Fife Queer Zine Fest

Fife Queer Zine Fest

Saturday 21 February, 11-6pm, Forgan Arts Centre, Free

Fife Queer Zine Fest is a new celebration of LGBTQ+ creative activity in Fife. Featuring an artists’ market alongside talks, workshops, music and spoken word, it’s a cosy celebration of proud lives and subversive ideas.

A zine is a wee magazine (that’s where the name comes from!) that anyone can make and share. A zine can be as simple as a folded sheet of paper or as elaborate as a glossy journal, using writing or photography or collage or drawing or anything else the zine-maker enjoys. For decades, zines have been part of LGBTQ+ and feminist culture, featuring at punk nights and community gardens, protests and collective events.

Everyone is welcome to join us at this grassroots event where independent writers and artists can come together to swap and share their publications and learn from each other.

Full Programme

11am-12pm Quiet Hour

Book a ticket for the Zine market quiet hour, a gentle way to experience the festival. Masks encouraged and booking required.

11am-4pm Zine Market

Featuring local artists and zine makers and stalls from Fife LGBTQ+ community groups. Free and unticketed.

11.30am-1pm Cut and Paste Art with Kirsty McKeown

Rejecting fast-speed communications, Dundee Zine Fest Co-Organiser, Kirsty McKeown invites you to think of the humble pin-badges as a space for profound, and often politically-critical statements. This drop-in workshop will you leave wearing your own declaration of DIY cultures.
You are invited to cut and paste images and messages onto badges, making artworks designed to be displayed on jackets, jumpers and backpacks.
All materials will be provided, with source imagery from a range of magazines and print material.

2pm-3.30pm Planter Painting with Equality Network’s Ruth McGill

A chance to paint your own beautiful planter with this travelling workshop from the Equality Network. Rooted in Pride brings LGBTI+ people together to share space, build connection and strengthen community, resilience and wellbeing

1pm-2.30pm Bad Feelings Zine Making with Darcy Leigh

Let’s make a zine together about all the bad feelings we have! Darcy will lead us in a creative workshop to explore the difficult, miserable and resistant, all building up to a one-day collective zine.
Ticketed.

3pm-4pm Comic Making and Self Publishing with Ollie Hicks.

Ticketed

4.45pm-6pm Closing Gig with Rebecca Radical, 4RK4NGEL and Essa Flett

We’re finishing off the day with a cosy gig of words and music from local artists. It’s all free, but do book your free spot! Ticketed.

Plus Highland Zine Bothy zine library, quiet reading area/zine making, food drinks and coffee from EH9 Espresso.

Book a ticket for the quiet hour, talks and workshops on the right of this page. For more information email queeringtheclachan@forganartscentre.co.uk

Practical Information

All activities will take place indoors but you are welcome to explore the grounds and garden. There will be some tickets to talks and workshops available on the day but please book ahead if you can. For drop in sessions you are welcome to join in and drop out at any time. Children of all ages are welcomed but this event is aimed at 16+.

Access

The rooms, grounds and most parts of the garden in use during the event are wheelchair accessible. You can tell us about your access requirements by emailing info@forganartscentre.co.uk. We will ensure there is seating available throughout the venue and grounds. Our foyer will be set up as a comfy, quieter area during the event. For travel directions from Dundee or Fife you can find more information on our Visit page. 

About the contributors

Kirsty McKeown is an artist who works with a variety of materials and processes including college, printmaking, analogue photography and altered objects; often using found materials from her immediate environment to influence what is made. She is a collector and a gatherer and frequently uses archival materials to inform her work. Working predominantly using analogue processes, these hands-on modes of production reflect the labour-focused context of her research and a deliberate rejection of fast-speed digital communication. Repetition and multiples feature prominently in her practice, often creating artworks in the format of zines, posters and badges, ensuring that these politically-critical artworks are accessible in and beyond a gallery context. Alongside this, she is passionate about self-publishing; co-organising Dundee Zine Fest – a semi-annual event that celebrates self-published zines, publications, printmaking, comics and other DIY creative culture.

Equality Network. Rooted in Pride brings LGBTI+ people together to share space, build connection and strengthen community, resilience and wellbeing.

Darcy Leigh is a zinester and academic, one half of Easter Road Press. He’s into DIY everything, Themes from his work include fatness, transness, tits, ambivalence, Jewishness and psychiatry. He appreciates pigeons, innovative zine folds and dark truths. When not in queer zine land, Darcy works in the ivory tower and is also committed to its destruction (aka, is a Lecturer in Law who researches the ongoing history of the British Empire).

Ollie Hicks is a Gender Non Conforming Butch Dyke Freak. They live with their wife Emma Oosterhous on the Wirral, and write, draw and edit comics for silly horny freaks. They are the writer of the graphic novel trilogy GRAND SLAM ROMANCE (co-created with Emma). Their next book with Emma, Gay Persuasion, a modern queer adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, is forthcoming from Avery Hill in 2027. Outside of GRAND SLAM they are best known for Butch Bros and a variety of small press works, including the webcomic Sarararara and the riso-printed comics MASK4MASK and The Cuckening. Their first solo graphic novella Last Summer at Camp Righteous was published in 2025 by Good Comics. Since 2020 they have been professionally editing comics. They edited over 40 titles whilst working in-house at Rebellion (and picked up an Eisner award nomination for their work on The Ballad of Halo Jones Full Colour Omnibus Edition) and more recently co-edited Discord Comics’ Succulent: Trans Inclusive Sapphic Erotic Comics with Tab Kimpton and Niki Smith.

Rebecca Radical

4RK4NGEL (she/they) is a dundee-based queer independent musician and songwriter. Her music is heavily inspired by spoken word poetry, and pierces to the heart of the queer experience while speaking truth to power.

Elisabeth Flett (she/they) is an award-winning writer, theatre-maker, musician and general feminist trouble maker. A 2021 graduate of the Elphinstone Institute MLitt course in Scottish Ethnology and Folklore, Flett is fast becoming a well-known figure in the world of queer Scottish folklore with their 2024 solo storytelling show The Selkie’s Wife enjoying particular acclaim. They are passionate about mental health awareness, LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality, themes which often feature in all forms of their work as a creative practitioner.

The Highland Zine Bothy is Mainland Highland’s first zine library – in a bothy! The artist and volunteer-led initiative has hosted over 30 events locally and internationally, as well as houses a growing collection of over 400 zines from the UK and beyond.

Zine Tablers

• Aileen Lees
• Beth Hamilton-Cardus
• Change Mental Health
• Comics Youth
• Essa Flett
• Fife Pride
• The Gay Saint
• Jo Jackson
• Russell Dornan
• Man* Made / Made Man*
• Nari: nariarts – Zines
• Oakley Lawson
• Pen Pal
• Teddy Thomas

More information

Fife Queer Zine Fest is part of Forgan Arts Centre’s Queering the Clachan, an arts project led by Harry Josephine Giles for LGBTQ+ folk in North East Fife. We’re running workshops in towns and villages across the North East, and making space for Fife queer folk and their friends to have places to meet each other, get creative and share their stories. We want LGBTQ+ lives in North East Fife to be vibrant, connected and celebrated.

Queering the Clachan is funded by Fife Mental Health and Communities Fund.