First Person: Queen of the Track

Queen of the Track is our ’zine, and after 18 months of hard work, we have our launch night on 8 March at Mary Mary cafe, Liverpool. If you pop down, we’ll be the three super excited ladies, brandishing ’zines and prosecco, whooping and yelling.

Queen of the Track is a ’zine and blog run by me, Flis Mitchell, Hannah Bitowski, and Amy LeStrange. We started this project simply because we wanted to create the sort of magazine we wanted to read. I wanted to read about politics, culture, finance and tech, but all I could find was body shaming articles, patronising features about relationships and celebrity gossip. So we simply decided to create what we wanted: a magazine that combined the fizzy energy and amazing content of the underground press and the beauty of a luxury woman’s magazine.

We wanted to recapture that moment when you first got ’zines as a kid, all crazy excitement, new viewpoints and a sense of solidarity and love. We want to facilitate social change, we are feminists, and we don’t see why serious politics can’t be combined with gorgeous print and awesome writing. We don’t know why the majority of women’s magazines are writing like it’s the 1950s.

On the launch date, which of course is International Women’s Day, we’ve been invited to do a DIY zine making workshop at the Bluecoat Gallery, and later we’ll be at MaryMary cafe for our launch. We hope to meet loads of new people throughout the day and night, ‘cause as everyone knows, a ’zine is only as good as the family it creates.