Photo: Art by Alyssa Giannini

Alyssa Giannini is an artist based in Olympia whose sheer body of work so far into this life is incredibly prolific and diverse. I was struck by their true uptaking of what DIY ethos entails — hands in all types of art, big and small, collaborating with community members both close and far away. I took the chance to ask them a few questions about how they manage to tie it all together and what got them to where they are now.

Can you give me a brief backstory on your upbringing, what brought you to Olympia and what being in Olympia has been like for you as an artist and as a person?

I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The area is rather conservative, and best known for Amish folks and a picturesque patchwork of family farms. I’ve been drawing and making what one could consider zines since I was a kid, when I wasn’t looking for salamanders or picking wineberries. My parents are brash Italians from New York City, who carved out their quiet spot in the woods to raise my siblings and me. I got my green thumb and sense of humor from them; my organizational superpowers are from my mom, and my total lack of chill is from my dad. He’s always working on a project, whether it’s building a house or converting lawn mowers to battery power. A few years before I moved to Olympia, I lived in Lancaster city, where I started more seriously developing my drawing style and booked some of the first safer space shows in town. I wanted to host house shows ever since I found out that was a thing you could do; the intimacy and ingenuity of it hooked me. My love of DIY music was born from mix CDs with handwritten booklets, reared in sweaty Lancaster and Philadelphia basements at the height of the 90s emo revival.

I moved here totally on a whim in 2014. My nesting partner came out west with little plan after getting laid off, and I followed a few months later. I wanted a change, and I knew a couple people around. We couldn’t afford much, so Olympia won out for being gay, small and somewhat inexpensive (that last one sure didn’t age well). I loved Olympia the moment I arrived, in the heat of summer, with blackberries and friendly cats spilling out onto the sidewalks. Despite the reception, it took a few years to truly feel like home. I’ve written extensively about the isolation of trying to make new friends as an anxious adult in a strange city. I started my ongoing perzine, “Wanderer,” as a way to work through those growing pains. That zine is now in its sixth issue. It turns out that growth is a never-ending process! In that spirit, over the course of my time here, I’ve learned how to play guitar, tabled and co-organized several zine fests, hosted a quarterly open no mic for close to two years and came out as nonbinary. Olympia hasn’t changed much for me in the way that I make art, but it has provided me with community I wouldn’t have found elsewhere. It also gave me permission to be trans, so thanks Oly!

DoDIY, the catalog of DIY spaces and related news, is an incredibly cool resource. From my research, it appears to have been administered by someone else for several years before you took the reins. Can you give me some background into what played into you getting admin on the website, and what that has been like for you, especially with covid’s effect on DIY spaces recently?

DoDIY.org was started by our fearless leader, Neil Campau, in 2007. It’s a massive resource for touring musicians and anyone interested in the DIY ethos. I had little to do with the construction of it, I just do the upkeep! I started maintaining the site in early 2019, after answering the call for someone to take it over. My antiquated HTML knowledge and love of spreadsheets prevailed. Neil and I have been internet acquaintances for like a decade, [and] I’ve been a big fan of the site forever; I had my house venue and zines listed on it over the years. We talked on the phone so I could figure out what I was getting into, and that was that. I spent the next seven months or so getting the spaces/organizers part of the site as up-to-date as possible. It’s way more work than I could have anticipated, but it’s humbling to care for such a thing; I feel like I don’t devote nearly enough time to it. There’s not much to do right now, in the way of adding spaces, since no one can tour until who knows when. I’m slowly working on updating other parts of the site when time allows, but I just quit my day job last month, so I’ve been spending most of my time cobbling my side hustles into an income. My friend and DoDIY helper Andy Waldron has been on the hunt for folks who organize live-stream gigs and long distance collaborations in this weird covid era we currently live in. That portion of the site is called the Bulletin Board, and it’s updated as frequently as we receive info, or have the energy to seek things out ourselves. I’m always looking to add new DIY music-centric zines, articles, resources, etc. to the site! I love to hear from folks about their own experiences with the DIY music community, whether it’s a list of your favorite funny venue names or a scathing critique of the way DIY can mirror greater society’s shortcomings — my inbox is open. 

A lot of your art, especially your zines, contain advocacy for certain issues pertaining to identity, self healing and growth, and maintaining healthy relationships. Can you tell me about the issues you’re most passionate about, and the kinds of things you’d like to communicate in this way through your art?

This question feels really big, so forgive me if my response is a bit scattered. Zines are my preferred method of shouting into the void, and I’ve been making them on purpose for around a decade, so I’ve covered a lot of ground. I think everybody should be able to thrive, freely, so long as they’re not hurting anyone. That core belief broadly motivates any advocacy I do — cruelty doesn’t sit well with me, whether perpetuated interpersonally or by larger power structures. I believe in being kind as a general rule, and working on yourself so you can better take care of yourself and your loved ones. When it comes to zines, radical vulnerability is important to me. Dispelling shame is important to me. Adding a lot of illustrations for my writing to hide behind is important to me, haha. All of my zines are perzines to some extent, even my how-to guides have a personal touch. I want to make it abundantly clear that I’m just a flawed human, learning as I go, trying to laugh at myself as often as possible. It’s my hope that sharing my process will make you feel better about your own stumbling journey. Finding a good therapist was the best decision I’ve ever made as an adult. My writing on personal growth and healing is as joyous as it is archival, because when you live with mental illness, any tiny victory is hard-won and worth celebrating. I write about maintaining healthy relationships because my formative romantic relationship was abusive, and I’ve spent every moment since then learning how to set better boundaries, stop being conflict avoidant and honor my worth. Practicing unconventional relationship models as an adult totally blew my mind, in the best way possible, which only intensified my desire to communicate effectively and build strong commitments. I’m majorly inspired by folks like Clementine Morrigan, Yumi Sakugawa and Odie Spinelli, who write on coping skills and attachment. I hope to make more zines with a focus on healing and attachment theory in the future. Right now, I’m working on one about homebrewing kombucha and one about living with ocular rosacea. I’m also collecting submissions for a second issue of my “‘Problem’ Skin” zine, which aims to chip away at the glaring absence of skin conditions from the body acceptance movement.  

Besides illustration-based art, you also do music! In what ways do you find your creative mind integrating artistic principals from one medium to the other, and what does making music do differently for your drive to make art?

You got me! I do a lot of things. I play guitar and sing under the name Tender Perennial. I got a mint green Squire Jaguar as a gift for my 28th birthday and just went for it. My friend insisted that if I thought it looked cool, I’d want to play it more, and they were totally right. Music isn’t a comfortable medium for me, and I still consider myself a beginner. I relate much more deeply to music than I do to visual art, so I get worried I’m doing it an injustice often. All of my art is rooted in a desire to connect, and I feel least adept at doing that through music. I keep making it because it challenges me to step out of my comfort zone in ways that visual art does not. It’s majorly different from the way I make visual art, which is very cut and dry — an idea pops into my head or I look at a beautiful thing and I draw it. Zines are similar, I’ll have an idea or want to unpack something, so I use a combination of writing and illustration to do that. With music, the process is way murkier, since it’s a feeling or some small moment I’m trying to convey using sounds and far more concise, symbolic language than I’m used to. I can write something vulnerable next to an illustration and share it on the internet or in a zine, but singing that vulnerable thing while trying to play the right chords in front of a crowd of people is infinitely more terrifying, and in turn, more gratifying to me when I feel like I get it right.

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Alyssa has a presence in multiple different areas.

alyssagiannini.com is their website for their art and more information & links

dodiy.org is an international catalog of DIY organizers & spaces, of which they help manage

@craftordiy official is their handle on Instagram

They also distribute a monthly newsletter! A link to it is on their website. 

Alice

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