Hope Amico is a collage artist, trained letterpress printer and former community bike shop volunteer, living and working in Portland, Oregon. She is the force behind Gutwrench Press — a letterpress shop, zine distro, and home of the Keep Writing Project, a postcard subscription she started in 2008.

I spoke with Hope via Zoom on October 19, 2020. The following interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Levi Sherman: What brought you to books and zines initially? And what has kept your interest?

Hope Amico: I did a lot of writing in high school. I knew a little about poetry chapbooks at that point, and then one of my high school friends brought me a zine. He started a zine, and I helped with it, and eventually I started my own.
I went to school for printmaking so that I could make letterpress printed covers for my zines. I wanted to learn different ways of bookbinding and ways of making more interesting and more elaborate zines.

LS: So you already had zines in mind by the time you chose a college major and delved into printmaking?

HA: Yeah, I didn’t even go to school until I was in my thirties. I went to school because I found out I could get in-state tuition, and they had large-format printing presses and large-format papermaking materials. I already had done some papermaking and some letterpress printing and some bookbinding, so I went as an undergrad with a small portfolio of these miniature books I had been making in my studio.

LS: How would you say that experience changed your practice? 

HA: I had the studio before I went to college, but not a lot of equipment. Then in school I met Kathryn Hunter of Blackbird Letterpress. She was an adjunct, teaching a Book Arts class that included just two weeks of letterpress. At that point, she was running her business alone and she was like, “you should come be my assistant.” I became her sort of intern for a couple months. I worked there throughout school and again when I returned to Louisiana a few years later. I was really lucky in that I had access to her print equipment and to her as a teacher. She was very encouraging. Also in school I became dependent on having access to some kind of printing press. I started my Keep Writing letterpress project in school, November of my freshman year. By the time I graduated the project was well established so I needed to find a way to print every month.

LS: I guess it would be a good time to explain a little bit about that project — what inspired it initially, and how it exists now in a pandemic when more people are thinking about ways of connecting with one another remotely?

HA: It was 2008. I had a lot of pen pals and had just moved to Baton Rouge for school. I wasn’t on Facebook and I wanted to be able to keep in touch with my friends. I had this idea that maybe people would sign up for a sort of newsletter, and I wanted to have a project every month. I had all this equipment around me, and I wanted to challenge myself to make a new postcard every month.

I mailed the first card to a bunch of friends and went to the New Orleans book fair with a sign-up sheet. I was like, if you give me a dollar I’ll send you this thing for two months and then — I don’t know, I don’t know what I’ll do after that. And like sixty people signed up in the first couple months. People were surprisingly interested. I was really hesitant to ask for money from pen pals for doing something I kind of already did, but I wanted to consolidate my mailing list so that I could keep up while I was in school.

The first cards were photocopied or made with stamps before I could use the letterpress equipment at school. They were single cards, and some were collaborations. Around the third year I hit upon this idea of making it a folded postcard so that it tore in half, into two cards.   There was a postcard I designed that could stand alone, and there was a question that was related to it, and people would mail back the second half. And that’s how it still works.

It’s always been a challenging project to explain briefly, but suddenly people seem to get it. I don’t sell in person right now, but I have an online shop. I sell fewer subscriptions, but more strangers are signing up online. 

LS: Do you mind me asking how many subscribers you’re up to?

HA: It pretty much hovers around 150 with some fluctuations. 

LS: I found out about your work when you sent me Eulalia #3. I alluded to it in my review, but I’m intrigued by this twenty-year gap between issues in the series. What does that say about how you think of seriality? 

HA: With all of my zines I have a really specific idea of what I’m doing. I’ve had five multiple-issue zines and I’ve done a couple of one-offs, but I have really specific ideas — usually it’s thematic. I was around twenty when I made the first Eulalia. Even then, I didn’t really draw very much. I wrote a bunch, but of course, I didn’t know I would become a printmaker. I didn’t know much about printmaking; one of my first prints ever was on the original cover of Eulalia #1. But I had this idea: what if I only give myself this tiny box to fill with words or pictures? It means I don’t have to draw a lot. It means I don’t have to write a lot. I’m terrible at self-editing; I want to go on forever. So it contained a really small idea, and the focus of that issue was about an interaction with a specific person. So when I thought of redoing it twenty years later, I found the first one. I really liked this concept of giving myself these parameters.

I work in series now, and they’re really quick. I think it’s just about giving myself parameters to work within and I create an idea to work on, like a prompt almost.

LS: Well, that’s a good segue to my next question. Is there a tension between working with the book as a medium — where the ultimate form is somewhat predetermined — and your process-based, conceptual approach, where the making of the art might matter more than the final product?

HA: Ooh, definitely. The postcards are also a good example because the past hundred of them have had the same structure.

With zines, I kind of go back and forth between wildly experimenting with form and then realizing that I also sell at zine fests and like to keep them somewhat coherent so people know what they’re looking at. So, a zine that’s all over the place in size, form and structure has to balance what I want to do with practicality for the reader. Is it something I need to display easily, or am I just interested in trying something out?

LS: So the book form provides a way to pursue whatever experimentation, whatever media you want to work in, and still know the outcome will be relatable for an audience.

HA: Exactly. It provides me with a recognizable structure that I can alter and add to and experiment with.  

LS: I’m wondering about how you approach collage as a medium, conceptually speaking.

HA: I started teaching a class two or three years ago called “I Can’t Draw,” thinking a lot about how I went to school for art but I’m not great at life drawing. 

In my final semester of school I had the option of taking what they called Drawing Workshop. My teacher believed you that something was a drawing if you said it was a drawing. So I just loved that idea that whatever I presented in class was a drawing if I could defend it as a drawing, and that was fine with him. So it was in my last semester of school, and I was doing these huge handmade paper hot air balloons and working on my letterpress project, so I had all these scraps of handmade paper and I just started sewing them onto paper, essentially building 3D collages and trying paper cutting. I just decided for that class to keep trying lots of different things because my final project was nearly complete. I started experimenting with making large work because I didn’t make large work, and making drawings, and essentially making large collages — and it was great, I learned a lot. I don’t remember what anyone else in class said about my work; I just remember just being really excited.

I came back to that idea later when I wanted to start teaching. It’s so freeing to make work like that. Not worrying about making something that looks like a bird, just trying to assemble all these ideas and not getting caught up on the idea that I can’t draw bird, but finding an image of a bird or finding other ways to represent a bird or an emotion or an idea or a place through snippets of other people’s imagery.

LS: What’s the relationship to the materials that you’re working from? Do you keep a big stack of papers and scraps? 

HA: I just finished moving my studio two weeks ago. I went back to New Orleans and got the rest of it, and there’s more than one box labeled “favorite collage materials,” which is funny because I don’t use a lot of images from books or magazines. I like patterns and textures, and I have lots of different ways of layering them. I also have bins of handmade paper from when I was making paper. I keep materials with the excuse that they are for my classes — images, alcohol markers, inks. My friend Thomas Little is an ink maker in North Carolina (he’s on Instagram as a.rural.pen). He sent me materials to make my own ink, and I did a lot of drawings with that. So I have a lot of materials that I want to work with, and start experimenting with them and then realize that I like some of the work that comes out of it.

LS: So where does that leave the original pieces that end up in the zine? As somebody who could otherwise make collages that stand alone, what becomes of the pieces that go into the books?

HA: The drawings and collages that have been used in zines were made, more or less, knowing what they were for. I keep those pieces as they are. I don’t do anything else with them. I think I’ve actually lost some of the originals from the last Eulalia in the move. I remember seeing some of them on the floor. I feel like they’re done. I don’t need them to be something else.

LS: It’s fascinating to me that the original can be a precious, auratic object that the zine merely reproduces, or just some scraps of preparatory material that are thrown away. I’m interested in how different artists approach that.

HA: I have the original drawings for Keep Loving Keep Fighting #9 somewhere, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve used them in other collages. Or I might make copies of them or just add them to the ever growing scrap pile of things I give my students to work with. I have so much stuff, I can’t hold on to everything.

LS: Another medium-specific question I have is about sewing. What does it mean that you use sewing as a structural, functional thing in your bookbinding but also as a mark-making device within the drawings and collages on the pages?
With Eulalia #3, I noticed that the thread is similar in the binding and in the collages, so there’s an interesting reading experience — it feels very integrated, but it also makes you aware that one is the real material in your hand and this other is a flat facsimile.

HA: I’ve used sewing in my work structurally but also as another way of drawing, as a different texture, as another way of making lines. 

Eulalia #3 is my first collage zine, and I was so excited that, even though they’re digital color copies, you can still recognize the sewing. The stitches flatten somewhat, but they still look fairly close to the original collages.

I haven’t thought about it, but I’m glad that you pointed out that there’s sewing both in the collages and in the book structure. I used to sew all my zines because they got too thick to use the Kinko’s long-arm stapler. I sewed them because it was easier in some ways. Then I saw a copy of Dream Whip, and he just uses a rubber band. I was like, man, that’s so much easier. Most of mine are rubber band bound at this point.But with that structure, in particular for Eulalia, I like to match the thread to the rest of the concept. Not just filling the squares on each page, but also that each cover uses a lightly patterned paper, some kind of pale color, with printed text in that color, and using that color of thread so it’s all cohesive.

LS: I like that you use a simple three-hole pamphlet stitch, but by adopting the same material and technique in the functional part as the content, you’re asking the viewer to acknowledge that it’s handmade. It could have been a rubber band or a staple, but a different kind of labor went into it.

HA: That’s funny, because — well, I didn’t know what a pamphlet stitch was until school, or maybe right before I went to school. So I probably had ten years of bookbinding making up all sorts of three-hole stitch things that were not as efficient, and showing other people who were trying to help me bind books and doing all sorts of wild things that were so much harder. And then teaching the pamphlet stitch afterwards, it sort of blows people’s mind how simple it is and how effective. So coming from a place, not from Book Arts, but from people learning the basics, people are really impressed by that. So for me it seems really fancy even though it’s just a pamphlet stitch. It’s a little more effort, but it’s really nice. The bindings used to be so much messier, but they hold together now.

LS: Right, it was an opportunity for me to remind myself that what I assume is a default binding is actually a thoughtful, elegant solution. I enjoyed having to think about sewing as an integral part of the picture plane as well as the structure.
You also work in sculptural handmade paper, so I’m wondering if you approach the book as a sculpture. Certainly the dos-a-dos structure, which can physically stand up, has more of a sculptural presence, but it seems like your focus is more on writing and image-making, sequence and pacing.

HA: I tried in the past to make my zines a little more uniform for the sake of coherence. Because the writing and the themes and the way I approach the writing in all the issues of Where You From have changed, the letterpress-printed covers are all really similar. 

For Eulalia #3 I definitely wanted to make a dos-a-dos binding, but that was only part of the motivation for this. I had already made Part One, the Before side, and I hadn’t printed it. It was just sitting there and sitting there and then some other things happened, so I wanted to deal with the things that were going on and make a new set of work that related to the first, as a sort of foil, and I realized that that the dos-a-dos was the perfect form. I had wanted to try it, and then realized I had these experiences that would make that form work.

I’ve done really sculptural books, but I like making zines with more subtle artist book aspirations.