Love letters to monsters

In this issue of Love Letters to Monsters 31-year-old Ciara discusses her decision to close the Learning to Leave a Paper Trail zine distro and her move from Boston to Kansas with her partner and cat. She writes about her father's death and her mother's emotional instability and manipulation, her quarrel with the word "community," and her constant struggle with painful rheumatoid arthritis. This zine has a hand-drawn cover image and cut outs from Ciara's college French textbook. The zine is split with issue nine of Alabama Girl by 33-year-old Ailecia Ruscin, a lesbian punk on a leave of absence from a PhD program. She writes about her experience of a friend's unexpected death and how it legitimated her decision to move to Lawrence, Kansas. She also writes about a guide entitled "Things I Wish I Would've Known Before Going to Grad School" and a piece about the misogynistic violence happening in the Kansas punk scene. This split zine was made for the Portland Zine Symposium, summer 2010.