An upcoming zine-making workshop at Northampton Community College will be led by Taryn Hipp, a Bethlehem resident whose résumé spans life skills counseling and farming.

Zine-maker-turned-counselor-turned-farmer may be an unusual set of hyphens, but it only begins to capture the many layers of Hipp’s life and work.

“I grew up in Bucks County in the ’90s being a problem child,” Hipp says with a laugh.

She was also a writer and zine-maker at the time. Zines are self-published magazines popular in punk rock and counterculture communities that got their start in the pre-internet days. For young people like Hipp at the time, zines were a way to write about life, fandom, or whatever they felt a need to express. Usually handmade in small batches, zines were photocopied and distributed for fun, not profit. Hipp stuck with it, finding zine-making a creative outlet during a period when she felt a little lost.

“In my twenties I was working at a record store and making zines and hanging out, and I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do with my life,” she says.

Turning 30, and finding sobriety, marked the start of a new chapter. “I started college in my thirties,” she says.

Inspired by her grandmother’s career, she studied psychology and found it to be a perfect fit. Her grandmother, the woman she called “Mom-Mom,” also went to college later in life, got a degree in psychology, worked in special education, and inspired Hipp deeply. “Mom-Mom was my best friend and guiding light,” she says. “Seeing how she treated everyone with such caring was inspiring. I was trying to follow in her footsteps. I found her to be as close to a saint as you can get.”

Hipp studied psychology in college and quickly found herself drawn to the field. While completing her degree, she moved to the Lehigh Valley to accept a position at Valley Youth House. There, she worked as a life skills counselor and found deep meaning in supporting teenagers with a wide range of challenges and traumatic pasts. Her world was soon upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and the death of her grandmother.

“As an ‘essential worker,’ it was a brutal time working through the pandemic,” she says. “Then Mom-Mom died in April of 2021, and that kind of sent my train off the tracks.”

She started to feel overwhelmed at work. “I was like, maybe there is something wrong with me,” she says. “I realized I was just burned out. It happened quickly. I was falling apart emotionally and it didn’t feel fair to the teens I was working with. You have to be 100% with those kids. You can’t phone it in,” she says.

She put in her resignation despite not having another job lined up. Gardening had been an escape and a respite during lockdown – she even had started a YouTube channel documenting her time digging in the dirt. “I was vlogging my gardening and growing experience,” she says. She called the YouTube channel “Gnar Garden,” drawing inspiration from the BMX scene that she became part of when she moved to the Lehigh Valley. “In the BMX world you hear the word ‘gnarly’ or ‘gnar’ all the time,” Hipp says. “Everything is gnarly.” She had no idea this hobby would launch the next phase of her unconventional professional life.

“I knew I needed a job so I started googling random words plus career,” she says. “I knew I liked being outside so I would google stuff like ‘outside plus career’ or ‘gardening plus career.’” Eventually she got a hit: there was an opening for a seasonal farmhand at Rodale St. Luke’s Organic Farm at Anderson Campus. She applied and, despite having no farming experience or manual labor experience, was hired.

“It was so beautiful and everyone I met was so cool. I was like ‘this is what I want to do.’ Every day I was so convinced it was the right thing to do.”

Hipp spent three years working at the Anderson Campus farm, which supplies vegetables to the hospital’s kitchens and employees. “I just knew I wanted to farm,” she says. Her time there allowed her to become more immersed in the Lehigh Valley’s agricultural community and to make important connections.

Through those connections, she learned about the Farm Business Incubator program at The Seed Farm in Emmaus. Hipp developed a business plan, applied, revised, applied again, and was accepted into the program, receiving access to land for the 2025 growing season.

The incubator allows new farmers to lease land at a subsidized rate and provides shared resources including a barn, tools, a greenhouse, tractors, and other equipment. She named her business appropriately: the Gnar Garden.

After a successful 2025 season, the Gnar Garden will return to the Emmaus location in 2026, selling a variety of vegetables through CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) shares and at area farmers’ markets. During the winter months, Hipp budgets, draws up her farm plan, markets the business. She also, as it turns out, will be teaching a zine-making workshop at NCC.

The connection with NCC came through the school’s East 40 Garden, a community garden and part of the growing Lehigh Valley’s agricultural scene. East 40 coordinator Katelynn Frey, a former co-worker of Hipp’s at the Rodale farm, helped connect the dots.

“Katelynn knew I was working on a zine about my experience becoming a farmer,” Hipp says. When the topic of zines came up among her colleagues at NCC, she told them about Hipp’s project and they were interested. “They asked me to teach a zine-making workshop, which is something I had never done before,” she says.

The opportunity to connect farming with her creative life, and her passion for working with young people, was irresistible. 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the first zine she ever made, and she can’t think of a better way to celebrate than by teaching the art form to others

“I’m like the opposite of a gatekeeper,” she says. “If I like something, I want everyone to know about it.”

Want to go?

The East 40 and the Art Department of Northampton Community College present A Zine Making-Workshop at 6 p.m., Feb. 12. In this hands-on workshop, participants will uncover the history of zine-making and have the opportunity to make their own zine! Every student will also receive a copy of “Stolen Sharpie Revolution” by Alex Wrekk. The cost to attend is $25 and more information is available on NCC’s sign-up page for the event.