It was the fall of 1994. I was 21 years old and living in Ypsilanti, Michigan—a loveable, dirty little college town populated, in equal parts, by students, dropouts, blue-collar workers, assorted eccentrics, and the truly insane.
I was coming off of four years in a college writing program that, for the moment, had done a great job of beating every last ounce of creative passion straight out of me. My girlfriend had just dumped me. I spent my nights loading semi trailers for UPS, and my days holed up in my bedroom with an already-outdated boom box and an alternate-tuned electric guitar, recording heartfelt but largely horrible song ideas for an imagined shoegazer band that never even came close to happening.
I was not, by anyone’s definition, on the fast track to success. And being 21, I was convinced that, unless I acted fast, my state of shiftless loserdom just might last forever. I needed to create something new and different and completely my own. And so I decided to make a ‘zine.
Its name was Stewie. And here it is, online for the first time, in its entirety.
