A group of artists, performers and community members gathered at Lawn Gnome Publishing on Saturday for “Grrl Fest,” a festival to raise awareness about violence against women and support local feminist literature.
Among the performers were The Lisa Frank Poetry Collective and local bands The Pleasure Victims and Sister Lip. The event also included a modern hula hoop dance by Heady Hoop Tribe, a performance by musician Korbe Canida and a Q-and-A session with author Nicole Zangara about her book “Surviving Female Friendships: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” which was published last year.
Admission proceeds went to Tilt Magazine, a new Phoenix-based women’s magazine, and Hard Candy, a feminist zine written and edited by ASU students.
Lawn Gnome owner Aaron Hopkins-Johnson said $150 was raised to be split between Tilt Magazine and Hard Candy.
Tilt Magazine founders Kharli Mandeville and Heather Maher said the money earned at Grrl Fest will go toward the publication of their first full issue, which they predicted would be released at the beginning of next year.
Visitors could pick up small copies of the two magazines when they entered. One was a preview issue of Tilt Magazine, with essays and poems by both men and women. The other was a mini-zine by Hard Candy that is a compilation of self-portraits titled “Do It Yourself(ie).”
Hopkins-Johnson said he organized the event because he wanted to create a platform for new feminist voices downtown.
“We’ve had lots of lifestyle magazines come and go that aren’t flattering for women,” Hopkins-Johnson said. “I just want to provide an alternative.”
Hopkins-Johnson said he has seen more content about club culture than feminism coming out of the Valley. He suggested looking at other cities, such as San Francisco and Portland, that generate more local literary zines focused on feminist culture.
Hopkins-Johnson also said he found inspiration in his own bookstore.
“It seemed like a lot of the women that were working here had awesome backgrounds in feminist critique, literature, social movement, history,” Hopkins-Johnson said. “I found people who didn’t want to make money but wanted to make a difference.”
Mandeville of Tilt Magazine and Jessica Pruett, one of the creators of Hard Candy, were among the women working at Lawn Gnome.
“I felt there was something missing. I wanted to be able to write things that I also wanted to read about in the community,” Mandeville said.
She started the magazine with Maher over the summer. According to the mission statement printed on the preview issue, the goal of Tilt Magazine is to “provide and encourage an empowered, feminist response to mainstream media and popular culture, as well as to redefine power and beauty in our communities.”
Pruett said she created Hard Candy last year as a way to honor female literary voices and the creative process.
“I wanted something that privileged process over product, and it was ultimately about what we get out of this as a community by making it together,” Pruett said.
The magazine’s first full-length issue was published last fall with the help of student contributors and editors. Pruett added that she prefers to focus on the group that creates the magazine rather than the audience that consumes it.
“Coming together to create something like that is transformative, and I think that maybe we don’t value that personal moment enough,” Pruett said.
The third full-length issue of Hard Candy is slated to release at the end of November.
An intimate crowd drifted between the backyard performance space and the front of the bookstore on Saturday, where patrons painted T-shirts with messages about both oppression and empowerment. The front lawn booth was hosted by The Clothesline Project, which encouraged survivors of domestic violence to design shirts that will be displayed at ASU’s Tempe campus on Oct. 23.
“It’s hard for all of us, and especially if you want to be honest about what it’s like to be a woman,” Pruett said. “There aren’t a lot of diverse, honest voices, and it’s really frustrating. … If we don’t support each other, then it just feels impossible.”
Audience members and other performers laughed and offered words of encouragement as The Lisa Frank Poetry Collective took the stage. The subject of the poems ranged from a daughter watching her mother bathe in glitter to a woman cooking her prince-turned-frog to Wendy from Neverland leaving her lost boys.
“It’s definitely getting a lot of really empowered groups together and … giving them an opportunity to be able to collaborate,” Mandeville said.
Mesa resident Crystal Burnett, 26, said she attended to support her friends who are involved with Tilt Magazine and was looking forward to hearing from some of the female writers and performers.
“Male artists have been supported more in the past, so I think it’s great that this is supporting women especially,” Burnett said.
Hopkins-Johnson said he envisions Grrl Fest becoming an annual event but hopes to pass it off to new female leadership.
Contact the reporter at emregan1@asu.edu.
