Cettle Kooked is Ramapo’s most innovative, underground project
If you find beauty in chaos, Cettle Kooked is the magazine of your dreams.
You’d never expect Morgan Wall and Miriam Sokolska to be the masterminds behind the Ramapo College radio show turned zine that fills the gap between art and activism.
“A big idea we try to emphasize is that art is for everyone and everyone can be creative, so we've never cut any submissions or restricted our zine to certain mediums or aesthetics,” Sokolska said.
Wall, a short pixie-cut sporting photographer, and Sokolska, a 6-foot tall Polish-raised artist are unexpectedly the best of friends. Last year, they started Cettle Kooked -- a hand-crafted, montage style, pocket-sized paper zine that collages doodles of cats and snails, poetry about love and loss, fake screenplay scripts, and notes you would pass to your friends in class across its pages.
The lack of DIY projects on campus led to the idea of a zine.
“Miriam came to me with the idea of a zine, and I was immediately like, ‘Yes, absolutely,’” Wall said.
The first physical magazine copies were released in December 2019. They were found in stacks across Ramapo’s campus, where students could grab their own copy for free. The magazine is widely popular in multiple communities and clubs, as copies of the magazine are seen spread out across the Honors Program lounge, on tables in B Wing, stacked in the newsroom and promoted by WRPR.
Cettle Kooked is “where art and community meet.” The expected content and theme of the publication changes by the issue, which is what makes the zine so enjoyable for a diverse audience, even outside of Ramapo’s campus.
“I think the collage style is just a utility on Morgan's and my part to incorporate everything together, but however the zine looks after we finish putting it together, is the aesthetic that turns out,” Sokolska said. “But really, we try not to trap ourselves, which I think makes it really unique, heart-felt and exciting to put together every time.”
A recent and one of the most important elements of Cettle Kooked is its online platform. They now regularly post on their Instagram page as a replacement to the printed zine distribution due to the pandemic, and they update their Linktree website with new zine content and various resources regarding local and countrywide social movements.
Last June, they hosted an Instagram Live interview with Ramapo student activist Khalisah Hameed that included perspectives on appropriate allyship, art’s role in activism and being a Black artist during the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“This was a really great and informative discussion,” Ramapo student Autumn Laird commented on the stream. “These are all important topics that were brought more into focus and openly discussed.”
And while what’s shown on the pages is telling of what Cettle Kooked truly stands for, you may be wondering where the peculiar name originated from. Morgan Wall has the answer.
“We were sitting down to lunch and there was a bag of kettle cooked chips, and that was it.” The first letter of each word was swapped because “the other way looks so wrong.”
