Zac Smith

On December 16th, 2025, I decided to publish an online-only, one-off, winter holiday-themed zine on December 23rd, 2025. In 2020 I had published two similar, albeit pandemic-themed, zines. I have been feeling selfish and isolated in the online indie lit writing community and so thought this would be something fun to do mostly for the benefit/promotion of other people. For the Quaranzines, I had posted open submissions. Since I didn't want to deal with rejecting weird assholes or novella-lengthed murder mysteries this time, I decided to only solicit people. I found this process difficult, frustrating, and guilt-inducing. If you wish I had solicited you, I apologize.

I first texted four of my writer friends asking for pieces. I then sent a number of Twitter direct messages soliciting some of my mutuals on Twitter, more or less at random. I quickly realized that Twitter had very recently changed direct messages into a passcode-enabled "chat" service without informing users, which has resulted in people not knowing they have new messages (some of you reading this may have unread Twitter messages without realizing it, maybe even a message from me); other people have seemingly abandoned Twitter over the past year or two due to the various (almost all terrible) changes to the Twitter algorithm, functionality, and user experience.

As such I decided to email solicitations to a number of people, some of whom I had sent direct messages to, and others whom I had never spoken to before. The latter includes Crispin Best, Maggie Nelson, Laura Theobald, Miranda July, Madeline Cash, and Gabby Bess. I also emailed the management company who represents Karly Hartzman of the band Wednesday. I emailed solicitations to other people I have spoken to before, including Giacomo Pope, Tao Lin, Noah Cicero, Lily Arnell, Daniel Bailey, Tom Laplaige, Rebecca Cyr, Lindsay Lerman, Sean Thor Conroe, and Sabrina Small.

Crispin sent me a couple kind messages, including a special, expanded version of his poem just for me to enjoy. Noah was very sweet in his response and asked to see the finished zine despite not being able to send a piece in time. Tom sent a screenshot of his piece and a perfunctory message, then never replied to my reply asking for the raw text of the piece; I used an online text transcription website to get the text from the image.

I lightly attempted to bully Madeline into writing a poem despite her protesting that she doesn't write poetry, since I believe anyone can write a poem, and I think she would have written a good one, but she gently told me to fuck off by sending me an AI-generated haiku. I had asked Sabrina, who seems to have been offline for up to an entire year, primarily because I remember them asking me to edit a piece of writing about mall Santas last year, and in response they bashfully sent me an old, 16-page pdf of an abandoned writing project about me, Zac Smith, seemingly based on the experience of asking me to edit the mall Santa story, and we worked together on selecting a small passage to include as a standalone excerpt.

I received an ambiguous, possibly sarcastic response from Sean. I received a polite, apologetic response after Christmas from Lindsay. I never heard back from Lily, Laura, Maggie, Miranda, or Karly's management team. Gabby's email is no longer active, and I gave up trying to contact her.

Of the people who responded to my Twitter direct messages, Yoel Noorali refused to write a poem (for reasons similar to Madeline) and Nathaniel Duggan failed at writing a poem, despite me prompting him with phrases like "Santa Bomb" and "Reindeer Beam." 4-5 other people responded positively but ultimately never sent me a poem. Many people likely never received my message. Several agreed and either DM'd or emailed me wonderful poems.

I was surprised and delighted that Greg from the band Cheekface sent me a poem; I had DMd the band in 2022 to ask about sending them a copy of my story collection, and shortly thereafter – I remembered only when re-opening our messages, seeing this again for the first time in 3 years – had accidentally sent them a picture of me in a bathing suit with the caption "beach fit," which I think I had intended to send to a different group chat. This is, as far as I can tell, the only time I have sent a semi-embarrassing photo to the wrong person. Only two of the five people I solicited over text (one I solicited indirectly through someone else via text) sent me a poem.

I included one poem by myself, which I enjoyed drafting and editing directly in the word doc for the zine. I didn't reject anything I was sent. I suggested minor edits to maybe eight of the pieces I received. A couple people sent me multiple pieces and I chose one to publish from each set. I like every piece that I published. Many were more dour than I had anticipated.

I titled the zine Merry Chrismzine, because it seemed comedically difficult to say. I only realized later that I had forgotten the 't' in Christmas. If you noticed, and thought I looked like an idiot because of this, please contact me and confirm my suspicions. Thank you.

I designed the zine using Microsoft Word. The art was sourced from publicdomainvectors.org, and I lightly modified one piece of art to fit the theme of a poem. The fonts used were SansBlackSmall for the headers and Adobe Jenson Pro for the bylines and body text. I adjusted the size of the zine two times in order to pleasingly prevent some poems from having 1-3 lines dangling on a second page. I exported the final file as a 3.25"x5" pdf.

I published the zine on my website, posting a link on Twitter and emailing a pdf and a link to my newsletter mailing list (~110 people), plus the contributors who aren't on my newsletter mailing list, and Noah. In my email I encouraged people to share poems they liked online and in person. Many people posted screenshots of their own poems on Twitter. One contributor grumpily Tweeted about how they didn't like that people were posting their own pieces only. Then some people posted screenshots of other peoples' poems. I didn't retweet or quotetweet any of the Tweets about the zine because that felt overwhelming to me. The AI-generated news service on Twitter briefly treated the zine as a trending news topic despite only having like 100 likes and 25 quotetweets, proving to me that the platform is experimenting with niche-audience-targeted trending news functionality, which makes me feel gross and belittled. Several people reached out to me directly to compliment the zine over Twitter direct message and email. No one seemed to shittalk me or the zine at large. I consider the zine a success. If you contributed, thank you.

On December 18th, Tyler Burn DM'd a group chat with me, Troy James Weaver, and Graham Irvin, asking if we'd do an online reading on Christmas Night. I politely declined saying that I would be spending Christmas with my family. On December 23rd, Tyler Burn DM'd the group chat with me, Troy James Weaver, and Graham Irvin, lightly chiding me for not soliciting him for a poem and also somehow accusing me of stealing his idea for a Christmas thing – possibly related to the thing about the Christmas Day reading.

On December 28th, Tyler Burn DM'd the group chat with me, Troy James Weaver, and Graham Irvin, asking me to send him a piece of writing for his new magazine, specifically suggesting I write about "the poetry santa book." Troy and Graham ribbingly noted that Tyler had DM'd the chat ostensibly just to solicit me for a piece of writing, and not them. On January 1st, 2026, I wrote this article. I saw that the current Twitter fiasco is the realization that people are using Grok to rapidly generate an unending stream of sexually suggestive images of both adults and children without anyone's consent. It is currently 2:37 pm. I am listening to the album Transaction de Novo by Bedhead on my turntable and it is too loud but I don't want to get up and adjust the volume. I hope you have a happy new year.

Zac Smith is a writer who lives near boston.