Trick Candle
A birthday zine.
This month’s snail mail is close to my heart. It’s a zine I’ve put together of birthday parties I have attended, thrown, and photographed in my twenties. As I send this post, I am actually likely out celebrating or recovering from my own birthday, the last of my twenties. I am edging towards thirty, which makes me very pleased. It’s not that being a twenty-something was particularly bad; this zine is proof of all its good. It was just an experience. There is no generalization to be made other than that every day, every year, felt brand new. Neither a bad thing nor a great thing, just the truth.
I know the zine is being made before I am 30, so I technically have another year of birthdays to share and document. But some of my friends are turning 30 or did turn 30 this year, and there is a sense that we are on two different sides of something. We are not old vs. young or anything like that. It just has a different ring to it. I wanted to remember a time when we were all in this crazy, unglamorous decade. There is something about that which I enjoy. It’s like a conclusion or some sort of line I am drawing that only I can see.
Luckily for my friends, their exiting this decade into something new will not keep me from photographing them; this zine is more about keeping track of the times. To celebrate an era which I had more fun than I could imagine, because I spent it with people I love. I wrote an intro to this zine which I will share below.
Trick Candle: A6 size, 24 pages, 100lb uncoated paper, full color print. Photography by Ava Williams
I bought extra zines, if anyone would like one please view them on my website here.
Intro:
Birthdays are a sore subject for some, but not for me. Not because I am particularly in love with the idea of a birthday, but more so in love with the excuse to get together. If there is any secret motive behind anything I do, it is likely stemming from a desire to see the people I love. Though I can’t say that’s a hidden quality of my personality. I know from my calendar that I am always on the way to see someone. That’s the way I like it.
Of course, by the time you read this, I will likely be twenty-nine. The last year of my twenties. Despite everything I am told about aging, I have no qualms about this.
This zine is made to commemorate the birthdays we celebrated in this long, unglamorous decade. Although it’s not quite finished, it feels like the perfect moment. Despite the unsettled nature of being twenty-somethings, we had some good times. I would even go so far as to say we made the most of every moment we could. Despite Covid, and weddings, and kids, and every other thing that reshapes and reforms our realities and our friendships, our ages never gave way to a ticking time bomb. One that told us everything was over. It’s easy not to be deterred when you’re twenty-one, but by the time you’re twenty-eight, people make it out to be that life is almost over. I have rarely given in to the propaganda. Hopefully you haven’t either. Regardless, we will all cross that bridge when we get there. There’s no use worrying; we might as well celebrate. What the celebration will look like is beyond me, but that’s the fun part.