Gigantic Sequins an independently run, bi-annual literary arts journal with staff scattered throughout the US, an overseas design editor, and guest designers every other issue. Gigantic Sequins is always black & white, perfect bound, and bursting with fresh poetry, prose, art, and when they can get them, comics. Founder and Editor-in-Chief Kimberly Ann Southwick answered our Qs.

Gigantic Sequins has a new guest designer every other issue.  Do you work with each guest to maintain some visual continuity between issues, or do you let them run wild and free?

We’ve only done this so far with 2 of our past issues and will again this fall. For our 2.1 issue, we went with “wild & free” minus a few stipulations of consistency we had—size of the mag, font for our title page, our semi-colon logo’s placement—, but we found that this was not the best way. Therefore, when putting together 3.1, we had the designer bounce ideas off of us. Shereen Adel, who is our “house” designer, wound up helping me out a lot. She is looking to put together a “Gigantic Sequins Style Sheet” when she designs 3.2 that will help us work with “outside” designers easily in the future. Overall, we want to see what crazy things the designers want to do, but we want to be able to say, “we like this, but we think this needs to change.”

Your logo is two semi-colons mirroring each other.  What's the story there?

I’ve always wanted to answer this question! I had this idea as a college student for a May Ray inspired tattoo, which my boyfriend-at-the-time talked me out of—instead of the f-holes on my back, I wanted semi-colons in their place. When I founded the magazine, I decided we could use the image to represent it. It was accepted, uncontested, by my staff at the time, and to this day, I’m glad that the image idea is being put to use. The semi-colon is my favorite mark of punctuation because it has so few, but essential, functions; also, more often then not, it is either overdone, or used incorrectly. Now that GS is an important part of my life, I’d still like to get it as a tattoo—though not in the same place I originally thought I wanted it.

What do you like about the zine community in Philadelphia?

To note, I don’t feel that Gigantic Sequins is Philadelphia-based, though that’s where our editor in chief (me, hi!) lives. Since we have staff all over the states (Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, Houston) and Shereen, our house designer, currently lives in Cairo, Egypt, I think that we feel more at home in a larger community—as in, the no-boundaries artist and writer community that exists all over.

But to answer your question— there’s a great Philadelphia bookstore, Brickbat Books, that just started carrying us, and it’s a great place to see what other Philadelphians are up to when it comes to zines/literary feats. There’s also a store on South Street (with a more anarchist than literary bend) called Wooden Shoe that has an excellent zine selection. There are some great small presses here (Splitleaves & Turtleneck Press), and also, the art scene here is incredible. We’ve already published two local Philadelphia artists, and I hope to publish more in the future—though we love great black & white non-photography art no matter where it’s coming from.

A weird thing about Philly is that you have to dig for the good stuff. Often, no one bothers to tell the whole city, “Hey! Come to my show!” or, “Look at this great zine I made!” or, “I have a gallery opening!” like people do in New York, where everyone is all in your face, “Yo! do this! come here! it’s happening here!” and there’s so much going on you just sit at home in your Bed Stuy apartment alone and listen to NPR instead. The good thing about Philly is when you DO figure out where the good things are happening, you DON’T choose to sit at home alone listening to NPR in your Fishtown apartment—you make sure you’re out there when it’s happening. And it’s totally happening here. New York thinks it's their best kept secret, but it's really our own: Philadelphia is actually fucking awesome.

With staff around the country and across the pond, how do you bring everyone and everything together to create such a strong, cohesive publication?

First, off, thanks. Secondly, oh the Internet. We love the Internet. We love Gchat, Submishmash, e-mail, Facebook, Wordpress and Kickstarter. We love Twitter. The staff works well together because we’re dedicated to our mission and also because we know how to communicate. In addition, I’ve only taken on genre editors whose aesthetics are similar to mine—this is not to say that we have a “limited” aesthetic, but only that “we know what we like”.

I won’t deny that there are issues that arise from our distance. Within the staff, we’ll have disagreements, and it’s much harder to have a disagreement with someone who you are “talking” to via email than someone who you can talk to face-to-face. We try to talk on the phone with each other when issues and disagreements border on personal or emotional, and that’s kept us together and kept the zine on the right road so far! Sometimes, it’s difficult to get in touch with Shereen because she’s in Cairo. But she always shows up in the end when we need her.

When I left New York, and the original staff dispersed, I wasn’t sure if Gigantic Sequins would survive the move. However, enough people were interested in what we were doing that we did survive, and I’m grateful for all of my readers and editors and staff and fans, past and present.

The diversity. I like that a “zine” can be so many different things. As in, there are a lot of unique people doing a lot of interesting things that fall under the “zine” category—lit journals like us, but also people who publish comics, recipes, reviews, illustration, photography, political writing, and, really, anything that works on a “page” . I bet there’s someone out there who publishes a sentence diagramming zine. I want to meet that person. Also, we are usually always trying to find people to submit more black & white comics that will fit on a Gigantic Sequins-sized page, so I’m hoping we’ll meet some good people who will send those our way!

"Meet Your Zine Maker:" Q&A Segments with Brooklyn Zine Fest 2012 exhibitors.