From the Margins of the Insurrection

Zine Writing and the Death of Literature

Okay, maybe not the death of literature. Maybe what we’re talking about is a kind of resurrection, and the title of this article and this special issue of Broken Pencil dedicated to zine and independent writing and publishing should be called “Zine Writing and the Zombies of Literature”. Because as far as the literary cannon is concerned – the established publishing houses, commentators, professors, and libraries who all combine to give status to published works – most of the writing and writing about writing you will encounter in this issue of BP is like the undead, doomed to walk the earth unseen, unwanted and, of course, feared.

The articles and stories and reviews in this issue of BP stand as a marker in the treacherous shifting sands of literature. It’s just one magazine with a handful of contributors writing about two handfuls of people. But as Andy Brown’s feature on the new Canadian independent press shows us, those two handfuls of people are setting the tone and the pace for radical writing and publishing in this country. In fact, almost all the articles and stories presented in this issue demonstrate – along with the reviews of litzines and chapbooks – that there is a whole lot more going on in writing and publishing in Canada then what is accepted or even allowed. And this issue of BP intends to stand as a monument to this activity, where ever it might lead.

Personally, I suspect that the underground literature so active in Canada is going somewhere crucial to the very survival of writing and reading in North America. Just as the explosion of independent record labels revitalized an otherwise moribund music industry in the late eighties and early nineties, changes in how and why one creates writing will lead to a revitalized literature (a process already well in progress). Much of this shifting aesthetic has to do with two key points, points that find surprising common ground within the generally diverse and malcontent literary underground.

First, writing (and publishing) is becoming more visceral. Sonja Ahlers – whose work appears in this issue – uses a form of pop culture hieroglyphics that is also found in the work of many younger writers who shape images solely with words. Less concerned with plot, and much more concerned with portraying life as they see it – as a string of images and has-been moments stuck in the quicksand of memory – younger Canadian writers working in underground publishing are united in their obsession with lurid iconography.

“My work is illustrated calligraffiti illuminated handlettered po illitterature,” announces Ross Priddle, describing the strange but not unaffecting mixture of hand-written ramblings that appear in his zine TranceMogrifications (see review this issue). Similarly, in this issue new stories by Golda Fried, Michael Bryson and Phillip Quinn all focus on the surface. In Quinn’s story, a man actually turns into his next door neighbor’s wife. The premise, which works in Quinn’s comic-book style writing, is made real to us not through some internalized thought process, but through the main character’s demand for make-up and women’s clothes. Internal motivations are suggested and inferred through gestures and snippets of dialogue. No longer does a narrator tell us everything we need to know, or even anything we need to know. As readers we depend not so much on the plot as on the tangible feel of the word’s capacity to evoke the mental pictogram of communal images etched into our skulls.

Despite the externalization of so much of this writing, it’s the personal need for self expression that motivates these literary pioneers. But it’s also something much more complicated than that. Here we come to point number two. Not content to sit around sucking it up, isolated by the myth of the global, and yet united with their peers across Canada through a potent language of pop culture imagery, young writers are turning inward to depict not just their own identity but the banal of the everyday that makes up their identity (and their generation).

“My idea is to become in tune with cultural and political realities,” says Thoth Harris, author of the self-published Blank (reviewed in this issue), in what amounts to an argument against the divide between literature and life. “Everyday life is my aesthetic. I usually look around the room before I begin to write anything down,” explains Meghan Robinson, poet and publisher of the tellingly titled zine Undergarments. “I’m fascinated by daily goings on and interactions…every day life is almost all I ever write about,” says Montreal writer/self publisher David Leaman (see review of his Through the Bottom of a Bottle). “My work is about me saying what I need to say to stay sane, and helping other people do the same,” explains poet/publisher Emily Pohl-Weary (see review of Title Here, Name Here). The comments of these creators sum up the sentiment that this kind of creation isn’t about culture or art, it’s about personal liberty and the need of the individual to assert their own existence in a faceless world of anonymous product.

Pohl-Weary’s quest for sanity through self expression is at once poignant and sad. We search for a destiny that is our own, use our chapbooks and zines and books to extend a counter narrative that insists on the individual even as so much of what actually happens in this kind of writing – Quinn’s meta-sex change, Gold Fried’s interchangeable group of hipster couple wannabes, David Lester’s mute, parodic sketches – is thematically anti-individual. This conflagration of seemingly irreconcilable forces comes out of our media-fueled compulsion toward artificial groupings, groupings that leave us disaffected and longing for the capacity to evoke our sensibility as individuals. As David Lester says: “Mainstream media/culture uses corporate identity as a role model so we start to see simplifications and stereotypes used to reach the greatest number of people. The debates become narrower as the world becomes smaller. Little room is left for expression that doesn’t fit the corporate package. Zines, self publishing, these become a radical response simply because of their existence, no matter what the content is.”

But the fictional content of so many self publishing endeavours — at once irrelevant and the whole reason for self publishing – somehow melds the urge to fight against the corporate identity, with a recognition that the products of corporate culture (pop music, tv, ads) will always remain an integral part of our lives and memories. Saddled with a millennial sensibility, watching our lives and world drip down the drain of the so-called global economy, desperately afraid of our own fragile psyches, we populate the world with our undead stories, hoping against hope that someone, anyone, will take the time to stab a stake through our literary hearts, end our restless purgatory, and ease the lonely burden that is resurrecting words at the end of the twentieth century.

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