fighting #7
by Hope Amico Author and John Gerken Author
Hope and John team up on this split zine reflecting on hurricane Katrina. Both long-time New Orleans residents, each has to come to terms with loss in their own way. John evacuates, travels, and returns, while Hope stays, applies to school, works, and lives on as best she can. Both Hope and John take their time here, and present a somber account of life after a natural disaster. Their words embody what it means to be human, each story picking up another piece, and slowly putting their world back together.
by Hope Amico Author and John Gerken Author
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Comments & Reviews
“Unlike a normal half ‘n half split zine, these two New Orleans zinesters celebrate, mourn, memorialize and document what amounts to a cohesive collaboration. Each types or handwrites interlocking sections and we are supposed to know by the font when there is a change in voice, but once you dive deep in you really don’t care. You are just deeply engaged in vivid descriptions on what life post-Katrina is like and about friends lost. Particularly moving are the understated tributes to animator/film preservationist/scenester-in-the-best-sense Helen Hill who was murdered protecting her child after a post-Katrina break in. The love and loss expressed in this zine is truly moving. In a postscript not featured in the zine, this spring Hill’s family attended a retrospective of her work at the Orphans film conference in New York, and it was wonderful. So is this zine, ultra highly recommended.”
“Both kids’ work deals with life in New Orleans, two years after Katrina. They, like most everyone there who’s not cashing in on the ‘urban renewal’ [sic], are halfway debilitated by post-traumatic stress. The stories they tell are pretty harrowing. This zine is highly recommended for people who want to stay informed about the post-Katrina fallout in New Orleans.’
"This is sort of a split zine, but not entirely. Each author writes pieces and they’re interspersed throughout. Each author signifies their particular pieces with their own handwritten titles. Both live in New Orleans and the vast majority of this goes from September 2005 through spring of 2007. The writing is excellent, poignant, and occasionally hard to bear because of the level of despair and frustration felt by the authors in the post-Katrina aftermath. This is further compounded by the rise in crime and the loss of their friend to random violence. Perhaps other zinesters have already written up their experiences of life in New Orleans after the levees broke, but I haven’t read it. And in the back of my mind I had thought it would be cool to read what a zinester would say about that event. Hope and John have done a great job here."
"... this zine offers the kind of material and insight needed is we as a community are to make ourselves available to the psychic dealing and repair so lost to the Gulf Coast and its fighting residents ... Deeply honest, the zine unflinchingly details the fears and anxieties of upheaval, intermittent alcoholism, things to be grateful for, resentment, and displacement ... The love and fervor written in the pages of this zine are a small miracle of words that do not die, but lay to rest - breathe. This work embodies the fullness of survival and dedication, an imperative read if the feeling that ought to end up lain in the dirt - isolation, despair, alienation - may seed and flower into hope and continuity."