a review, a fire and thou

There’s a lovely review of a bunch of my zines over at rob mclennan’s blog.

And here’s a photo of the fire some of my friends and I held this weekend, as a prelude to the winter solstice- the longest night of the year (which is tonight!):

And here’s a married to the sea comic, just because.

some things

- I went over to the Women’s Bookstore to pick up a few things on Friday. News articles have been circulating around this week about how the store’s been hit with hard financial times and needs an extra kick of funds to stay open. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha does a good job of giving a succinct summary of how amazing and neccessary this place is in the fabric of radical, queer, POC, feminist communities in Toronto. It’s also one of the few book stores left (if not the only one, now, since the death of Pages, this fall) that has a section devoted to zines and small press. If you’ve got any holiday shopping left, or are in the market for some new reading material, consider dropping in and spending some cash and time there. We don’t need more Chapters or Amazons stores in this world.

- This weekend, Lindsey Markel has got all her Fickle Little Machine zines posted as .pdfs on her website for free download. Hopefully this post doesn’t hit you too late to get in on the action.

- A friend forwarded me a link to an interesting call for submissions to The Women’s Studies Quarterly on the theme of ’safe’. The call-out is for both theoretical and creative work:

“Our lives are filled with devices, organizations, and agreements to keep our bodies, loved ones, and belongings “safe.” These practices appease our fears, but what does it mean to be or to feel safe? Is safety synonymous with security, stability or stasis? Is it a condition, or the negation of threat, risk and danger? Can we ever be truly safe? If not, why does it endure as an ideal?”

Small Press Fair rehash

The weekend at the press fair was fruitful – I sat at a table beside the lovely workhorsery press, with there army of dolls and cats used in the stop-motion trailer for Jocelyne Allen’s book ‘You and the Pirates’, which I found out that Jocelyne had made and animated herself. I found out the secret of the film’s flying rabbit, and it was like seeing behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.

It was also nice to a see a couple of familiar faces out, as well as meeting a bunch of new people and getting the chance to have a lot of little conversations about plague, contagion and phobias with folks, in light of those being topics of Pearls Before Swine Flu / This is Plague City .

Yet another small press fair event at the Gladstone, though, so there was a similar problem to Canzine- directing traffic upstairs. The upstairs space at the Gladstone is also subdivided into smaller rooms, and there were tables placed in them. Eventually, sellers in the rooms were moved en masse somewhere else, as they were getting no visitors. A space as labyrinthine as the second floor doesn’t really work for this type of event, and I know both Canzine and the Small Press Fair don’t want to cap table numbers, so the number of sellers is not going to shrink. The Gladstone adds a certain cachet with its popularity and allows people to drink beer while browsing or sitting, but I think crowds could be sustained at other venues, as well.

I’ve now made it a mission to figure out a space a press fair could go that’s large and all on one floor. I attended the fair at the JCC, and the Reference Library, and felt that the spaces worked well, so those are options to return to (well, after the Ref Library is done renovations). I also got to wondering what places like the Latvian House at College and Bathurst or other cultural or labour halls would charge a community group to rent. I’d talked to a guy at Canzine who mentioned trying to rent one to put on some punk shows, and how their prices had gone up a lot, but wonder if that depends on the type of event. There’s also looking into other community centres, schools or public spaces – Montreal’s Expozine is regularly held in a church basement! A commenter responding to the blogTO review of this weekend’s fair gives kudos to the organizers for getting away from church basements and towards a more polished venue, but I don’t know… what if those spaces are more functional for small press events of this size in terms of browsing and customer-to-maker interaction, despite their lack of sheen (and beer, as the case may be)?

‘Pearls Before Swine Flu / This is Plague City’ / Bookfair This Saturday

It all started with a conversation I had in a class I’m taking, where I realized I don’t really write the city I live in directly into my stories. I was thinking at the time specifically of landmarks like the CN Tower, but in particular, more commercial sites like the Eaton’s Centre or Dundas Square. I recognize that, for the large part, the reason why I don’t write these places is because I never go directly to them as a pleasure visitor – I’m always passing through, or trying to get away from them. I find them generally pretty alienating. So I set myself up with the challenge of writing places I normally avoid.

I got in touch with Dave of woodenrocket press, and asked if he’d consider doing a split zine, writing Toronto and spaces within it that struck us as alienating. This was also sort of riding the wave of H1N1 fear, and the city was already amping itself up on pandemic talk. We took both the ideas of fear and suspicion in the cityscape, as well as collective sickness, and each wrote linked postcards about them.

Thus, here’s ‘Pearls Before Swine Flu / This is Plague City’, our two stories in one tidy, split-zine package. Kensington Market and the Eaton’s Centre make appearances, as do freaked out narrators navigating different present day landscapes of dis-ease.

It’s been so long since I’ve done a split zine. The last time, I was a teen, and it was a crosscountry affair with Jill (in which I wrote a giant rant about the judgmental crowd at a punk show in Nipigon, if i recall correctly…), so we set it up by mail, instead of making decisions in person over the photocopier. I’ve always done stuff myself, and laid things out with a gluestick and scissors. This time, Dave laid it out in InDesign, and I did the cover (still with tape and scissors- old habits die hard), and we spent a couple of hours tonight tag-teaming the copying. I just finished collating them here at home. It was really fun! Thanks, Dave.

If you’re interested in picking one up, you can email me at bitsofstring@yahoo.ca or come to the Toronto Small Press Fair on Saturday at the Gladstone Hotel, in Toronto (10-5), and get one in person!

‘my things / my grandmother’s things’

This is a personal essay I wrote about doodling, the fallibility of memory and the act of making home, for a conference about collecting. I gave it as a story-telling style lecture/presentation here in the fall, and decided to sandwich my slides and story together in print form.

It’s 20 pages, and 1/4 sized. You can order it from me for 2$+postage. Email bitsofstring (a!) yahoo(dot)ca

Update

It’s been a little while since my last update! Here’s the latest:

- My postcard story ‘Prototype’ is part of the zine anthology ‘Coming out Femme’ put out by the Femme Family NYC, which you can order through them for 5$ (+2$ shipping). My story is about one of my first memories of being able to see femme.

- The Toronto Small Press Fair is coming up on Dec 12, at the Gladstone Hotel (the apparent nexus of all small press events). The Gladstone is @ 1214 Queen West, and the fair’s from 10-5. As far as I know, admission is free! The Small Press Fair, from my previous experience, is like a quieter Canzine, skewed a little older and more towards lit stuff than crafts.

- I’m working on a split zine fiction project which is (so far! ) about alienation in the city, with Dave Proctor of Wooden Rocket Press. We’re planning to get it out for the Small Press Fair. Details forthcoming.

- I’m also planning on printing a very short run of my collectorama lecture, complete with illustrations, for the fair, as well. I’m hoping to print them this week or next. You can also order a copy from me by email, if you missed my talk at OCAD and can’t make the fair: bitsofstring [at] yahoo [dot] ca

- Do You Like What You See? gets a shout-out on the fight boredom! blog

- You can download the new Hostage Life album here, for free. I’ve been going to punk shows again, lately, and trying to find new bands of that ilk to listen to, as I only have my old coterie of regulars from when I was a teen. (Bad Religion, anyone?) A friend of mine and I hit up the final show for these guys before they broke up, and it was an epic, sweating scream-fest. Very fun.

- Lindsey Markel has an amazing poem by WS Merwin posted on her blog.

Jacob Scheier, interviewed by rob mclennan

my friend Jacob is interviewed here by rob mclennan on poetry and the work of making work.

Canzine round-up

So Canzine was a rousing success today… although i got there at 11:10 and found the entire main floor booked with tablers already, so i didn’t get a coveted main-floor position. (Set-up begins at 11:00. if you know anything about the Gladstone hotel, you’ll know the ballroom / melody bar area is a pretty big space! apparently people had been lining up outside at 10:00 a.m, due to not remembering the time change.) I sold a lot of Do You Like What You See?, and think that having anything referencing Craigslist is something that sells. I was joking with my friend afterwards that I need to write poetry about other popular cultural touchstones to get my work picked up. Ah, the curse of being a poet.

I have to say, showing up to so many tablers this a.m sort of boggled me, and made me think the event has really outgrown the Gladstone in some respects. The editor of Broken Pencil walked by our table, which was in a stairwell, and made some joke about how they really should have tried to fit another table there, as well. I’ve come to expect these events to be packed, but it seemed triple-padded with tables in a lot of areas, leaving folks little room – or poorly lit room – to move around. I’m trying to think of an appealing solution, but holding something like this at an arena loses its appeal. However, the more cramped you are, the less people are actually going to browse and read and engage, so something’s got to give.

I didn’t see a lot of familiar faces this time around. I’ve been doing Canzine for probably about 7 years (I just did the math. Eep.), so I’ve seen a fair shift – a switch in locations, an entire renovation of a hotel, a massive growing of the event, but have had a bit of a community of folks I can count out to run into… but I missed Great Worm and Kim Kutner today, among other folks.

It was nice to see a whole Montreal contingent out, folks and work I’d seen at the Queer Zine Fair in Montreal this summer, like The St. Emilie Skillshare and Amber. There were also a shit-ton of media students and reporters out and our table seemed to be parked right by a press hub, so there’s probably a few photos making their way into the blogosphere of me staring off into space, slack-jawed and knitting.

CANZINE – Nov 1

come and see me at Canzine next weekend! I’ll have the usual knitted critters for sale, as well as some new zine projects. drop by and say hello!

Sunday, November 1, 2009
1pm – 7pm
The Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen St. West (Queen just East of Dufferin)
Toronto

$5 admission

new zine: DO YOU LIKE WHAT YOU SEE?

hot off the presses!

after a stint of time spent cruising the internet looking for romance and amusement, the desperation and desire i noticed in the ads i trawled became fixating points i wanted to play with, and riff on. so here’s ‘do you like what you see?’, a zine of found poems culled and created from toronto’s w4w section on craigslist from the past 2 months.

these are 2$, and you can order one from me at bitsofstring@yahoo.ca

Here’s a sample page.