Celebrating 2025

and a poem by Spoon on AI

2025 was a stunningly successful year for Rabbits of Realness. We hosted 8 workshops, had a table at 5 different zine fairs, and created 275 zine kits, 155 of which have been distributed so far to kids and adults. We got to work with 5 amazing local art organizations in the Boston area, and delivered our lecture “The History of Zines as Queer Expression” not once, but twice! The second time was an expanded version that included “Fan Fic Interludes” with RoR member Jane Kim-Testa, to everyone’s delight.

Here are a few highlights from our 2025 workshops:

The defining project of the year was creating “kid kits” to introduce elementary school aged kids to the art of letter writing. Most of the kits we distributed were these ones, consisting of our How to Write Your First Ever Letter zine (available for free download), a stamped envelope, colored paper, origami paper, and colored pencils or crayons. Before the school holiday break, we sent 20 of these kits to Mariah’s 4th grade class in Baltimore. In the future, we hope to send one for each of the 80 students she sees in a day.

One of Mariah’s 4th grade students exploring a kid kit.

The Rabbits themselves have grown in numbers, as rabbits do, through more artists and writers joining to make zines with us. We published a number of new zines in 2025, and are working on a new website where they will all be available. This is part of a few RoR administrative infrastructure projects. Speaking of, we actually wrote a mission statement this year:

Rabbits of Realness is an artist collective whose mission is to encourage creative expression and nurture mental health through community workshops, letter writing, and sharing art and ideas through zines.

When we spoke with Spoon this past Monday, he said that his goal for RoR in 2026 is to get more love and joy out into the world, and promote the things that we do. He wants to have a series of questions that we talk about each Sunday (probably over on our Instagram) focused on creativity, writing, and having fun.

Overall, the pressure cooker of 2025’s political landscape has lit a fire under us to do all the good that we can right now, and practice hope through action. We believe this is human to human work. Heart to heart connections are properly messy. Creativity is an iterative process that requires soul. It is hard and it is beautiful. We’re so happy to be here on the planet with each of you reading this. Happy New Year, let’s make zines together in 2026!

Here’s a poem by Spoon on AI - cheers!

A and I

AI cannot sleep, dream, or fly. 
It cannot see or feel an orange sherbet desert sunset. 
It cannot taste the scent of a woman or a bite of an apple. 
No matter how hard it tries, it never felt a mother’s tears
or the sweet waters of her womb or heard a baby’s sigh.

AI cannot live and cannot die 
because it cannot dance, it cannot cry; 
it cannot sleep, dream, or fly, 
no matter how hard it tries. 
AI cannot live and cannot die.
It cannot feel the pull of the moon at its height. 

AI is good for some things, but must remain out of sight
because it cannot fill our heart with love
and it has no skin to feel the night. 
It cannot live. It cannot die.