By Bonita Zeier | Leah Welch
The vibe and cosmology of ZO — a different kind of universe can be condensed to the Big Bang of its beginning in September 2014. It was sticky hot and all of the artists, writers, poets and creatives that we could draw in Los Angeles were gathered together in West Hollywood. We were in search of literature in motion. When artists and poets meet for the first time, there’s a certain amount of known heartbreak—it’s almost palpable—and it immediately connects us. It’s the barometer by which we measure plots, stanzas, point of view, heroic couplets. We were meeting for the first time for ZO Magazine’s launch party at The Tropics. ZO is a rare kaleidoscope of anything and everything artistic, creative, and poetic. In a very subjective opinion, it’s the gateway for us to a new artistic paradise.
The Tropics can easily be found by its massive and cool plants that spill out from the doors, windows, and climb everywhere inside the building’s semi-ecosystem, even cascading down walls. It is the epitome of exotic—which speaks to the soul—and created the perfect atmosphere to launch our purposeful composition of arts. (By the way, The Tropics did the landscaping for Jurassic Park, so our Big Bang beginning was in very good company.)
Bonita Zeier and Vivienne MacLeod, Directors for the current incarnation of ZO, have been working together for many years on predecessor versions of the magazine, its tangent film (The O.D.D. Room), and several ZO creative spaces.
Planned hard copies of the magazine have been in the works and drafted for many years, and the envisioned coffee table “Collector’s Edition” is still a priority, but respectfully awaiting its perfect timing! The online launch in 2014 took off and was so ideally suited to our global format that it’s reach has left little time and resource to print — but print we will — in that quintessential fullness of time that we’ve been waiting for.
ZO is about creative life all at once. We are not as comfortable experiencing one thing, as we are being immersed in a dozen completely. If you wander around the ZO website, you’ll see that art is rarely alone. It’s usually coupled with creative thought and poetry — stories and articles aren’t merely belles-lettres, they are generally illustrated as we project in 4D (height, width, depth and ‘relative’ time). We have to distinguish ‘relative’ time because we are intentional that our pages should not be limited to current time. It’s not so much a hodgepodge collection as it is an altar to new literary forms and civilization. If ZO’s soul had a sentence, it might be, Damn any singularity in a vacuum; give us an altar as big as a planet by which to cherish all creativity. For sure this would better be translated as a painting, but we’re talking now as writers, so we hope you get our literary drift.
We believe in the power of words. There has never been a moment where a word or a sentence couldn’t help but change the outcome of something. This is the altar that ZO wants to nourish and foster. This idea that words have the necessary magnitude by which to shape and reshape our culture into something positive and beautiful. It is something that we truly have faith in. They may seem like such a small thing—words—but we communicate for a reason. We believe that reason is this primal need to find our reflections in each other and voice what we see and feel when we’re faced with those reflections (however difficult or ecstatic).
Since the launch, ZO Magazine has been read all around the world. Our Poetry Expos have found poets from all across the globe. ZO continues to experiment with their Cloud Z formation in art, literature, poetry, and everything weird and cool. In reflecting on ZO over its past years, the thing that is ever-growing and which continues, is its ability to transform itself and others. When you land on our pages, when you read and fall into the words, photos, and art there, you get a glimpse of Planet ZO, of unfiltered creativity, of that imaginary mind that has bound humans together (perhaps even before time). We think of it as a divine presence, as energy, as soul translated through words.
