Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Noemi Martinez of the zine and blog Hermana, Resist and of the organization Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Justice Collective.

Maegan "Mamita Mala" Ortiz pointed me in the direction of The Sanctuary, Building Bridges & Breaking Down Walls. Anyone interested or working in/with immigration, (im)migrant rights and civil rights should be turned on to this. 100% pro-migrant, my kind of place. 

Vivir Latino keeps me grounded on what's going on in the land of Latino politics and entertainment, often with that tongue-in-cheek attitude I love.

In zine talk, I'm very excited about Alex Wrekk's second edition of Stolen Sharpie Revolution, and must soon get this in my grubby hands. I'd already been doing zines when it came out years ago, but the sheer wealth of info contained, makes me, well, giddy. When I was tabling with my "traveling zine library" of a couple of hundred zines packed into suitcases, I told zine newbies that Stolen Sharpie Revolution was *the* zine bible.  Alex makes buttons, with that small distro feeling we all love and miss.

I'm in between rented houses, as usual, and half my things are packed including books, posters and suitcases full of zines. But I get by on easily digestible but thought provoking zines with copious amounts of radical love from brokenbeautiful press, Nadia, letter writing, and Raven's Eye (whose posts remind me of radical love that doesn't make it into books).

Bio: Noemi Martinez describes herself as "a Chicana/Boriqua writer & activist spiller of truths and secrets living in the militarized borderland of deep South Texas." She writes the zine Hermana, Resist and blogs at hermanaresist.com.  She's a member of the Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Justice Collective. Being vegan in the land of cabrito and fajitas was not challenging enough, so she organizes Mujerfest, Homenaje a Nuestras Muertas, and Valley Voices against Violence. She's also a "single mami to two kick ass future alternative media makers." You can also find her work on Twitter at @5secondpoems 

Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Broken Pencil editor Lindsay Gibb.

I started making zines when I was 15 and I stapled my last page when I was 21. A short run by comparison to other zine-makers who, when one zine is played out, start up a new title, and who foresee no end to the zine as their means of creative output. And while I read new zines on a daily basis, I recently when stumbled upon Teri Vlassopoulos’s blog and was brought back  to the days when I used to make my own. Vlassopoulos was the creator of Melt the Snow. It was one of my favorite zines in the ‘90s, and she uses her blog to talk about zine history, Canadian lit mags and books she’s recently dug into. She also writes about zinemaking in Shameless magazine’s new anthology She’s Shameless which is due out at the end of June.  

When I’m not reading or writing about zines I’m usually knitting. I’m relatively new to knitting—only 5 years in the game—but the obsession swelled quickly in me. Some of the best social networking sites I’ve found for knitters include Ravelry—where you can share patterns, organize your projects using the sites cataloguing tools and show your latest creations to other users and Men Who Knit—where male knitters can create profiles and blog about their projects. Church of Craft is, of course, a great example of a way to not only connect knitters and other crafters online, but also to lure them off the web and into workshops, craft retreats and stitch and bitch nights in various cities. And whether you care about knitting or not, Thread Banger's recent "DIY Roundup" of the funniest knitting patterns on the net is definitely worth a look.

Since I write about documentary filmmaking on the side, and I’m a David Lynch fan, those two things combined have me interested in Lynch’s Interview Project, in which takes a trip across America to meet regular folks and talk to them about their lives. As Lynch says “it’s something that’s human and you can’t stay away from it.”

I wanted to give an honorable mention to the sites I frequent when I really don’t want to be productive for a half hour: Fuck You Penguin, CakeWrecks and Totally Looks Like.

Bio: Lindsay Gibb is the editor of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts. She is based in Toronto where she is also a staff writer for Realscreen, a trade magazine for documentary filmmakers, and an associate editor and co-founder of Spacing magazine, which examines Toronto’s urban landscape. Watch for Can’tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil, to be published by ECW Press in Fall 2009.

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger most weekdays. Today's guest is William Patrick Tandy, creator and editor of Smile, Hon, You're in Baltimore! (a Best Zine nominee for the 2009 Utne Independent Press Awards ).  We asked him for five links and here's what he came up with. 

Baltimore has never done a particularly good job marketing itself.  The Powers That Be in the nation’s 20^th largest metropolitan area strive for that “big city” recognition among out-of-towners who are otherwise abandoned to negotiate for themselves the gap between John Waters and David Simon – each of whom, like the world’s religions, might possess kernels of the truth, though never its entirety.  The following subjects – lesser known beyond the city limits – are a mere sampling of the scuffed heritage and earthy character that still captivate me, a Jersey boy, nearly 10 years after my arrival…

A. Aubrey Bodine: From 1920 until his death in 1970, legendary Baltimore Sun photographer A. Aubrey Bodine documented life in Baltimore and across Maryland in the pictorialist style while simultaneously exhibiting his work and winning competitions the world over.  Today, Bodine’s daughter, Jennifer, maintains an extensive, ever-growing online database of his work, offering reproductions for sale.

The Johnny Eck Museum: Billed as the “Half-Man”, Baltimore native son Johnny Eck made a name for himself early in life through appearances on the sideshow circuit and, most notably, in director Tod Browning’s 1931 classic Freaks.  In later years, Eck became a renowned painter of window screens, a common practice in his East Baltimore neighborhood since the early 1900s.

Baltimore John Watch: Outraged by the area’s illicit sex trade (and attendant criminal activity), a handful of bold (and tech-savvy) residents of Baltimore’s Pigtown neighborhood launched Baltimore John Watch in 2008.  Contributors document the often brazen activities (which frequently go down – no pun intended – within feet of the elementary school, during school hours), going so far as to post photographs of the perpetrators, their vehicles and plate numbers.

Killduffs.com: Curator Thomas Paul maintains this online repository devoted primarily to collecting the histories and images of old movie houses in Baltimore and across Maryland, most of which have been razed, long ago converted for alternative use or simply left to rot.  Paul’s brother, Adam, operates the equally engrossing Baltimore Ghosts: Unsung Monuments of the Monumental City, which delves even further into such esoteric history as streetcars, advertising, railroad lines, streetlights and more.

Baltimore Crime Beat: In his nearly 20 years with The Baltimore Sun, veteran crime reporter Peter Hermann has run the journalistic gamut from covering the city’s police department to serving as the Sun’s Middle East correspondent.  At a time when the Fourth Estate more closely resembles the House of Usher, Hermann’s knowing which questions to ask (and of whom) as well as his insight and good old-fashioned legwork render this daily blog an indispensable portal into the city’s criminal element, its victims and the men and women of law enforcement who stand between them.

Guns and Potato Chips: Former bounty hunter Michael Papantonakis stands accused of selling guns over the counter at the Utz potato chip stall where he has worked since his old man bought the place 39 years ago.  “I love the Utz stand down there!” a friend of mine (and former employee in the Mayor’s Office) said in disbelief when I brought the story to her attention.  “Indeed,” I replied, “and according to the charging documents, so do the Bloods, the Crips and the Angels.”  Smile, hon, you’re in Baltimore!

Bio: William Patrick Tandy began publishing Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore! under his Eight-Stone Press imprint shortly after fleeing the Garden State for less-oppressive climes in 2000.  From the harbor to the hills, the submission-based Smile, Hon collects the tales of those on whom Mobtown has left her indelible mark: polished, professional essays; barroom sermons delivered from the sanctity of a favorite stool, the poet’s fleeting sentiment captured in both word and snapshot – a slice of Baltimore as told by Baltimore, all presented with the time-honored, DIY accessibility of a limited-run, handcrafted zine.  Learn more at http://www.eightstonepress.com.

Previous Alt Wire Guests:   Alycia Sellie, Davy Rothbart, Roger White, Dan Sinker, Phil Yu, Matt Novak,  Jason Marsh, David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel, Anne Elizabeth Moore 

Image by Davida Gypsy Breier.

A few weekends back I spurned my habitually uninspiring Sunday Times fare and sunk into the couch with Keep Loving, Keep Fighting / I Hate This Part of Texas (#7), a beautifully written combination of two zines out of New Orleans. Hours later, I peeled myself off the cushions, lost in a reverie for a lost city, but comforted by stabs of gratitude for the folks there still fighting the good fight. The zine’s writers, Hope and John, present a series of sporadically ordered flashes of Katrina aftermath, from plugging away at a youth-oriented bike clinic to spreading the news of a beloved friend’s murder: 

It felt like evacuation all over again, people calling one another with jagged voices, hushed hoarse whispers not wanting to utter the unthinkable. Asking to check in about this person or that, ending every conversation with I love you.

In our May-June 2007 issue, we reprinted Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose’s wrenchingly honest chronicle of his descent into depression covering Katrina’s destruction (article not available online). Hope and John’s diary-like recollections moved me in a similar way, for their candor in grappling with the ugliness, kindness, resentment, beauty, fear, and pain that so many must navigate in their efforts to survive and resurrect life in New Orleans. At the end, a list of organizations doing good work in the city comes as a welcome coda of opportunities for action.