July 19, 2008
Last post, upcoming zine fairs
Well, my time as the resident blogger here has come to an end. Seems like the thing to do is to plug the various zine-related projects I'm involved with or know about, so here goes: I hope to see some of you zinesters and zine-readers at Expozine in Montreal -- it is set for late November with all the details appearing on the website (www.expozine.ca) by mid-September. With nearly 300 different exhibitors selling countless hundreds of printed works, it's worth visiting Montreal for if you're any sort of zine fan! Much sooner is a new zine fair happening in Quebec City on August 9, for details visit these websites: http://lesraboussiers.blogspot.com/ http://www.panpeinture.org/ If you happen to be visiting Quebec for their anniversary (or to see Celine Dion's free concert), you should definitely check that out too. Also, if any of you have small zines or comics you'd like to sell in the network of Distroboto vending machines in Montreal, check out the website for the project... Read more.
July 11, 2008
Since the current issue of Broken Pencil is the fiction Issue, I’m making fiction today’s topic—or “making fiction”, to be more precise. My own first novel was recently published (A Fine Ending, Insomniac Press), and despite what some readers thought, it is a work of fiction. It sort of has a “non-fiction” aspect to it, in that a real time and place serves as the background to the story, and real people inspire many of the characters. However, the story and the major themes came first, and the events and characters served them. If I’d meant to write a non-fiction chronicle of that time and place, or some sort of autobiography, I would have done the opposite. I’ve written a lot more non-fiction than fiction and always aim to be as thorough and comprehensive with my research as I can. I didn’t think the subject matter of my book would have been well served by my usual scholarly non-fiction approach, however. Approaching it as a work of fiction allowed me to focus on the mood and ... Read more.
June 24, 2008
10 LESSONS LEARNED IN 10 YEARS OF PUBLISHING ZINES
by Louis Rastelli Although it’s currently on hiatus, I published Fish Piss Magazine between 1996-2006 (see www.fishpiss.com for more info), and thought that this would be a great place to share some of the lessons I learned from the experience. 1. The issue is never finished. At some point you just have to print it and put it out. 2. If you’re starting a varied zine that is open to submissions, then what you decide to put in the first issue greatly affects what you receive as submissions the next time—i.e., put in lots of poetry, you get lots of poetry. Put in a really gross cartoon, you get even more disgusting cartoons. This leads to another lesson: 3. Putting in really good interviews or well-researched articles does not mean you’ll start receiving lots of really good interviews or well-researched articles. That stuff takes a LOT of work, and people are less willing to do it if they aren’t sure it will be published. With Fish Piss, I usually took it upon myself to do som... Read more.
June 12, 2008
Ninjalicious and urban exploration
Sorry about the long wait between blog postings, folks – shortly after finishing taxes and various June 1 grant applications, my main Mac was hit with a spate of bugs and worms and viruses, and it took awhile to clean it all up. (Lesson no. 1: Macs may be far more impervious to viruses and worms than PCs, but that doesn’t mean they’re COMPLETELY impervious!! I suggest anyone with a Mac occasionally running the free ClamXAV program, especially if you work with people who own PCs, because you can easily end up infecting them.) While scouring my various inboxes to ferret out infected emails, I came across one from March 2005 which gave me pause. It was from Ninjalicious (Jeff Chapman), a response to an email I sent him after I heard he was diagnosed with cancer. I was in the midst of dealing with my father’s terminal cancer when I emailed him, and was sad to get this reply from Jeff: “I'm afraid I did pick up a batch of cancer somewhere along the way. I'm in the midst of chemotherap... Read more.
May 23, 2008
Ninth annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair
Montreal’s annual Anarchist Bookfair held its ninth edition last weekend. Once again, I had to point out to many friends that the fair doesn’t just include anarchist literature – it’s a really huge press fair, packed full of some of the best publishers and distributors of North American alternative books and zines of all kinds. This fair has inspired a number of other annual anarchist bookfairs across the continent, notably in Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver, New York and San Francisco, and featured several days of DIY and informational workshops as well as numerous cabarets and concerts. For the ninth year in a row, I had a table alongside my pals Conundrum Press and Cumulus Press, and did a hell of a lot of shopping whenever I had the chance. Some of my fave finds include: Steampunk Magazine (www.steampunkmagazine.com), which sold out within the first hour from the one distributor who had copies of a few issues. I managed to grab number 3, which features an interview with Alan Moor... Read more.
May 8, 2008
First of all, let me thank my old friend and University alumnus Magda Wojytra for her blogs here in the past few months. It's a real coincidence that we both end up blogging here back-to-back. There isn't much I can say by way of introduction that you won't find in the biographical box at the top of the page here. There also isn't much to this first blog post -- I will post a "real" first entry at the beginning of next week. In the meantime, just to make sure I know how all of this works, I will upload a photo from one of my favourite websites, the Church of Euthanasia. (Give a hoot -- don't reproduce!) See you again soon, -Louis Rastelli... Read more.
Louis Rastelli
Louis Rastelli has been involved in writing and publishing since forever. A bilingual native Montrealer, he drew his own little magazines and comics as a child and would convince his teachers to "run off" copies for his classmates. By age 12, he was submitting short stories to science fiction magazines (although none were published). His first exposure to zines was while browsing independent record shops in his early teens. He was excited to discover that some accepted submissions, and began writing for local zines when he was 16.
He studied and worked in southern Ontario in the early '90s, and was dismayed upon returning to Montreal to find that the old zines had stopped publishing in his absence. In 1996, he began his own zine, Fish Piss, and was quickly flooded with submissions from people starved for a place to be published. The wealth of talent that filled the early issues--including the likes of Jonathan Goldstein, Golda Fried, Heather O'Neill, Marc Bell and Marc Ngui--earned Fish Piss much recognition (and international distribution) within its first year.
In 1998, he co-founded Archive Montreal with fellow publishers, a non-profit organization with the mandate of preserving and promoting local independent culture. In 2001, frustrated with distribution problems, they launched Distroboto, a network of former cigarette vending machines converted to sell art, music, films and zines. The project took off and was later featured in The New York Times as one of the "Ideas of the Year." More than 25,000 works by over 500 artists have since been sold through these machines.
In 2002, they founded Montreal's Expozine small press, comic and zine fair. The fair has grown to host nearly 300 publishers each year and recognizes the best among them with the annual Expozine Alternative Press Awards. Through it all, Rastelli continued to write freelance for many different publications and also self-published numerous miniature books of fiction and historical essays. His recently published novel, A Fine Ending (Insomniac Press), set in fin-de-siècle Montreal, has been called "a timeless portrait of the spirit of bohemia" and "a warm-hearted account of an artistic community's defining years." He left his long-time day job with an international conglomerate in 2005, and has since kept busy working on these many ongoing projects. He is also an avid record collector, DJ and musician and would love to find the time to become an amateur filmmaker.