“Nothing Will Shock Us”:
Keeping Six Quarterly
A review by Alison Turner
various writers, Keeping Six Quarterly
Keeping Six Hamilton, 2019-2022
11 volumes, softcover, $5 per issue
When I visit a new place, I use an online platform to look up routes for morning jogs. Recently, I found a review for a path by a river that included the following comment:
The unpaved stretch is where the homeless go to camp out. If this makes you skittish or all of the trash along the river makes you boil, perhaps another route is for you.
I will not say who wrote this review, which platform they wrote it on, or which city they’re writing about. We might find endless similar comments online that are more dismissive of people camping by rivers or trails or under bridges. I’m sharing this comment not to shame the reviewer but as an example of how easily people who are not experiencing homelessness position “homelessness” as a thing that is easily avoided: if this thing makes you uncomfortable, take another route to avoid it.
Thousands of miles away, an author named Verny shares a memory that could be a response to the reviewer of the jogging trail. Verny tried to enter a shelter with her daughter, but they were both turned away: “we had to sleep in this grass. […]. Homelessness is like being viewed as the ground” (KSQ Vol.3.3, p. 20). The “unpaved stretch” of land by the river that the reviewer evokes as a place to avoid might also be the grass where Verny sleeps with her daughter, where Verny would maybe avoid too, if she could, where Verny feels like others look at her the way they would look at the ground that she sleeps on.
Verny writes this memory in Keeping Six Quarterly (KSQ), a zine published in Hamilton, Ontario by and for people who use drugs and/or are experiencing homelessness. The zine is a project hosted by the Keeping Six center, an organization that self-describes as a harm reduction action league whose mission is to “defend the rights, dignity, and humanity of people who use drugs.” Harm reductionism is a philosophy that addresses context and circumstances of drug use rather than focusing solely on abstinence, and thus aims to reduce harm from drug use rather than punish, stigmatize, or criminalize people who use drugs. To learn more, visit the National Harm Reduction Coalition website.
In a cultural moment when it is more likely that someone seeking a nice place to jog encounters a statement about people experiencing homelessness than a memory shared by a member of that community, KSQ offers resistance to the implied division between these communities.
KSQ has nine published issues, starting with Volume 1.1 in January of 2019 and currently ending with Volume 3.3 in September 2021 – Volume 3.4 is forthcoming. The zine’s full accessibility online and its stamina to produce several issues a year are rare traits among zine projects. The Keeping Six Hamilton website, which hosts this zine, explains that the zine grows out of a weekly art and writing drop-in group who initiated the project because “There are many people with talents to share but who lack an outlet.” The site also positions the zine as a “tool for advocacy” that could help engage a wider community and “build understanding and compassion for the community of people who use drugs.” KSQ’s prioritization of its own community makes it possible for its authors and artists to speak to an outside audience, even one that might feel skittish on the outside looking in.
I. Finding Keeping Six Quarterly
[I] would like the people in charge to stay here for a month or two. Then maybe they would fix the broken system (Anonymous, Vol. 3.3, p. 17).
I am always on the lookout for publications written by people experiencing homelessness, because I know that they are feats of commitment. When I facilitated writing groups in shelters for the first year of the pandemic, I witnessed how the writing, art, and discussions that guests engaged in rarely left the community. Writers had limited access to the internet, even rarer access to print publishing venues, and, sometimes, internalized beliefs that no one would care about what they have to say.
Zine-making can respond to these limitations. Zines are low-cost publishing options that are rooted in subcultures, from sci-fi enthusiasts in the 1930s to punk rockers in the early ‘90s, and they allow creators to share their work without conforming to standards and expectations of editors, publishers, or instructors. In zines, readers probably won’t find the poem of the year or the short story that would be in The New Yorker if only editors there could see it—but readers probably will find writing that surprises, delights, and dislodges what they thought they knew to be true. Zines are a way for people with something to say to their own community and, potentially, outsiders to their community, to say it; and zines are a way for people who feel “skittish” around some communities of strangers but are open to listening to what they have to say, to hear it.
Zines offer marginalized communities a chance to speak to each other and to outsiders. Some zine makers create issues for a small circle of family and friends, keeping them intentionally inaccessible to outside audiences. For zine makers hoping to reach a wider audience, particularly from within a marginalized community, making their writing accessible—and findable—is a challenge. For online zines that are created by people experiencing homelessness, for example, a basic google search is likely to yield false leads. In December of 2021, searching ZineWike’s “5,000 + articles” for the term “homeless” yields 26 results, none of which lead to the actual zine: for example, “Words Are Not Enough: Lip Service To Two Years Working With People In Crisis,” is listed on the Back Pocket Press website but cannot be accessed digitally or for purchase; and a 2016 news article praises a zine written by adults in Seattle who were formerly homeless but does not link to the zine itself. Googling relevant terms yields a few more options, only two of which are available to a public audience. One of these, “The Coping Skills Zine,” is a single issue created by 16 members of a group called the Homelessness Lived Experience Advisory Group in Austin. The zine is entirely available as a pdf online and shares hand-drawn tips for how to cope during times of crisis, ending with a blank page prompting the reader to add their own coping skills. This zine is a great starting place for learning about some of the resilience of this community in Austin, but its momentum is halted as a one-time publication.
While Keeping Six Quarterly is one of the few ongoing and accessible zines created by people experiencing homelessness, finding it requires first encountering the Keeping Six Hamilton website, keepingsix.org. Here, “The Zine” is one of several tabs, which include information about Naloxone (a drug that can save lives in the case of overdose), encampments in the surrounding area, and volunteer opportunities. In the Zine tab, the nine issues are neatly aligned and easy to open into a flipbook program, so that viewers can click through and watch the pages flip (and hear the “flip page” noise, which I, personally, find delightful). While the initial issue includes a few pages that are difficult to discern in its digital format because of a dark, scratchy background, all content is visually accessible starting with Volume 2.1. Also starting with 2.1, the zine establishes a structure that maintains its focus on the Keeping Six community. On every first page, readers learn the times, places, and contact information for writing and art drop-in meetings as well as how to submit to the zine—and the important fact that accepted submissions will be compensated with a $10 gift card. On the back of every issue, readers find a full page with information about the National Overdose Response Service, “Canada’s First Remote Safe Consumption Line,” and a number for the 24-hour hotline.
Sheltered within this explicit support by and for this community, the zine occasionally invites in an outside audience. This invitation is offered through multiple forms, including poems, stories, answers to interviews, or responses to prompts such as “These things really bother me” and “these are things I dream about” (Vol. 2.2). KSQ’s prioritization of people who use drugs and/or are experiencing homelessness as a primary audience allows the zine to effectively speak to outside readers, a structure that bridges, rhetorically, the distance between readers.
“Nothing Will Shock Us”: Zine-Making for an Us
The information about drop-in groups and calls for submissions on the opening page of each KSQ issue actively invites in hesitant contributors. The call lists a range of possibilities for submissions, which, along with the usual suspects of genres like stories and poems, includes “Personal experiences–e.g. Dope trips” and jokes. At the top of this submission page runs a mission statement: “All types–nothing is too crazy or outrageous, nothing will shock us.” I imagine that this invitation is particularly welcoming to artists and writers who use drugs, squat, and/or live on the streets and want to write about their memories, ideas, and imaginings that are criminalized and make mainstream audiences uncomfortable. Here, content that is not considered appropriate by more conventional publications is treated as important.
Several KSQ issues also print policy-related updates that are immediately relevant to people using drugs or staying on the streets in Hamilton. These updates include the posting of a Keeping Six statement responding to the City of Hamilton’s breach of an agreement that had been negotiated among several agencies to best support people living in camps. This post does not mince words:
For the city to walk away from this negotiated settlement unilaterally, and without even the courtesy of any communication with us, or any apparent consultation with those on the front lines, is deeply antidemocratic and repressive, […]Repealing the protocol once again shows us that some city councillors care more about protecting property than they do about protecting human life and dignity. (Vol. 3.3, p. 4)
The editors of the zine do not negotiate their tone to ingratiate themselves to any potential city councilor members reading the statement. They write for people living in camps, demonstrating ongoing, non-negotiable support.
Contributors also publish creative content that is written directly to other community members. A colorful body diagram highlights “Safer Injecting Areas” (Vol 1.1 p. 13), and a quiz tests readers’ knowledge about drugs and drugs use (and provides answers) (Vol 1.1. p. 13). One author shares time-sensitive information on a page titled “KO FENTANYL ALERT”:
We at Keeping Six want to put out a muther fucking warning to all users. There is some shit going around that is light purple in colour, cooks up clear or can cook up pink. […]People report having lost hours or being in one place and waking up somewhere completely fuckin different. Like jail if your luck is shit. (Vol. 2.1, p.5)
The entry ends with a call for care throughout the community: “So be careful, don’t use alone and carry Naloxone.”
A section titled Urban Survival Guide includes tips for making it on the streets, such as a list of places in Hamilton that serve meals and a strategy for respite from lugging your suitcase around: check it in to the lost and found at a mall, and, a few days later, if it’s a different staff member, come back looking for your lost item (Vol. 3.1, p. 23-6). An anonymous artist contributes a drawing of a 2×2 grid and in each square reviews each of the city’s temporary shelters: “safer than sleeping outside but sad,” she writes for one; “Awesome, welcoming space, warmth hits you as you enter […] Best place ever! Should be an example or prototype for others!”; and “Would like the people in charge to stay here for a month or two. Then maybe they would fix the broken system” (Vol. 3.3, p. 17). While it is unlikely that people living on the streets in Hamilton seek this zine when deciding which shelter to enter, as if they had the luxury of such choices, I imagine that reading of other people’s experiences in shelters brings companionship to anyone currently navigating the shelter system.
The zine offers emotional support to the insider community of people who use drugs and/or are experiencing homelessness. There are several tributes to community members who have passed away over the months, including one for Glen, a First Nations’ elder who “lived in shelters and on the streets” and “recruited people for HepC testing” (Vol. 2.1, p. 11). The opening page of Unsheltered, a zine-within-the Keeping Six zine, honors “the women and gender-diverse folks who have lost their lives to homelessness,” a statement that is followed by a list of initials (Vol. 3.3, p. 12). Unlike a list of names which, unfortunately, can be easy to skim over when you do not recognize any of them, a list of initials honors people who have passed away while holding their identity sacred to the community that misses them.
“If you enter Hamilton shelters”: The rhetorical invitation
While supporting the Hamilton community of people who use drugs and/or are experiencing homelessness,, KSQ also makes good on its aim to serve as a “tool for advocacy” by speaking to an outsider audience. This happens through several methods, including an occasional direct addressing to an outsider “you.” In the final lines of the poem “Inner Heat,” Stanley Shaver asks the reader to “take the time to say hello and talk with him [someone living on the street] a while/ You will come to feel in a very short while/ The inner heat you’ve brought that poor exile” (Vol 1.1 p. 4). Or, an anonymous author writes: “Through art you see that we are people and there is an exchange” (Vol. 2.2, p. 18). With the “you” in the phrase “you see that we are people,” the author implies an audience who might not otherwise believe that the art-makers are people, an audience, we might imagine, that could feel “skittish” if surrounded by the Keeping Six community.
Explanations about drug use and/or homelessness also address an outside audience. A peer harm reduction worker explains crystal meth to an audience that does not know about the drug. He writes, “If you enter Hamilton shelters, you will see young people with terrible sores. That is because [a] user begins to pick. They believe that insects are erupting from their skin” (Vol. 2.2, p. 26).
Similarly, in a printed version of a speech that Danielle Delottinville delivered at an International Women’s Day Celebration a few months earlier, Delottinville explains why women can be impacted differently than men by drug use. She writes, “Women are also vulnerable because more of them can’t inject themselves (compared to men) so in a lot of relationships, they will have their partner help them inject, so they need someone to help them inject. That means they can control them this way as well.” Or, she continues, men will take the first shot then give their partner, a woman, the contaminated needle, an action she includes as an example of a “dysfunctional relationship.” She uses this information to advocate for peer-assisted injection as something that “empowers women who may feel stuck in relationships they don’t want to be in because they don’t know how to inject themselves” (Vol. 2.2, p. 22-3). As a person who does not inject drugs, it has never occurred to me before that the physical act of injection intersects with gendered power systems; how many voters, I wonder, voting against safe injection sites have considered how a woman who is addicted might seek such a site to remove herself from an abusive relationship?
In one of the zine’s longest pieces, an 8-page excerpt from a memoir by Penny O’Radical, the author rhetorically positions himself as a bridge between readers who are insiders/outsiders to experiencing homelessness. He explains, “When I finally asked two strangers which shelter I would have the best luck at, I had been wearing the same clothes for three days during a relentless rainstorm” (Vol 2.3, p. 17). After finding the shelter, he observes people in line for breakfast the next morning:
It is very easy to paint the whole lot with a broad brush and say that they are all basically the same, and in some ways they are, but when you are on the same level for however long, it is much easier to see the fine details. (My emphasis, Vol. 2.3, p. 20).
O’Radical initially positions other shelter guests as “they,” but then needs to confront the irony as he waits in line, too. He writes, “Standing in a long line at 7am with a bunch of homeless men waiting to be fed was the first time I stopped to absorb my situation, and it was a cold hard slap of reality. I had a moment of clarity that made me feel a thousand emotions at once, but the dominant feeling was despair” (Vol. 2.3, p. 21-2). After this realization that he is among the “they,” he switches to second-person voice:
Each problem that enters your mind seems harder than the last, and all of them combine to form super-clusters of unsolvable problems and impossible odds. Your ego takes a huge hit, as does your pride, which you will now be swallowing with all your meals for the foreseeable future. (Vol. 2.3, p. 22).
O’Radical speaks to the audience with whom he used to identify, a “you” who has not lived in a shelter or experienced homelessness, and a “you” with whom he knows how to communicate.
Other sections also move between audiences of insiders and outsiders to homelessness. In the issue published in September 2020, a time when encampments became a topic across much of North America, KSQ provides information that is directly helpful to people living in camps, including which organizations are on the streets, what kinds of support they offer, and when. However, the editor appeals to an outside audience: “remember that encampments are people’s homes, we don’t want to bombard or be a constant presence.” Then the article shares a summary of what they are hearing from people living in camps, including campers’ concerns with vandalism to tents without support from police, people getting misinformation about tents being taken down, and an acute need for more support for women (Vol. 2.3, p. 4-6). These needs are likely well known by people living in encampments and working in organizations supporting encampments, and I can imagine that it is gratifying to see these needs recognized; meanwhile, readers who are not familiar with these environments might be surprised to learn of their complexity.
Getting ourselves “ready for the real day”: the audience of all of us
Ultimately, the zine bridges audiences of insiders and outsiders by providing the space for people to introduce themselves in whatever way that they choose. These introductions, interviews, stories, and memories could interest someone living on the streets, in a temporary apartment, or in a home that has been in the family for generations.
Jody Ans’ short piece about the complexity of domestic violence has an ending so powerful and memorable that I don’t want to quote it and ruin it for others (Vol 2.4, p. 11). Barb Swietek’s essay about her experiences with sexual abuse since childhood, marrying a man young then coming out a decade later, and the first time she uses drugs compels any reader to give more thought to addiction. She describes her physical deterioration from drug use, her several attempts to enter treatment, her recurring relapses, and the moment when she fully commits to recovery. At a recovery meeting, she saw someone she used to deal drugs to facilitating a meeting: “She was clean and I was shook to my core. I wasn’t even sure it was her until she said her name. She told her story and I thought ‘wow, there is something here’ because if she could get clean then I stand a chance” (19). Barb’s story might encourage others struggling with drug use as much as it encourages people struggling to support loved ones experiencing addiction.
Even sections in which authors contribute a few sentences summon a collective readership. In a special section of short profiles in Volume 3.1, MJ writes “I get up, I get high, I get myself ready for the real day, go out, help out people who need help in the community” (5); a few pages later, Arny writes about the loss of both his brother and his partner when he was in his twenties: “It seemed like anything or anyone I loved was taken from me. For the next decade I got heavy into the drugs. Not realizing the damage I was doing to me and my family. Now at 51 I feel like I have been in a coma for the last 20 years. How fast life goes by” (8). Whether readers recognize daily highness or being “heavy into the drugs,” readers can relate to “getting ready for the real day” and “how fast life goes by.”
As a final example of how KSQ allows authors to introduce themselves to each other and to outside audiences (and I could have shared others), a special section in Volume 3.3 invites contributors to explain art that they have created at a drop-in event. Yuangtinée describes her painting of nature: “the world with man-made rules and infrastructure is bad for my mental health. But in nature, I find serenity and peace. Nature’s rules are rejuvenating to my spirit and non-judgmental” (15); Jodi explains that her drawing of a colorful small building is of a shelter: “sometimes it’s good, sometimes bad. The colours are what you see in shelters; energy that causes different colours” (16); and Robin interprets her drawing of a web with a self-portrait on a piece of burlap in the center: “When you’re homeless, no matter what you wear it feels like burlap.” It is in this section that Verny shares her memory of being turned away from a shelter with her daughter. Verny’s description is next to two abstract paintings, one dense with dark colors and the other with spaces left between green blades of grass: “we had to sleep in this grass. My art reminds me of this. Homelessness is like being viewed as the ground” (Vol.3.3, p. 20). The gentleness with which Verny includes her daughter before the words “sleep,” “grass,” and “art” evokes a “ground” that any reader might have to sleep on, even a reader feeling skittish at the thought.
Conclusion
we felt that while we were in the encampment we actually belonged somewhere, for a change, in the city, not just in the gutter —Daniel (Vol. 2.4, p. 29).
Despite the many strategies that this publication uses to widen its audience while prioritizing the extended Keeping Six community, it remains unlikely that the zine will reach people who aren’t already curious about the knowledge of KSQ contributors. How can we increase encounters of the unknown in this digital world? If we are not in a city that publishes a zine or newspaper authored by people experiencing homelessness, how could these words end up on our coffee tables, the links to the projects in our browsers?
Zine-making is gaining popularity among mainstream audiences, particularly during the pandemic. As people are waiting at home, away from others, confused and uncertain, public libraries, NPR, and academics invite customers, listeners, and students and/or colleagues to make zines to process their pandemic experiences. For example, Denver Public Library’s Social Distanzine series seeks submissions from all library customers, and several issues feature work by library staff; NPR’s “How To Make A Mini-Zine About Life During The Pandemic” post from May of 2020 beckons NPR readers to “find out how you can make [a zine] yourself […]. All you’ll need is a sheet of paper, a pen, 30 minutes and a little creativity”; and in an essay titled “Between Activism and Academia: Zine-Making as a Feminist Response to COVID-19,” Emily Gray describes how virtual zine workshops provided a group of academics “a vital interruption to institutional notions of ‘productivity’ during the COVID-19 pandemic” (Gender and Education, 2021, p. 1–19, p. 3). KSQ may serve as a model for these new and mainstream zine makers as much as it continues to hold zine-making as one of the few spaces where marginalized communities can support each other.
The phrase “keeping six” is a military term that has been taken up on the streets. If a person stands at the center of a clock looking at 12 o’clock, then 6 o’clock is behind them, where they cannot see for themselves. “Keeping six,” then, means to “watch your back,” or, when one person says it to another, to watch the back of someone else. On the streets of Hamilton, this term is one of the ways that people who use drugs and/or are experiencing homelessness protect each other from arrest and other dangers. To “keep six” might mean “tell me if the cops are coming” as much as it could mean “I’ll protect you from others while you get some sleep.”
Keeping Six Quarterly is part of this protection. Contributors share art and writing not only to keep each other safe from the physical threats that might happen behind each other’s backs, but also from the emotional dangers of marginalization, isolation, and segregation. If communities living by the river are imagined by outsiders as something to feel “skittish” about, then Keeping Six Quarterly imagines an audience of outsiders that is willing to try harder.
Alison Turner is a doctoral graduate in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver. Her research interests include oral histories, community archiving, and community literacy, particularly among communities experiencing homelessness. Her critical work appears in Archivaria; Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric; American Archivist; and Community Literacy Journal, among others.