Cindy Crabb, dorisdorisdoris.com, $3
In doris #31, Crabb recounts a month spent squatting in a motel cottage on Cape Cod in the dead of winter with her friend Elliott. They drove from the west coast after a friend’s murder, with no particular plan other than to escape. There’s an interesting balance between them: Elliott speaks in metaphors, while Crabb’s inclination is to name and dissect her way to the other side of depression. Elliott is paranoid; Crabb is reckless. There’s an understanding that while the month near the coast was shitty and cold, it was also kind of awesome.
Crabb spends a lot of words considering her exhausting style of living; she is resourceful, a voracious reader, and she wants a just world and gives what little she has to help realize it. But she’s also unmoored in some ways and prone to pushing people away when they get close. There are a few requisite pages about being a white person fighting against racism, and reconciling vegetarianism with farming and interacting with meat-eaters of other cultures. The best parts of this zine are Crabb’s personal stories because they are hers only and you can’t read them anywhere else. However, sometimes it’s like she wants to make her experiences or what she learned from them universal or even prescriptive, and I think there’s something lost in that. (Mary Green)