A Poet's Life: On Making, On Being, On Surviving with Taylor Zhang '21

A Poet's Life is a series where we talk with Columbia poets about everything from living as a poet to making a living as a poet. 

Here, we speak with alumna Taylor Zhang '21 about Choo Choo Press, the Risograph press she runs with artist Emily Bluedorn. Choo Choo Press is a small press that publishes literary zines with an emphasis on nostalgia, obsession, and states of liminality.

Zhang is an English teacher. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, The Cortland Review, The Vassar Review, The Louisville Review, The Drift, and Columbia Journal. Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, she now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

How did you and Emily Bluedorn come to create Choo Choo Press?

Taylor Zhang (TZ): Emily and I were studying in Paris and at the time we were both interested in pursuing different careers. We actually met at an interview for a corporate internship and neither of us followed that path. Meeting each other in Paris was a stroke of good luck because both of us had been secretly harboring artistic dreams, but we never had the confidence to follow them. She really changed the course of my artistic career, and I think I changed hers too, in the sense that we gave each other the confidence we needed to pursue art. After the study abroad experience, I pivoted and decided to get an MFA. A year later, she ended up doing an associates program at Parsons School of Design and is now getting her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Both of us love zines and comics and we used to talk forever about these little comics we read as kids. There's also a strong overlap in how much we love ephemera. So it started from loving and reading physical things like zines and comics. From there, we began talking about our common interests—a lot of our zines are about nostalgia or obsession or childhood. Those aesthetic desires were the same for us, so after a while, we started making our own zines. Creating Choo Choo Press was about finding a community of people who want to get their work out there and who love physical, tangible books.

What do you find meaningful and valuable about zine culture and microprinting?

TZ: There's a kind of value and preciousness that arises from having a physical copy and being able to touch and hold onto it. I also feel like [making zines] is such a beautiful way to create without having any of the exterior forces of corruption, which sounds really intense and maybe a little bit overblown, but there's no sense of "I'm doing this for someone else. I'm doing this for attention. I'm doing this for clout. I'm doing this for fame." It really becomes about the question, "Why do I make art? I make art because I feel compelled to make art." In some ways, you get to trap that pure form of creation when you self publish and when you do small print runs. A third reason I love zine culture is because it's been so integral to marginalized communities. It's closely linked to underground culture and that's really appealing to me.

Why did you decide to print with Risograph printers?

TZ: We found Risograph printers when we were both already living in New York City, and once we saw what it looked like and the kind of projects that had been printed on Risograph, we were both in love. For people who don't know about Risograph, Risograph printers are printers that come from Japan and were initially made for commercial use. Digital printers have now eclipsed [what Risograph can produce], so the use for Risograph now is more aesthetic. They print in layers. So you have to print a blue layer, then a black layer, or a pink layer and a blue layer. You never quite know what the color is going to look like until the layer has set.

Another thing about Risograph printers is that they're prone to making mistakes, such as little skips of color or little ink spots here and there. We were really enthralled by that. For us, not knowing what the final product looked like was an exhilarating experience. Not knowing if there's going to be mistakes is exciting, especially for the two of us, because we're such perfectionists. There's a sense of letting go when you use a Risograph printer, and also a sense that there will never be a print run like this because it's so unique.

Could you walk me through the process of Risograph printing?

TZ: You start with a digital file. Then there's what looks like a big printer and these drums of ink. You put in a black drum of ink if you're printing in black, then you take the drum out and put in a drum of blue ink. You put the same sheet of paper with the black ink into the printer and the blue ink will come out, too. The ink is kind of wet. It's a heavy ink, so you need to dry the paper out for a bit. After that, you can cut and fold, then either bind [the zines] with a spiral coil or staple them. You can do the classic eightfold where you fold it up, tear it in the center, then fold it back into a booklet. There are so many different ways that you can create a book once you've printed off the Risograph printer.

It sounds like such a loving and intentional process.

TZ: I think it goes back to the idea of creating art for art's sake or feeling a connection with what you're making. What's the point of making seventy-five copies of a zine that most people will never hear about? I do it because I love to do it and the artist loves to do it, then we have something beautiful and precious and real in our hands.

How do the layers of color and bright colors of the Risograph printers reflect the language and the topics that Choo Choo Press wants to center?

TZ: A lot of our projects are centered on feeling and bodily experience, and I think you can see that in the physical copy of these texts. A lot of what we work through is rituals or obsession, and I think the vessel of these printed copies feels like it's providing a precious mold around the project itself. Our last project was Green Dream by alumnus Peter Patapis '20. He was writing from the stance of occult poetics and was interested in letting go of the ego, and there was so much about nature in [the work]. The printer came back with this heavy green ink that would smudge on your hand. So when reading, you might get some green on your hands. We also included an insert that we didn't mention in the table of contents, so the insert was a sort of Easter egg. You would flip through the book and all of the sudden there's this insert you weren't expecting, [which mirrors] the way we aren't expecting the insight that comes out of egoless writing.

Could you share more about some of the collections you've worked on?

TZ: We mostly do chapbooks of poetry and literary zines. We wanted the output to be diverse, and I'm pleased with how different each project has been. They each have their own personalities.

After we did our own zines, we first went to my friend, alumna Veronika Kelemen '21. She was writing about an ex—her partner now—during a time when they were separated. There were these images in her work of heartbreak, loss, obsession, blood, and tattoos. She has tattoos all over her body and those formed an inspiration for the images we made. The cover is a dark oxblood, and the back is even darker. So it looks like fresh blood and dried blood. It's like the beginning of the wound.

Then we did Reign is Over by alumna Emily Simon '21. I had such a fun time working with her and editing her manuscript. I noticed there was a sense of the personal and the political [in the work], so I separated them into three sections that tracked something intimate. She had experienced the end of a relationship that was really affecting her, and also the political turmoil of the last several years. There's a middle section where those two threads are intertwined and it all ends up culminating in the last piece. I loved working with her to shape her poems into a chapbook that had an emotional and intellectual arc. Emily Bluedorn had so much fun making the chapbook's collages. We pulled the images from popular culture, from institutions of power, and also from small kitschy items that were just lying around Emily's house—crocs, pigeons, and just strange things she had.

The most recent zine is with Grace Fellman—Impossible Home, which is a kind of return to her roots. It's a classic eightfold zine about growing up in the suburbs and instances of spirituality, mysticism, the cosmic, or the sublime that pop up in places that you wouldn't expect them to. There's a tension between the artificial and spiritual as they intertwine.

What does the distribution of the work between you and Emily Bluedorn look like?

TZ: Emily does all of the covers, the inside images, and the layout. I focus mostly on editing the text and working with the artist to make sure the project is cohesive. The part that becomes collaborative is what we want the binding to look like. Do we want it to be staple or coil? What colors do we want to use? What size should it be? What paper should we use? What stickers should we include when we mail them out in our envelopes? How do we want to launch? All of this becomes a collaborative process that happens after we get the final layout.

What does the editing process between you and the artist look like?

TZ: Most of the time they'll send me their poems and I'll look through and try to identify certain themes or images. From there, I might ask to see more, or if they've given me a lot, I'll start excising. It's about trying to find the right amount of text. I'll read through the manuscript and provide notes. Their response to my notes and suggestions feels almost like a secondary creative response, especially when they change the order [of poems] or insert a new poem. Then I get that second draft back, and it's an infinite conversation back and forth. I would say that in the first few stages, I see the huge body of work, and in the second stage, we're trying to find the heart of the zine. The rest is classic line edits and stylistic suggestions. 

Emily also plays a role in this. Just the same way that I talk to her about layout, she also plays a huge role in the text. She almost always reads that first draft of what the zine will be and gives her own thoughts. Then we all talk about the images or visual elements from the text that have inspired her.

Have you faced any challenging moments since starting the press?

TZ: A major issue is that during COVID, we had no access to printers, so we had to send our printing out. So a huge challenge for us is the logistical aspect. Where are we going to print this? How are we going to print this? How are we going to fund the printing if we don't print it ourselves? We've come a long way from bothering the lab assistants at Parsons to stay an extra hour so we could print our own stuff, but these questions still do arise. It's a dream of ours to own our own Risograph printer, so we can do the work ourselves, but as it stands, we're mostly renting studio space to print.

I would love to learn more about your own writing. As a poet and nonfiction writer, how do you see these genres speaking with each other in your work?

TZ: I feel like they come from the same creative impulse, but they have different priorities. In nonfiction, there's more emphasis on your logic and the idea you're trying to present, the criticism you're trying to provide, or the narrative experience you want your reader to have. In poetry, all the rules are off the table. Every time you write a poem, the poem is living in a world of its own logic, so every time it's something completely different. I think it means that poetry is much more experiential—there isn't the same idea of a message being brought about. I think most people toggle between having something they really want to say and having an emotion or a bodily experience that can only be recreated through poetry.

As a recent graduate of the program, how has your relationship with writing changed after you graduated?

TZ: When I was in the program, I wasn't interested in submitting my work. I was interested in producing work and I was not at a stage where I wanted to show anyone anything I was working on. I just wanted to read as much as possible and write as much as possible. After the program ended, a few things happened. The first one is that financial concerns became more real. I was adjuncting and working as a waitress. I was also copywriting. I had a million different jobs. Somehow, these financial concerns translated into a real sense of urgency to get my creative work out there. That was when I started submitting poetry, pitching different essays, talking to people in the community, and taking Choo Choo Press more seriously. My relationship with writing has definitely evolved since being in the safe haven that was graduate school, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve, too.