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

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

Some writers 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 magazine done purely out of passion) is a way to circumvent roadblocks real and perceived. In good zines the young writer's impatience 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, and e-mail. Feedback is generally immediate and relevant - no editorial boards or collectives to slither through. The end result can be an 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 tiny, limited-edition art book stuffed inside a silver cigarette packet and available for $2 through the Distroboto - an old-fashioned cigarette vending machine located in Casa del Popolo, a Montreal cafÈ and bar.

All Day Breakfast is now a perfect-bound book that boasts extra material and a full-colour cover. It's available at 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 agent Anne McDermid sliding a couple of 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 10 years.

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, 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, 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 comes out only twice a year, versus TNQ's four issues per year. However, Kiss Machine's July 2001 launch party featured erotic sculpture and performance art that 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?

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 art books stuffed inside silver cigarette packets exist to fill a niche that literary journals refuse to acknowledge. Reading Kiss Machine leads you to wonder if The New Quarterly editorial board is sipping a bit too much 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. First, while you might think a zine publisher-cum-author would be antithetical 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 to 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.

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 that his first instructor at Chouinard Art Institute greeted the 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 rewriting, 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.