Amanda Huron Interview Amanda Huron Interviewed by John Davis January 18, 2019 Washington, D.C. 0:00:00 to 0:44:55 ________________________________________________________________________ 0:00:00 Davis: Today is January 18th, 2019. My name is John Davis. I'm the performing arts metadata archivist at the University of Maryland. Today I'm speaking with Amanda Huron, co-creator of Brickthrower. Also the Movement Empowerment Solidarity Through Art or MESA zines, during your years in D.C. Am I missing anything zine-wise from the D.C. years? Huron: Not from the D.C. years. I did a zine when I was living in Minnesota, and then I did the final issue of it when I had moved back to D.C. And that was called Splatterspleen. Issue number five, I did when I was here. But the rest of it was Minnesota-based. And then what else? Yeah, no, that’s it for D.C. Davis You were mentioning Minnesota. Huron: Yeah. Davis: So let’s talk about getting into punk in the first place, and what interested you in punk. How did you get into it? Huron: I got into punk in high school here in D.C. I think in 11th grade was when I first heard about Fugazi, so that would have been ’88 or ’89. And a friend of mine—actually, let’s see—10th grade, a friend of mine gave me a tape of the first Fugazi—13 Songs. And the first time I saw them was at All Souls Church, a show with Jawbox and Shudder to Think. In September. It was either ’88 or ’89. And I was—so I had a couple friends at my high school, and then we also were hanging out with a bunch of kids from Blair High School in Silver Spring who seemed to know a little bit more about punk than we did. So we were kind of hanging out a lot in Takoma Park and Silver Spring with those kids. And then just going to shows when we heard about them. But yeah, what was it? I mean, I was—like many of us, I was a weirdo in high school. [laugh] I just did not—felt rebellious against my high school, and against sort of the mainstream Amanda Huron Interview expectations, culture, et cetera. So I also was working around that time at a summer camp, a Quaker summer camp in Maryland, where there were people who were into punk too. So it was kind of like people in different parts of my life were into it, and encouraging getting into it. So yeah. I loved the music. Davis: Did zines play any role in getting you interested? Did you read them back then? Huron: No, no, they didn’t. I didn’t really become aware of zines until I left D.C. in 1990 to go to college. And I guess it was like the early ‘90s was when I started realizing zines were a thing and started doing my own zine and stuff. 0:03:01 But before then—I mean, maybe that’s not entirely true. I had a friend in high school who read Maximum Rocknroll, and so I was sort of aware of Maximum Rocknroll. But in terms of more dispersed kind of zines, I wasn’t really aware of them in high school. Davis: And you would get your information about the scene essentially from going to shows or from friends? Huron: From friends and going to shows. Davis: Or mix tapes or whatever other things…? Huron: Yes, exactly. [laugh] Yeah, friends, going to shows, mix tapes. That was about it. Definitely not the radio or anything like that. Davis: When you did start doing your own zine when you were in college, were there certain zines that it had made you want to do that? Huron: God! That is a really good question. Why did I even get the idea to do a zine? [laugh] That’s a really good question. I don’t know. OK. I can’t say necessarily which zines inspired me very early on, but I do know that some of the zines that inspired me as I was doing a zine around that time—Cometbus obviously was a big one. Melissa Klein, who’s my good friend now, who also grew up in D.C. but I didn’t know her when we were growing up together—she was living out in San Francisco and doing a zine called Inkling that I liked a lot. And then there were a lot of—like early ‘90s was definitely the rise of riot grrrl, so there were a lot of like riot grrrl feminist zines out there, many of which I was into. So yeah. 2 Amanda Huron Interview And then I would—I was in bands, and we would go on tour, and we would meet people who were doing other zines and trade them. There was a zine—these guys in North Carolina were in a band called Hellbender, and they did a zine called Foodbox that I really loved. And then Al Burian from that band went on to do Burn Collector, which is a zine I really love. And Al has become a friend over the years. I mean, it’s funny how like people just—it’s like I've never lived in the same city as Al, but I was in Berlin a year and a half ago, and spent like all this time hanging out. You know? It was just like a—because we have this super shared history thing, which includes the zine stuff. But yeah. And then I would just—when I was doing a zine, I would just be constantly trading zines with other people, and writing letters back and forth and stuff. So there’s a guy John whose last name I can’t remember—he did a zine called Pants That Don’t Fit. I don’t know, it’s like these just [laugh] zines you come across and connect with. Yeah. I’d have to—I of course had hundreds and hundreds of these, and then a couple years ago, I pared it down to like a basic core of zines that fit in one box, which I have. The ones that really meant something to me. Scam. Iggy Scam was doing a zine out of San Francisco that was really incredible. Scam zine. Doris zine I liked a lot. 0:06:00 Davis: So you moved back here after college? Huron: Yeah, moved back here. Right. So I moved back here in the summer of 1995, yeah. I spent an extra year out in Minnesota after college just playing music and going on tour and stuff, and then I moved back here in the summer of ’95. And yeah, moved into my dad’s basement, and started playing music with people. And then met Natalie [Avery, co-editor of Brickthrower] in the summer of ’96. So that was really when I started connecting with a lot of people. Well, actually the first punks I connected with when I moved back to D.C. in ’95 were like those University of Maryland punks, like Luci Fort and Nick Pimentel and like these—and we got connected because they were fans of the band I was in in Minnesota, and they had seen us play here. So I sort of knew them vaguely. And then I got more connected with other folks over the course of the next year or so. But Natalie, I met that summer of ’96, and that was when we—we basically just hung out every day. [laugh] 3 Amanda Huron Interview Davis: So you started [Huron and Avery’s band] Stigmatics right around that time? Huron: I guess it was that summer, yeah, because we met through that band. I mean, I had met Cristina Calle—I forget even how I met Cristina. It was at some like bike courier party I was at. And then she and I talked about playing music together and then she mentioned, “Oh, I know this woman, Natalie, who plays guitar, and maybe she’ll want to play with us.” And so then we played with Natalie. And then we just became friends through that. Davis: And it was pretty unusual for a band to make its own zine. That was sort of one of the defining characteristics, even, of Stigmatics, I feel like, at the time, was that it was cool that not only did this band make music but they also worked together to create a publication. Huron: Yeah. Davis: But I assume you all were just sort of in the throes of inspiration at that point, right? Huron: [laugh] Yeah. I mean, cause we were all really interested—we all lived in Mount Pleasant, and we were all interested in sort of what was going on in the neighborhood in terms of neighborhood politics of the mid-‘90s. And it’s funny, because now [laugh] when you study D.C. history, as I do, and then people talk about D.C. history, they're like, “Oh, the mid-‘90s was like the absolute nadir of D.C…”—you know, the Control Board took over the city in ’95, and it was this like murder capital of the world, and all this stuff. The HIV rate was going through the roof. We still were dealing with the ravages of crack and the violence of that. But our experience of D.C.