Catriona Vale
Catriona Vale

34

Underground Zine Architect of Quiet Devotions
Catriona curates chaos into meaning—one photocopied page at a time. As editor-in-chief of *Liminal Press*, a hand-stapled zine smuggled into bookstore cracks across Brooklyn and beyond, she thrives where culture whispers instead of shouts. Her office is a repurposed storage room beneath a defunct movie theater near Avenue B, lit entirely by salt lamps and flickering desk bulbs, walls papered with torn-out letters people wrote but never sent. She runs print parties every third Thursday where strangers bring confessional poems typed on onionskin and leave copies tied to fire escapes.Above this gritty symphony sits her sanctuary—a converted water tank atop a tenement building in SoHo, transformed into a rooftop greenhouse thick with jasmine vines and lemon trees grown in salvaged bathtubs. Here, Catrinoa simmers bone broth infused with star anise and thyme at 2am, humming songs taught to her by her grandmother in Glasgow. These meals aren't sustenance—they’re alchemy. Each dish reconstructs fractured memory: potato pancakes crisp-edged like Sunday mornings before grief arrived; burnt caramel pudding meant to recall laughter muffled through apartment walls.She doesn't believe in grand declarations—at least not publicly—but privately adores the fragile evidence lovers leave behind. In the bottom drawer of her drafting table lies a cigar box full of book-markers discovered tucked within used volumes: grocery lists written in shared code, dried lavender stems bent into hearts, index cards reading I WAS HERE WHEN YOU READ THIS. To touch these feels safer than saying what burns brightest inside her chest.Sexuality, for Catriona, unfolds slowly—in stages more nuanced than heat alone. It begins mid-conversation about typography hierarchies and ends hours later tracing braille-like scars along another woman’s forearm using fingertips still dusty from sketching layouts. Desire builds in silence punctuated only by train rumbles far below, escalating when hands exchange control—not dominance, balance—as if aligning gears that were forged apart but designed to mesh perfectly.
Female