Kate Sandler

Kate Sandler in 2005.

Kate Sandler is the sole writer of the zine Brainiac Zine, as well as the editor of a number of Diatribe Media publications including Sanitary and Ship. She is a core staff member of both Fall of Autumn and Diatribe Media and has presented workshops at the Allied Media Conference, the Midwest Anarchist Bookfair and the Self-Publishing Media Reform Fest at the WLUW Record Fair in Chicago, IL. Her apartment houses the Fall of Autumn distro.

Biography

Kate was born in Little Rock, AR, in July of 1982 and grew up in Ann Arbor, MI. She attended Ann Arbor's open schools system and graduated from Community High School in 1999. She currently attends Columbia College of Chicago.

Projects

High School Zines

Kate made her first zine while she was in her sophomore year of high school, inspired in part by a school project for which she never turned anything in for credit. It was a labor-intensive work called Down to Size and consisted entirely of facts about how many times certain products in wide consumer use could reach various planetary objects from Earth if a year's-worth were stacked end to end. No copies remain.

She also produced a small one-shot zine called "At the point," which consisted of a single run-on sentence, reproduced in its entirety here:

At the point where plucking a single grape from the vine feels like a kiss and you find yourself re-creating scientific phenomena in your saucer with your latte overflow and you sit alone in a diner with smoke from a dangling cigarette filling the space between your glasses and your dilated pupils while you think about clarity and your memory is no more than a curse but you still wish to regain your broken habits to reclaim and preserve the past and tears don't come because there's nothing worth the effort and you've forgotten the smell of summer camp and clouds cover the supernova which once was worth living for and even music has lost its poignancy and the ghost-shadow of photocopied Wite-Out is worth more to you than all the gold in the world and your affinity for Scrabble has taken on quixotic (356 points if placed correctly, starting in the upper left-hand corner) proportions and you feel mostly confused and a little bit dead-- that is the very definition of 'morning is a long time coming.'

"At the point" was written during an invitational youth arts festival at Western Michigan University.

Organizations

Kate was a founding member of the Self-Publishers Events Council of Chicago, which hosted an independent media conference on Columbia College Chicago campus in 2003, funded by the Columbia College Ecology Club, of which Kate was the founder, president and sole member.

Simultanously, Kate worked on the upstart of Diatribe Media in Chicago.

She currently works with the Fall of Autumn co-operative and continues to devote energy to Diatribe Media.

Editing

Most of Kate's work in current circulation can be found in the form of copy-editing in zines produced by the Diatribe Media collective and publications under the Fall of Autumn banner. A devoted and meticulous editor, Kate often takes on projects in the independent publishing world, charging no fees. She sees it as her personal mission to clean up the spelling, grammar and punctuation of the often raw corpus of the zine community, ideally lending readability and credibility to the fruits of its labor. She can be reached for editorial services at kateeliza*at*gmail*dot*com.