Meet a Medievalist Maker: Teresa Pilgrim
“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
Teresa Pilgrim is a medievalist and transfeminist scholar, creative practitioner and activist. Teresa employs the process of zine making in a number of transformative ways that are integral to her embodied reading and writing practices. Teresa facilitates creative-critical zine workshops in a variety of settings including trauma-informed discussions. Recently, in June 2025, Teresa had an exhibition of their zines with Blossom LGBT, UK, entitled ‘My Queer Truth,’ for Pride.
Project
A recent project I have been working on is an exhibition of my zines, titled My Queer Truth, as part of the Celebrating Our Past, Creating Our Future, Our Annual Celebration of Queer Art & Heritage organized by Blossom LGBT. My exhibition included the creative-critical zines I made alongside my doctoral thesis. In the zines I was able to capture and begin to process the painful memories that were triggered by my research into female masculinities and medieval texts. My responses, informed by my lived experience of conversion violence, formed a crucial part of my readings but they could not be represented directly in the traditional form of the academic thesis.
Process
I would describe my process as embodied research: creative and critical work reflecting my lived experience of my trans, nonbinary, queer identity: a visual, textual, or bodily historical archive. The archive holds aspects of my thinking, not necessarily in an ordered fashion but in readiness for further discussion once the initial thoughts are recorded but perhaps are not yet fully formed. By their very nature my embodied thoughts – of my body and mind, interdependently– are often fractured, and fragmentary – C-PTSD in critical-creative terms becomes a kintsugi-like knitting together of things I need to say. Binding them together. Calling them back to me from the regions of dissociation where they are held at bay to save me further pain.
In November 2022, I took part in two zine workshops, where I first developed my distinctive fragmentary style of collaging which combined my own poetry with others’ poems, manuscripts, photos and my analyses, including headings and subheadings. I love creating— and glitter, sparkly holographic tape, and ribbons are a regular feature of my zines. Significantly, this style of collage mirrors how I think and write, which, as I have come to realise, is in fragmentary and fractured ways, as, due to the nature of trauma, I respond to both knowingly and sometimes in less intentional ways.
In my experience, zines afford deep thinking – an active thinking that because it is also a creative process, allows us to think more freely i.e., without unhelpful pre-editing or harsh judgements. This is why I, as a survivor of interrogation etc, find it a freeing form, and similarly I find it brings rich reward in other trauma-informed spaces, as well as in teaching, outreach and activist contexts.
Peek
A number of my zines were included in the exhibition, three of which I am highlighting here.
I created the zine below alongside my thesis, in which I wrote significant key episodes from my early life in conjunction with triggers of different extremes of violence I recognised in the medieval sources. For example, in ‘Survivor: Aftermath’, I wrote about the bloodied, watery scenes of fatal sexual violence and the celebrated death of the masculine woman made out to be monstrous in the heroic poem, Beowulf. Until I wrote my poem and considered the episode in relation to the memories this analysis triggered, I could not complete the chapter. The poem came first because trying to write about this episode in prose to begin with was too much to face. Therefore, the poetic form enabled me to tap into these fractured memories and helped me to build on them in prose. Each I time I reread and re-edited this piece, which I did innumerable times, I felt empowered - reconnected with myself because it reminded me of all that I survived which meant that I faced these difficult feelings without dissociating from them. This practice helped me feel things from within, rather than external to myself. A skill I needed to build upon.
Zine contents: The Power of Words and the Presence of Silence, Survivor: Aftermath (plus the poem, Aftermath), Rosemary is for Remembrance, Unravelling the Past, I Watch (a poem about seeing my young body on the screen), Armour (a poem about my tattoos), My Grandmother: Remembering; Betrayal.
The tattoos I got later also have this same empowering aspect to them, as well as being a more literal reclamation of my body and what it looks like. The creativity of my tattoos are key to my process as well as being visible expressions of my embodied research.
Join Our Conversation is the zine I made for the workshop I facilitated on behalf of Refugee Tales. The event was held at the Institute of Historical Research in generous partnership with the Centre for the History of People, Place, and Community, and the Refugee Law Initiative in the School of Advanced Study.
Refugee Resource, Oxford, Zine Workshop (1): Journeys & Belonging. I made the zines below to illustrate the texts I used in my workshop with women refugees, and it also contains the loose script of my introduction to the workshop. A bit of a checklist of prompts if you will. This form of activism and support of other women is incredibly important to me. Assisting with translation for the participants was also a large component of this workshop and, as this is something that ties into my work on policy surrounding the provision of interpreters and translation services with Refugee Tales, my next workshop focused on parallel translations, some of which were kindly shared with us by poets at Sidhe Press.
In facilitating these workshops for Refugee Tales and for the Oxford women’s group, my understanding grows of why this creative form is so helpful for displaced peoples. One of the first things people encounter when coming to the UK is a very hostile immigration interview process in which they repeatedly prove their identity and the validity of their asylum claim. Trust and creativity are intrinsic to my workshops. The zine format supports a multiplicity of underrepresented voices that contribute to a growing archive of zines and lived experience, a new archive that centres and empowers personal lived experience
Prompt
This prompt to get started with making a zine can be focussed in one of two ways – either to think about a knotty problem about which you are writing, or to explore a theme. There are two types of zine format you can use. One is to take a sheet of paper and fold it into a booklet. You can find instructions at this link.
This second format allows pages to be added as you create new material. However, the paper booklet is also good if you are formatting a talk, paper, or anything that requires sequencing e.g. assignments.
What you need to get started: pick a theme or point of focus. Choose your zine format and collect together any of the following. These are what I tend to use, and I particularly like the collage effect of layering materials: paper, card, glue, ribbon, pens, glitter, tape – I use holographic tapes, stickers and anything else you might like to use; medieval manuscripts I am working on, or that I want to work on. Isolate particular words or passages of text which are meaningful to you, perhaps even highlight them. Print out terms you are focussing on in your analysis – how they are defined by you – think about why – and how they are understood more generally either in theory or culturally. Perhaps there are passages of your own work which you are especially proud of. Print these in different font sizes depending on the size of your zine.
I also invite participants to choose an item that for whatever reason is important to them– something that has significant personal/emotional value – to bring to the conversation. I find this personalized approach hugely beneficial in facilitating conversations, as a way of unlocking new creative thinking. Being seen and heard for who you are is a very freeing mindset to start working from and also builds mutual trust. In your chosen workspace, you could have such an item by your side.
I also like to print images – I use texts, book covers, quotes, bibliographies illustrated by a pile of books. I have printed out images of critics, including moments when I have been in conversation with them. For example, Judith Butler. I tear up images or cut them up. If I am formatting a talk – I will organize my materials sequentially, if not, I will start the work and think about the connections later. Your zine is a creative embodiment of your creative-critical thinking as it unfolds. In other words, trust the process!
Zines produced in a workshop on exam revision, for students at University College, Oxford (shared with permission).
Thank you so much, Teresa, for this wonderful post about your creative-critical practice! Do follow Teresa on social media or get in touch to work with her.
To contact Teresa and/or discuss commissioning a workshop, email tpilgrim94 at gmail dot com. Teresa’s website is currently under development here. Find her elsewhere online at: Teresa_Pilgrim (IG) and @pilgrimteresa.bsky.social!
