Notes from Underground
The Last Word
From Quill & Quire, January 2002

Most writers are familiar with the traditional publishing route, a slow but well-traveled road. The landmarks and mile markers include getting accepted into the UBC creative writing program, having a poem(s) published in The Malahat Review, getting a short-story into Descant and receiving an arts council grant. For those in a hurry, there's always the express highway, patrolled by a literary agent demanding a 15% toll.

Some find this circuit too congested or polluted, and instead choose a less direct path toward the same goal. For many, doing a zine (a small handmade amateur publication done purely out of passion) is a way to circumvent roadblocks real and perceived.

Certainly, self-publishing is more work than simply mailing out submissions, but not everyone enjoys growing old and embittered in the litmag waiting room. The impatience of young writers has been converted into initiative, and the result is a vibrant, parallel system of distribution and recognition. Zines offer writers the opportunity to establish a body of work and get that work into the hands of friends and strangers. They also provide access to a network of like-minded individuals, a community that helps incubate and nourish new and bold ideas.

Because the stakes are lower, zines allow -- nay encourage -- experimentation and provide a safe space to develop a voice and style. You also learn typography, graphic design and editing skills. Best of all, you get to correspond directly with your readership, be it through zine fairs, snail mail or email. Feedback is generally more immediate and relevant -- no editorial boards or collectives to slither through. The end result is increased confidence in one's work and the realization that there is a lot of vital writing that will never appear in traditional literary formats, regardless of the quality of that work.

Not everyone pushing through the Xerox underbrush has a clear destination in mind, though. No one publishes a zine to get wealthy; most are lucky to break even. Often the journey is more interesting or more important than the destination. All Day Breakfast by Valerie Joy Kalynchuk is a novel that began life as a limited edition mini-art book. More accurately, it began life as a tiny, limited edition art book stuffed inside a silver cigarette packet available only through the "Distroboto"-- an old-fashioned cigarette vending machine located in Casa del Popolo, a Montreal café and bar. Cost? A mere $2.

I could not make this up if I tried.

All Day Breakfast is now a perfect-bound book that boasts extra material and a full-cover colour. It's available at better bookstores across Canada. The fairy-tale ending to All Day Breakfast would no doubt involve its accidental discovery by a drunken literary agent or Penguin editor with a nic-fit. And while the image of uber-agent Anne McDermid sliding a couple loonies into an antiquated vending machine in a bohemian Montreal bar is rather delicious, the truth is a little more prosaic. Both the smoking and non-smoking versions of All Day Breakfast are published by Conundrum Press, a Montreal independent run by Andy Brown. The overwhelming response to the Distroboto version convinced Andy Brown to reissue the work in a more "accessible" format.

As zine-to-book conversions go, this situation is definitely atypical. But it illustrates most of the problems young Canadian writers face, including distribution, promotion, presentation and recognition. Thankfully, life in the underground literary scene has improved significantly during the past ten years.

In fact, some zinesters enjoy the unbeaten path so much (with its concurrent community and institutions) that they're loathe to ever abandon it completely. Zinester Jim Munroe had his first book published by HarperCollins, but decided to self-publish his second book. Better yet, he framed his decision as an anti-corporate statement, and encourages others to follow his example through his nomediakings.org website.

The more often this happens, the more "legitimate" zines become, although to be honest, the heavy lifting occurred awhile ago. The so-called zine revolution of the early to mid-1990s, coupled with a spate of zine books that emerged in 1996-7 (including Thrift Score by Al Hoff and Inconspicuous Consumption by Paul Lukas), have threatened to make photocopied missives into just another medium. Broken Pencil, the zine and independent culture guide has a circulation of 4,500. And proof of mainstream recognition -- if not acceptance -- can be found in the CBC show Our Hero, whose high-school heroine (Kale) is a zinester.

The end result? Well, during an interview for A Very Lonely Planet (based largely upon Single Guy Zine), my host said, "I assume we don't have to explain to our listeners what a zine is at this point." I must admit that felt pretty good.

If we agree that zines have the same validity as, say, independent music released on cassette or vinyl format, instead of CD, then the next question is: What literary purpose do zines serve? I believe zines are poised to overthrow (or at least successfully tweak the nose of) stodgy and unresponsive literary journals.

Emily Pohl-Weary and Paola Poletto publish a zine called Kiss Machine (subtitled "a conga line of arts and culture in magazine format"). Comparing Kiss Machine to, oh, say, The New Quarterly is instructive. Issue #3 of KM had a circulation of 400, versus TNQ's 600. KM costs $3. TNQ is $8. KM is thinner than TNQ, and only comes out twice a year, versus TNQ's four issues per year. However, Kiss Machine's July 2001 launch party featured erotic sculpture and performance art which caught the fancy of the MuchMusic camera lens. I feel confident in saying that The New Quarterly will never stage a similar media coup.

Encouragingly, two articles from issue #2 of KM are being reprinted in Geist (an honour also bestowed upon litzines such as Anonymous Juice and I'm Johnny and I Don't Give a Fuck). In a Quill & Quire article published last year, Gordon Platt from the Canada Council described literary journals as a cultural "farm team." But what does it say when Geist (a member of said "farm team") reprints zine work? What does that make zines? Benchwarmers? Waterboys and/or watergirls?

Perhaps it's time to discard such outmoded classifications. Litzines like Kiss Machine freely mix poetry, prose, photography and pornography to create fun, funny, challenging and well-designed publications. Litzines, e-zines and limited-edition mini-art books stuffed inside silver cigarette packets exist to fill a niche that literary journals refuse to acknowledge. Reading Kiss Machine leaves you to wonder who spiked The New Quarterly watercooler with embalming fluid.

For those mainstream (and independent) publishers and editors who have had their appetite whetted by this new medium, please keep a few things in mind. Firstly, while you might think a zine publisher-cum-author would be anti-thetical to the mechanics of marketing and publicity, the exact opposite is often true. Someone who has edited, distributed and promoted their labour of love will often be more attuned to how best attract attention for their book.

The price of doing business with zinesters is that they will demand more control over the end product. Yes, like anyone else, they are excited about having their book published. But at the same time, preserving their voice, tone and content -- basically, the elements that gave their work resonance in the underground -- is paramount.

Still, the zine world isn't always an exotic diamond mine in the rough waiting to be exploited. For every Kiss Machine there are four illegible punk zines and a seemingly endless number of self-published poetry collections. For some, zines provide a kind of training wheels that ultimately must be removed.

In Chuck Amuck, an autobiography by Chuck Jones, the famed Warner Brothers animator, Jones recalls his first instructor at Chouinard Art Institute who greeted his class with a grim edict: "All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone." If our craft involves writing, more writing and re-writing so as to eliminate those 100,000 bad sentences, then zines are no better or worse than the lit-journal crawl.

Will Bruce Westwood ever be caught pawing his way through the CanZine Festival like some sort of starving raccoon? Doubtful. Can hoary lit-journals learn something from these brash do-it-yourselfers? Definitely.

Article as it appeared in Quill and Quire