Spotlight on Jam Doughty
/BY CARA SCHAEFER
From ice crystals to backyard noises to beetles, art can be a great way to process what you observe. We spoke with Jam Doughty, a Chicago-based artist, about zine making, urban invertebrates, and how to make your own nature zine.
Photos courtesy of Jam Doughty.
OUT THERE: For those who aren't familiar with the term, what is a “zine”?
JAM DOUGHTY: It's short for magazine. It started out as a personally Xeroxed, manually cut and pasted, little fan zine. Some of the first zines were science fiction fanfiction zines in the 60s. Most of the first ones were actually written by women who weren't allowed to really participate in science fiction, and so they were making their own fanzines about Kirk and Spock.
OT: What got you into making zines?
JD: I actually come from a family of zine makers. My grandparents made zines in the 80s. I've always been inspired by their work, like my grandpa would make rubber stamp zines and all these cool mail art zines, and had a system of pen pals — kind of like a mailing list that he would use. My grandma also made a recipe and poetry zine, and my mom would make zines with her friends in high school. I didn't start making zines until I moved to Chicago four years ago. Before that I grew up in Washington State.
OT: What was that transition like?
JD: I have really enjoyed it. I wanted to live in a different ecosystem, specifically an urban ecosystem. Although I can't just go out in my backyard and stroll through the woods as easily, I do feel like I'm experiencing just as much weird nature here. And it's just so much more densely packed and human adapted.
OT: How was it that nature began to play a role in your zine making?
JD: The impetus for me making zines was observing the urban nature interaction. My first one was of snow crystals during my first winter here, because I'd never seen that diamond dust snow before. So I drew a bunch of different snow crystal formations. And then my next few zines were about winter textures in the city, plants in hibernation, plant detritus caught in city grates and bricks and stuff...I was just really obsessed with all of the textures of winter. Even though it's really tough. I mean, everything is dead over the winter.
OT: What nature do you tend to notice walking around the city of Chicago, and has anything you observed surprised you?
JD: All the time! I am a plant person. I really love looking at the ways that plants find any niche that they possibly can in a city and take advantage of it. I love watching like, “Oh, nobody pulled this weed a few years ago, and now it's a tree — and has completely destroyed this fence. Good job tree.” Or in some neighborhoods, we have melanistic squirrels. They’re all black and they're really cute!
OT: One of your zine series is called “City Inverts”. What's one of your favorite invertebrates from this series and why?
JD: Before the pandemic, me and my coworkers would do outdoor programming, so we would go on a lot of bug hunts. We would flip over logs, and try and find different creatures. That's where l have the most familiarity with rollie pollies, millipedes, centipedes...all of those guys. One that I didn't include in the “City Inverts”, because it is really rare and I had never seen it before, was terrestrial flatworms. They look like they should be in the Mariana Trench, like they should be far underwater.
OT: So you’ve also done zines on indoor nature. What does indoor nature mean to you?
JD: Part of my philosophy as a nature educator is to try and make nature as accessible as possible. And I think the best way to do that is to just build an awareness that you live in an ecosystem, and you're part of an ecosystem even when you're surrounded by human-made stuff.
Indoor nature journals started at the beginning of the pandemic, because I was trying to figure out something that was still nature related, but that wouldn't encourage anything that could be considered risky. I think it's important to reinvent and re-envision space, especially when you’re stuck there. I wanted to try to help kids, or whoever wanted to fill out the zines, work through their house in a more positive way, because that's something that I was really struggling with.
OT: If someone's feeling inspired after reading this, how would they go about making their own nature zine?
JD: The mini zines that I make are actually folded out of a piece of printer paper, like a single piece of eight and a half by eleven paper. And there are lots of easy guides online that will show you the folding pattern. It's pretty simple. That's part of why I like the medium so much, because it's so xeroxable.
There are so many different ways to approach it. I have one friend who instead of drawing plants in her zines, she dries them and then very carefully collages them onto the original and then Xeroxes it from that. So it's not just for drawers, you can make these however you choose. There are a lot of people who make perzines, which stands for personal zines. Those are more like diary scenes. You can even just write down all of your observations — all of your reflections after a walk through the park, or a gaze out your window. There’s leaf rubbings. You can do bark rubbings. You can draw maps. You can include any way that you process the environment that you're in. Mini zines are such a flexible medium. And if anyone feels inspired to make a zine after reading my zines and wants to do a zine swap, I am always down to trade zines!
