Issue 08
ZINE TEENS
By Simon Steinhardt
Is apathy really the scourge of teenagers that so many experts claim? Or do kids simply reserve their indifference for academic subjects that don’t seem to relate to the world they live in? If you ask Michael Etter, anyone who tries to tell you that teenagers don’t care about anything has probably spent far too much time observing high school classrooms and not enough of teens’ real lives.
A former schoolteacher, Etter left the classroom looking to find his creative voice as an artist and graphic designer. In the process, he devised a way to offer the same opportunity to disadvantaged teens, providing a forum for creative kids to discover their writing, design, illustration, and photography skills and publish them in a zine. Etter’s project, re:Active magazine, has given dozens of underprivileged teenagers in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood a chance to see their ideas and work taken seriously.
In 2003, during his last semester of art school, Etter was asked by a friend to speak to a group of incarcerated youth about the power of creativity and the freedom it offers. Penniless and disconsolate, Etter didn’t think he would make the best advocate of the joys of artistic expression, but he agreed. “I wound up in a room full of kids without much hope, trying to convince them to have some,” he recalls. “I just told them my story, but something happened in that room that changed my life and put it back on course. My experience mattered to someone else in a way that I found hard to achieve teaching within the public school system.”
The following year, with the help of his friend Kristin Mehus-Roe, Etter launched re:Active and published the first Xeroxed, handstapled issue. For the second issue, they secured a grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department to pay for a professional print job, perfect-bound and glossy. In between issues, Etter’s career trajectory landed him in Lawrence, Kansas, but he remains involved as the director of the program, most recently led by good friend and trusty photographer Dan Monick. Etter intends to set up a similar project in the Midwest, “continuing this multicultural collaborative process with other like-minded souls itching to do something meaningful with their creative talents.”
If teenagers can relate to adult experience at all, the struggle to find oneself seems to resonate particularly well. In turn, adults who recognize the challenges teens face in forging their identities are especially able to provide guidance and support. With re: Active, participants are encouraged to explore their own thoughts, feelings, and lives, and are then taught how to transpose their findings to print. The first two issues—“Beliefs” and “Cure(s)”— focused on ideas that can be particularly troubling to teens who find their lives lacking in those areas; in addressing such subjects through artistic expression, these kids appear to have sublimated their angst into real answers to their existential questions. More than just a learning opportunity and a safe, productive after-school activity for its young contributors, re:Active is a source of pride for them, a tangible record of their achievement, and—could it be?—something for them to care about.