Please help us welcome Dylan of Dylan Garcia Poetry to The 815 Artisan Collective!
Dylan’s creative journey started at just six years old, with some paper destined for the recycling bin becoming the pages of a very first written and illustrated book. As Dylan describes it, that was a “first attempt at self-publishing.”
Turns out, that was only the beginning.
In the late teens, Dylan discovered slam poetry and began feverishly writing and performing poetry on stages throughout the Midwest. By the early 20s, national poetry slam competitions became part of the journey. Today, that love of words has found another creative outlet: zines!
If you’ve never heard of a zine (pronounced “zeen”), you’re exactly the person Dylan hopes to reach at The Collective. A favorite format is the mini zine—a tiny six-page DIY booklet created from a single sheet of paper. Zines give Dylan a way to combine poetry and other thoughts with visual art, collage, stamping, and paper crafting. Dozens have already been created, with plenty more ideas waiting their turn!
Dylan describes the work simply: Handmade. DIY. No generative AI.
Accessibility is an important part of Dylan Garcia Poetry. The zines are intentionally affordable, but they’re also accessible in another way: the goal is for someone to look at one and think, “Hey, I could make this too.”
Dylan believes that the more art that exists in the world, the more likely people are to create. A big part of joining The Collective is introducing more people to zines, building awareness of this unique form of creative expression, and hopefully inspiring even more zines to be made.
And the creative process is wonderfully relatable: eight hours at work, home to scramble and make things before bedtime, then rinse and repeat! Even after printing, cutting, and folding hundreds of mini zines, that very first fold of a new batch can still bring a moment of second-guessing.
One of Dylan’s favorite parts of creating is finishing something and knowing that no one else in the world has made that exact thing. By sharing that creativity with others, Dylan hopes to inspire more people to experience that feeling for themselves.
Stop by The Collective, pick up one of Dylan’s mini zines or buttons, discover a form of art you may not have encountered before, and maybe even leave inspired to make a zine of your own.
We’re excited to welcome Dylan Garcia Poetry to The 815 Artisan Collective!
