COLUMN ONE : Telling All With Wit and Rage : Personal zines are self-published glimpses into the lives of twentysomethings. Those with a touch of the voyeur can follow the details of romance, tragedy and the bizarre.

Tammy Rae Carland opens up her soul at least three times a year and invites perfect strangers in for a glimpse. The part of her on public display is occasionally funny, always outrageous and obsessed with a former First Daughter she describes as both “geeky” and “this icon.”

She charges two bucks for the pleasure--and a couple of stamps “if you’ve got them.”

When Carland, 28, of Long Beach, isn’t publishing her quarterly “I Amy Carter,” she does things such as writing open letters to her sisters:

“When I was nine years old and my rapist said not to tell anyone or he would do the same to you I believed him. I had to believe him, it was the only thing that kept me alive.” For $3.50, you can buy that letter tucked inside the San Francisco-based quarterly Thorn.

It is difficult to decide which is more unusual in this era of media conglomerates, dwindling public forums and limping language skills: That Carland spews autobiographical bits both harrowing and hilarious on a regular basis, or that people she does not even know pay to read those snippets.

After all, “I Amy Carter” is no People magazine, Tammy Rae Carland no Amy Carter--although she says at times she’d like to be.

Carland is a practitioner of the “personal zine,” a sort of international postal salon inspired by equal parts humor and rage. Tales of sexual assault, betrayal and a mother’s death crisscross in the mails with anti-career stories of washing dishes in all 50 states, a catalogue of the best dentist movies of all time (an admittedly short list), and a paean to the city of Oakland (also rather brief).

Zines (said zeens ) are perhaps the smallest of the world’s small presses--self-published, low-budget and often profane, varying wildly in size, circulation and quality. Personal zines are the sotto vocce version--filled with the sort of information formerly penned within the impervious walls of friendship and family.

The often twentysomething publishers of personal zines are carrying on a conversation at once both public and private and doing it in intimate print--a medium that can be held and held onto--rather than via cold computer screen.

Many of these nouveau publishers are rebelling, say the few who actually study zines, against a mainstream media that neither takes their lives into consideration nor represents them in any fashion, a media they could not crack even if they wanted to.

In the process, personal zines help fill a gap by committing to paper the details of daily life in the late 20th Century, an era nearly devoid of the “personal documentation” that crowds libraries and provides the raw material of history, those yellowing sheets of paper very likely headed “Dear Diary,” “Dear Mom,” “My Darling.”

Personal zines “are great historically,” said Billie Aul, senior librarian with the New York State Library, which houses one of the few official zine collections in the country. “From the Civil War we have generals’ letters to their wives, what they were doing and what they were thinking. You don’t get that stuff from the late 20th Century. Personal zines could bridge that gap at least to some extent.”

But not all publishers and readers view zines through such a lofty lens: “We publish for no reason at all , not even for the exciting promise of being endlessly poked and prodded by a bunch of culture vampires (reporters) wanting to know how our fabously morose 20-something lives are turning out,” writes “Your friend, Jeff” in the foreword to his “X Magazine.”

Those who read personal zines often have a touch of the voyeur or, perhaps, soap opera addict, tuning in regularly for more minute details in the lives of people they have never met, in cities they may have never seen.

“With zines you get all the dirty office gossip without any of the involvement . . . or risk,” said Lee Wochner, 31, who emigrated from southern New Jersey to Burbank in 1988 with three close friends--the same people with whom he writes “L.A. Gang Bang.” “It’s the perfect ‘90s pastime.”

Personal zines are but one in the zine pantheon. These small, independent publications trace their roots at least to the newsletters put out by ardent science fiction fans in the 1950s. Depending on how academic you want to be--and most zine makers do not want to be at all--zines’ parentage could stretch back to Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaist manifestoes of the early 1900s or even to Thomas Paine and his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense.”

“The whole American press in Colonial times was a zine because they were outside of the Europeans,” said Aul, whose zine collection was donated by Mike Gunderloy, founder of Factsheet 5, which is the newsprint bible of the zine world. “They were not in the mainstream of intellectual thought. Once the revolution happened, it got legitimized. . . . Zines go in and out of the mainstream depending on what’s going on in the world.”

Now, Sassy magazine, which caters to teen-age girls, runs a monthly column about zines. Gunderloy’s encyclopedic “The World of Zines” was published by Penguin Books, the folks who bring you Shakespeare. And in Frederick Barthelme’s latest novel, “The Brothers,” one character puts out a terrorzine, a compilation of stories with a certain sick quality that are pasted up and photocopied.

Zines range in topic from the mundane (work) to the bizarre (filk music). Although a quick flip through the thousand or so zine reviews in each Factsheet 5 reveals many zine-makers’ obsessions with conspiracy theories and serial killers, the fastest-growing zine categories are “queer zines, music zines and riot grrrlzines,” said R. Seth Friedman, publisher of Factsheet 5, which appears several times a year.

Yes, Factsheet 5 sometimes sounds like it’s written in a language other than English. And, no, it does not come with a glossary. But if you are reading it, chances are you already know that queer is the label used by many publishers of gay-themed zines, that filk music refers to songs written by sci-fi fans and that riot grrrlz are the secretive young members of a new brand of feminism and often practitioners of a particularly angry form of rock ‘n’ roll.

If you don’t know this, you probably should not be reading Friedman’s zine about zines.

Like all things alternative, it is hard to gauge just how many zines of any stripe are hurtling through the mail or stacking up in record shops and bookstores. Friedman pegs the number at 20,000 to 50,000 nationally--up from 10,000 a year ago--of which 500 are personal zines. Others agree with his overall numbers but argue that anywhere from a quarter to half of all zines could be considered personal.

New York’s tri-state area has long had a flourishing zine culture, Friedman said, and Southern California has its share, but “Seattle, Austin and San Francisco really kick butt” in terms of number of zines per capita. Those cities, he said, have the three ingredients necessary to make them meccas of alternative publishing: They have colleges, large transient populations and high numbers of young people.

“The people who make zines are younger, educated, move around, want to stay in touch,” Friedman said. “A person who stays in an area won’t make a zine, because they still have their friends (around them) to keep in touch with.”

And they often--but not always--have access to a personal computer; the growth and ease of desktop publishing is one reason that the number of zines continues to grow. In addition to printed and photocopied zines (purists make illicit copies on the boss’s machine at their day jobs), a technologically savvy generation also publishes them via personal computer, CD-ROM, audiotapes and videocassettes.

But personal zines are rarely so Space Age in execution and are just as likely to be written in Ackworth, N.H., population 776, as San Francisco, population 723,000. They are an egalitarian and accessible form of communication designed, Friedman said, by people who feel isolated and want to connect, people who have a message not necessarily suited to mainstream media.

“I recently moved to southern CAL and I’m feeling isolated, bored, lonely and wanting to meet rad dorky egghead kinda girls,” writes Tammy Rae Carland in the debut issue of “I Amy Carter.” Her solution to this conundrum is her zine, which also gives her a forum in which to deconstruct her childhood in a Maine welfare family, grapple with her sexual assault, find a safe vehicle to discuss her “coming out as queer,” her “never fitting in.”

Lee Pembleton, 27, like many personal zine-makers a self-professed outsider, “rebelled a long time ago and just never came back. . . . I still do not belong.” He’s an anarchist, a carpenter, a musician, a Chicago resident and a man with a strong need to communicate but a touch of confusion about just what to say.

“I had to make a zine,” he recounted of his pre-publishing days, “and it had to be a personal zine. I had nothing I wanted to say in a zine. But I thought, ‘Gosh, my mom does.’ ” And he had it all in writing, letter after letter from Suzette to her boy, Lee, the son who detached himself from his family sometime after his seventh birthday.

When Lee first published “Mom”--a photocopied bimonthly compendium of Suzette’s wit and wisdom, photographs, postcards and drawings--Mom did not know it. Now she does and approves, sort of.

“Mom 2” begins: “Lee Lee! Happy Easter! Here’s a bag of goodies from the Easter Bunny. . . . I love my fanzine. . . . Although I liked reading the first letter I wrote to you, I hated the rest of my writing, really stupid & pretentious. I do like my photos tho. Mostly I like you. Love, Mom.”

Publishing “Mom” is a form of therapy for Pembleton, a way to heal some wounds of his childhood. It is also “a way of communicating that is really special,” he says. “It’s getting an emotional connection and communicating with other people, although I don’t know them.”

Family also turned Maddalena Polletta into a zine-writing outsider, but the disease in her household was physical rather than emotional--her mother’s pancreatic cancer. Polletta, who teaches New York City children to garden by day and is an artist by night, wishes she had had a map book to steer her through the stages of her mother’s death.

She did not know then that it was all right to be callous and bitter and angry at the woman wasting away in front of her. She didn’t know then, she said, that “it’s OK to be ugly and mean.”

When her mother died two years ago, Polletta published “Nine Months After Diagnosis,” a personal zine in the form of a chapbook, a delicate pamphlet graced with melancholy woodblock prints, poetry masquerading as prose, and a photographic timeline of her mother from ‘50s glamour girl in wide cinch belt and full skirt to cancer patient in a hospital bed. She has bartered, sold or given away 400 copies.

“Fear is the thing,” Polletta wrote. “I am afraid of the growing revulsion I feel towards my mother. She retches all the time. She sleeps in her clothes. She is addicted to painkillers. I love her. I don’t want to be mean. Sometimes I confuse her with the disease.”

While Polletta’s readers get a guide to grieving, subscribers to “L.A. Gang Bang” get minutiae, the simplest and often funniest details in the lives of four transplanted New Jersey-ites: Lee Wochner, 31, playwright; Gary Grasso, 29, actor/waiter; Mary McGuire, 29, film company executive assistant/stage producer, and Valorie Kurtz, 28, respiratory therapist.

“Gang Bang” is one of the oldest running personal zines around, with an international circulation of about 300 and a monthly cost of $1. In addition to printing a monthly update from each of the four, it includes letters from readers--most of them addressed to McGuire. “Mary is a young single woman in Los Angeles,” is Wochner’s explanation. “For people around the country, say, Kansas, there’s a romance to that.”

In Chicago, too, particularly a certain prison, which housed a certain inmate who was a quick draw with the ballpoint pen and engaged in a yearlong epistolary battle with McGuire. His beef? Her dating habits.

“He told me I should lighten up and not be such a man-hater,” McGuire recounted--a letter, which, of course, was faithfully printed in the zine. “One woman wrote in to say who’s he to tell you how to live your life.”

Granted, a prison inmate would be a logical reader for a personal zine, someone for whom anyone’s life would be at least something of a distraction. But in five years, “Gang Bang” has had only three incarcerated subscribers; the rest of its readers most likely have their own lives and little need to live vicariously through Lee, Gary, Valorie and Mary. But they do.

Solomon Davidoff, an instructor in the department of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, contends that people read personal zines because they need both family and titillation.

“People like inserting themselves into other people’s lives,” he said. “People enjoy being voyeurs, whether they admit it or not.”

And the people who write, print, staple and mail these publications?

“There’s no need for the world to find out about their minds. But there’s a need for them to put these out. They write about their dreams and hopes and aspirations. Even if someone thinks you’re pathetic, they pay you money to read about your life.”

In Their Own Words

Low-budget and obviously self-published, “zines” vary wildly in circulation and quality. What unites zines--a sort of international postal salon--is their intimate nature, their baring of information formerly penned in the privacy of family and friendships. Some excerpts:

From “Dishwasher”

“The following week, my night to work arrived and I was just too lazy to go. . . . So I stayed at home and assumed they would assume my lack of presence meant I quit since that’s what I assumed. And it felt good. Jobs are for quitting. You get a job, do it for a spell, then quit and it feels good. These are my ‘values’ which I used to think differed from my dad’s but I don’t think so anymore.”

From “Seamonkeys From Guatemala”

“I am eighteen and don’t feel confident or decisive enough to decide whether to get a six or nine piece chicken nugget at McDonald’s; I can’t imagine myself deciding to spend the next four years trapped in the Army with only an M-16 to keep me company. But the Army thinks it’s just peachy that 17 year old kids are making this kind of commitment (ironically, often BECAUSE they don’t know what else to do.)”

ALL ABOUT ZINES

* Authors: Although women and men of all stripes publish zines, they are more likely to be mobile, in their 20s and live in college towns. In general they tend to be urban.

* Circulation: Finding zines can be tough. Some are sold through record stores and alternative book stores. Many are listed and reviewed in Factsheet 5, the zine bible, which publishes price and ordering information. Many are bartered, given out in coffee houses or handed out to friends.

* Technique: Low-tech zines can be handwritten and photocopied. High-tech zines can be created through sophisticated desk-top publishing. Some are electronic, and others are done on CD-ROM.