Back in the 90s, before the internet, and before I got all into food and growing things, I put out a zine.

You remember zines — little magazines printed on paper? You bought them at indie record stores? Or Quimby’s if you were lucky enough to have someplace like that in your town?

Anyway. Ours was called Maxine, and in it my friends and I trafficked in earnest, if smartypants, analyses of feminism and pop culture. (Our tag line was, “A literate companion for churlish girls and rakish women.”) In that cultural moment identity politics were on the wane, as was political engagement in general, and we were pissed that popular manifestations of female empowerment were fast being boiled down to Liz Phair saying “blow job”and Courtney Love falling out of her slip.

We weren’t alone; across the country other young feminist writers were firing up their Mac Classics and learning Quark Xpress, among them the Bay Area-based publisher of Bitch Magazine. Lisa Jervis graduated from the same midwestern liberal arts college I and my coeditor, Zoe Zolbrod, did — if a few years later — but, girlfriend, she lapped us quick. 

Between 1995 and 1999 we put out five issues, made some new friends, got a little bit of nice press, and were included in an anthology of “girl zine” writing. I managed to somehow parlay my meager editing experience into a job at the Chicago Reader;  Zoe went to grad school and wrote a novel. All in all, not a bad showing, especially as, while some of the stuff in Maxine has stood the test of time, other contributions (like mine) now read as unholy hybrids of ostentatious vocabulary building and hopeless naievete.

Bitch, meanwhile, took over the world. 

In its first ten years Bitch was hailed across the national mediasphere. Spin called it “the best-written and edited girlcentric zine around” — and that’s a fairly representative pull quote.

Its circulation hit 40,000. It incorporated as a nonprofit. It published its own anthology. It got fan mail from Ira Glass. Jervis and art director Andi Zeisler quit their day jobs and hired staff.

We were a little jealous, even as we cheered their success.

Well, everybody’s moved on since then. We stopped publishing Maxine ten years ago. Jervis stepped down as publisher of Bitch in 2006, and — quite honestly — I stopped getting so worked up about feminist interpretations of popular culture and found other subjects, like food and farming, through which to channel and process my frustrations with this messed-up world.

Imagine my surprise to discover, then, that Lisa Jervis has reinvented herself as a food writer.

I’m sure her book will be a big hit.

Sigh.