Man do I like drawing myself dancing. In St Paul…in Berlin…and back at Hampshire. And by golly I sure do like girl music. I have a lot to say about that, and someday I will. But that is for a much longer comic. So just dance. Panel by panel, we’ve got: Britney, Natalie, Taylor, and Barbra.

SO HOW ABOUT BURN BOOK, HUH?  Over the weekend, I sent out an email to a bunch of people asking for submissions to the final two issues.  Now I’m posting it online so that all of you secret readers can see it and come up with some geek and hipster stories for me:

Hey People!

I’m interested in your perspective for my Div III. It’s taking the form of four issues of a magazine called “Burn Book.” (You know, like in Mean Girls.) Each issue has the theme of a different stereotype label. So far I’ve completed two issues: “Slut” and “Hick.” This spring, I’m doing two more: “Hipster” and “Geek.”

The magazine is a mix of writing and comics. I try to figure out which medium best suits each story. (More often than not, it’s comics.) This is NOT a “professional/academic” project. It’s an artistic project. Like all of my work, it sometimes gets rude and crude and opinionated and bitchy. Thank God for that!

So: do you have any good “Hipster” or “Geek” stories? I’m excited about these two topics because I think that they’re more broadly relatable (and less politically loaded) than “Slut” or “Hick.” I hope this will encourage people to be more open about sharing stories.

When working on the previous issues, I found that short, concise stories leant themselves particularly well to comics. Here are some examples of stories that will go into the “Hipster” issue:

• An argument I had with two friends about whether hipsters have “stolen” plaid.
• A conversation between some Freshman girls bragging about how much cocaine and Adderall they do.
• A moment when a friend and I realized that some hipster girl’s GIANT black-frame glasses were so purely decorative that they did not even have glass in them.

So! Please send me stories of miserable Middle School years of geekhood! Or of miserable college years of being surrounded by hipsters! Or even better, moments when you have made someone else feel like a geek! Or when you’ve realized that you yourself were behaving like a hipster! One of the main themes to both “Hipster” and “Geek” is the idea of insider vs. outsider. Many people identify themselves as geeks, but almost no one identifies as a hipster. So I’d be interested in stories that go against that.

You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to, and you’re free to tell me that parts of your story are off limits for the magazine. If I use any of your story, I can run the rough draft by you first. You can even have input on whether it becomes a comic/interview/essay, etc.

If nothing else, I would be interested in gathering people’s definitions of the words “geek” and “hipster.”

DUE DATE FOR HIPSTER: Sunday, February 28
DUE DATE FOR GEEK: Sunday, March 28

Thanks for listening,
Athena

PS If you know of anyone else who might be interested in contributing to Burn Book, forward this along!