In November and December 2025, we completed a series of exciting zine-making workshops with S1 students at our Paper Trails partner, Liberton High School library. Communities Programme Assistant, Kuba, brings you a short piece on who was involved, and why projects like these are so important!

Our first collaboration with Liberton High School started in July 2025, but the most recent Autumn marked our second multi-week project; a hands-on, creative process of zine-making. A zine is a small booklet or magazine, designed and made either by hand or digitally. They allow the artist to create a small hand-held booklet with multiple pages, and all you need to make one is one A4 piece of paper. Zines are an incredibly simple but powerful medium for self-expression. Most often, published zines are those which adopt a strong independent spirit, focusing on subcultures, passions and whimsical short stories.

The three week-long sessions were facilitated by Edinburgh based Candice Purwin, an incredibly talented illustrator, animator and comic artist whose pieces embrace slow creation methodologies and a preference for traditional and practical image making methods such as pencil, ink and paint work. Candice’s work has spread across many mediums, one of them being The Goblin Comic Library which is available to view online.

These particular sessions were ran with S1 students, who were able to explore the creation of zines through the independence of their own topic, whilst having the expertise and guidance of Candice.

The variety of topics explored in the students’ zines was astonishing, ranging from stories of a lonesome cacti -lost and bewildered, unable to understand why everyone refused to hug it- to cultural zines on the delicious assortment of Sudanese foods. Other favourites included a sentient Greggs sausage roll, who after growing legs, ran long and far to find peace in the wilderness, and the little book of all things you can put on the barbecue.

The responses we received from the students when asked about their feelings towards the project, typically revolved around creative freedom. In a regular school day, filled to the brim with knowledge and theory-based tasks, students found a nice sense of relief and freedom in exploring a topic entirely decided and executed by them. The project reminded all those involved that storytelling, and art can be a calming and insightful process, which celebrates individuality and diversity of stories.

This is among our first collaboration projects with Liberton High School, but it will certainly not be the last. As the Liberton High School students and staff look forward to moving into their new building this year, we look forward to continuing our partnership for the next few years!

The multi-year Paper Trails project is part of Edinburgh International Book Festival Communities Programme and is made possible by players of the People’s Postcode Lottery, The Cruden Foundation and The Ettrick Charitable Trust.