I have loved zines (pronounced like the end of maga’zine’) and reading zines since one of my early femme icons, Rocket Girl from Rocket Power, started making zines at the local skate park in that classic 90’s-00’s cartoon. Some of my favorite zines I’ve enjoyed over the years are from people defining and redifining their mental and emotional lives in this indie-DIY art form. I have made a lot of zines for friends, and have hosted a few zine making parties over the years.
Separately, I knew that marketing my private practice would be one of the three things that I would not enjoy or resonate with in operating my own mental health care work practice. While making journal zines for a few friends in May 2026, I realized this would be a fun thing to share in therapy. Specifcally zine journals, where readers would be prompted with a few reflection questions about a given topic or theme. I previously ran social media for a private practice I worked at and loved generating ideas and doing the writing and art for it, but really disliked measuring metrics of engagement etc. These realizations and memories inspired me to begin making therapy zines and distributing them around my community, to offer a sort of free community care service (so to say), and to introduce my practice to the community as well.
All this is to introduce that I have been making therapy zines and journal zines and distributing throughout little free libraries, local queer and artsy businesses, and university student centers around Chicago. This is in the hopes of both marketing my practice for like minded care workers to network for mutual referrals, to let people interested in therapy know about the services I offer, and to just engage with the therapeutic work of (1) creating and distributing free and accessible art that might (2) offer asyncronous care work in my local community.
So if you’ve found one of my zines out in the wild, I hope you enjoyed it at least, and found it meaningful and useful for whatever purpose you might have found it meaningful or helpful for at most! I am open to connecting to support with therapy, with therapy referrals, and for therapeutic related art and community projects.
The rest of this page will include some of these zines I’ve been making and distributing, and I will try to keep it as updated as possible. The Cicada Counseling Chicago instagram and bluesky will also feature some of these zines as I print and distribute them as well.
As of now, none of them are for sale, and none of them are available on demand for printing (but I am happy to email pdf’s of zines for you to print out should you want more copies of any of them 🙂 )! That said, if enough interest is expressed I would be open to a monthly mailing / subscription service. My dear friend Jam (@WormyOrchids), who designed my logo and does illustrations for some of my work, has a very lovely monthly zine subscription service that I recommend to everyone!
Support weird local DIY and indie art, ya’ll! And make some yourself! We want to experience and celebrate your creativity! It’s a way to do therapeutic work AND do community 🙂