indie artist in residence
currently in residence:
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.
Email: indierez@brokenpencil.com
New blogger aboard
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
Louis Rastelli
Link
posted: May 8, 2008
How Rob Brezsny is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
"... the out-of-control imagination in service to the ego is the function by which most people lie to themselves constantly"
Don't you just LOVE Rob Brezsny?! If you haven't had the pleasure of one of these shining beacons of unfailing online optimism, don't delay - Free Will Astrology website awaits. The bright colours alone are bound to tweak you into a more wakeful reverie of the moment's potential for glee.
Many people are familiar with Rob's horoscopes which are syndicated in hundreds of newspapers and weeklies, and are also available on his website.
Fewer people are familiar with his books or how he got into horoscope writing in the first place. I highly recommend to read the whole thing on his website, especially if you're a writer, artist, designer, and especially if currently you're blocked in any way - creatively, ethically, financially...
Here are some outtakes:
"I tried to imagine a way I could write an astrology column without violating my integrity.
...
Though I was a student of astrology, not a teacher, I had high standards about how the ancient art form should be used. And I considered newspaper horoscopes to be an abomination. Without exception, they were poorly written and dull. They encouraged people to be superstitious and made the dead-wrong implication that astrology preaches predetermination and annuls free will.
...
What happens to people, I told myself, tends to be what they believe will happen to them; the world runs on the fuel of self-fulfilling prophecies. Therefore, couldn't it be said that my oracles would be accurate by definition, since anyone who regarded them seriously would subconsciously head in the directions I named? As long as I diligently maintained an optimistic and uplifting tone, no one could fault me for manipulating people in such a way.
... the pay was $15 a week — so low that I could keep some of my food stamp allotment.
I regarded it as a fortune, though, considering that I was getting paid to be a poet in disguise. My secret long-term agenda, after all, was to build an imagination strong enough to gain regular access to the fourth dimension without the aid of psychedelics. What could be better training for that than a weekly assignment to spew out 12 oracular riffs and shape them into terse word-bombs?"
I have been following Rob's horoscope on and off for at least 15 years now. One aspect of the writing that I have always liked is that if that week's horoscope for my own sign, Capricorn, didn't really give me the boost or intrigue I wanted (and most often it did!), I could go and read a bunch of the other signs until I found something that was the exact message from the universe that I needed (ie. until something made me cry). And now I know why.
The other closely related and to me much more fascinating quality of Rob Brezsny's horoscopes and even his writing in general is the unflagging optimism that rarely sounds cheesy. No small accomplishment, that.
Maybe this is because the writing style is so blatantly over the top that to ridicule it would require a kind of stylistic innocence or even naiveté as well as hardened cynicism - and who can marry those for long?! As the prefrontal cortex wastes precious moments in baffled indecision, the eye moves forward along the lines of text and the charming ideas that unfold sneak in and anchor themselves on something much sturdier: a resonance with the disarming possibility that it could be true.
What, exactly, could be true? Whatever it is we each need to believe in the moment to keep going, keep striving, keep our head above the rising waterline with grace and style.
Don't believe it, imagine it. It's much more effective.
Blooming apple tree and bare branches lit by sunlight against a stormy sky.
Savigny-sous-Faye, Poitou-Charentes, France. March 2008.
Magda Wojtyra
Link
posted: 11 March 2007
Only Five Billion Left Behind
It is a well established idea that the media, as an extension of corporate will, has the budget to harness the kind of vehement ingenuity that fosters insanity in society in a way that is very difficult for any individual to resist. We wander in a stupefied daze like conflicted robots programmed to want things that are destructive for us and ignoring the soulful yearnings of our true selves.
And so it is that even intelligent, mature, astute, and therefore somewhat safely outsider members of society secretly crave for someone to buy them one of the gifts on Facebook. Not the free ones, mind you. Those are fine – the cache is in the $1 JPEGS.
Think about what an utter scam this is! And how devilishly ingenious! Yes, $1 is not that much in our bubble of a world, and so MILLIONS of these tiny, tacky virtual illustrations have been sold, as attested by the “sold out” or “only 50,000 left” sings in the store... So and so bought so and so a tiny pixilated stiletto, or a ninja shaped gingerbread cookie, or a golden egg laying goose, or even a turkey baster. What is up with THAT one?!
One has to look pretty closely at the situation to see any kind of silver lining in paying more for a virtual donut than a real one, or to figure out exactly how 900 square pixels of a virtual beer refresh anyone. (I counted, not including the head or the “refraction” in the glass.)
And then I saw it – a can of whoop ass. And I wanted it! Why does it pull on my particular heart strings? And then I knew: because it was a virtual, immaterial representation of a culturally very specific phrase, a bit of LANGUAGE made “real” in a way that was very different from the visual representations of real objects like sock monkeys or roast hams. And it struck me that the phenomenon of virtual gifts on Facebook is one of the most obvious signs of a kind of yearning for virtual and therefore spiritual meaning to our lives that is actually starting to break to the surface on a large scale!
Yes, it is still all wrapped up in making money, conceived by demented ad agency Gandalfs that did take the ring of power for themselves and haven’t yet looked back, and yet it is undeniable! It seems to me that people are actually starting to loosen their cravings for material possessions and zero in on the intellectual appeal of the IDEA behind the object itself. A Gucci gold watch on your wrist is heavy and cold and, most importantly, seen by the few people that happen to be in physical proximity. But a can of whoop ass stuck to your Facebook profile like gum to your shoe? Priceless!
Real money for truly virtual goods - we can figure out what was really going on later, after it buys the physical us on our physical planet some time. I say let’s keep it spreading like wildfire, before the oceans are completely filled with plastic.
Magda Wojtyra
Link
posted: 1 February 2008
Mythomaniac
Can you remember learning your first word? How about the last word that you taught to yourself, by looking it up or asking a question? How do all these words get into one's head? It's an infection, symbiotic. It's also one of the most powerful technologies we have, and it's still evolving: People thought Thomas of Aquinas was special because he could read silently by just looking at the words, in his mind, as it were! This was shocking to people for whom up to that point reading meant to read aloud, to make the vibration with the tongue and throat, to hear the sound, and know the meaning of the words that way. We've come so far, and there's still such a long way to go.
Terrence McKenna said it this way: "The primary insight that has been secured here at the end of the 20'th century is that information is primary... this world is made of information..." From Australian Aboriginals singing their history into being to the mathematical language of physicists, it's a solid and respectable idea. If the world is made of information, then that is a kind of language, and if it is language, then it is a code, and the "implication for the digirati is that reality can therefore be hacked... If it is code, then it is far more deeply open to manipulation then we ever thought..."
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that if everyone said exactly what they meant and meant exactly what they said, then all the world's problems would be solved. What a task!
And yet we try, don't we? To express ourselves effectively, to fix the world's problems. Maybe it just has to be kicked up a notch, cranked up a level, to 11, or 12, or however high it takes. It's a pliable medium, language, and it seems to me we can push the limits so easily to achieve so much more of a result. Like recycling or water conservation, it's the cumulative effort based on little moves that bears big fruit.
What am I even talking about? Can you imagine casting a magic spell by negation, by saying all the things you didn't want and hoping that what you'd get is what you wanted? Of course not. And yet language is used in such a way every day, all the time.
So let's all start practicing to speak in more positive terms in our daily lives, to speak in literally positive linguistic expressions that can at least have a hope in hell of being the kind of powerful incantations our world needs.
Magda Wojtyra
Link
posted: 25 January 2008
Farewell; ChiZine Publications
Well, everyone, this is my last post as Indie Artist-in-Residence. I hope you've discovered at least a couple of new dark fiction writers and publishers, and enjoyed my occasional rants and sundry postings.
Before I go, I thought I'd leave you with the URL of the small press I just started with my wife, Sandra Kasturi. It's an extension of my webzine and is called ChiZine Publications. Here's the URL:
Our first title, Brent Hayward's weird SF/dark fantasy novel, Filaria, should be released sometime in mid-2008, if all goes according to plan.
Alright, I'm outta here. Got a story to write for the Halloween 2008 issue of Taddle Creek, as well as a third novel to beat into shape.
Keep reading and writing, folks—and don't be afraid to let your dark side take over once in a while. It's fun as shit and half the calories.
Brett Alexander Savory
Link
posted: January 21, 2008
The Horror of Two Spaces After a Period!
Not that it has anything to do with horror, per se, but I definitely want to spread this far and wide. Taddle Creek echoes my thoughts exactly on people who still insist on putting two spaces after a period, even though no magazine, newspaper, or publishing house publishes like this. I, like most people, had the two-spaces rule driven into me in school, but once I saw the pointlessness of it—that it would be removed from the final product, anyway—I weaned myself off it and now quite comfortably only use one space after periods.
Maybe we need a national helpline for people to call: "Are you struggling with only hitting the space bar once after a period? Do you feel that a part of your childhood is being ripped away from you by ceasing to add that extra space? If so, please call 1-800-JST-1-SPCE. Operators are standing by to take your call. We're here to help."
Anyway, read Taddle Creek's piece on it—and if you're one of these Two-Spacers, please make an effort to reduce your wasteful spacing. Seriously, think of the children. Think of the environment, people! Big Oil and the Military Industrial Complex wants you to add that extra space! Show THE MAN that you're not going to play ball.
Brett Alexander Savory
Link
posted: January 7, 2008
New issue of ChiZine now live
The 35th issue of my Bram Stoker Award-winning webzine ChiZine is now live!
Fiction:
"Dust and Bibles" by Michael Colangelo
"The Mystery of the Missing Puskat" by Lavie Tidhar
"Matthew" by A. C. Wise
Poetry:
"A Brief History of Night, Before Sleep" by Leah Bobet
"King Kong's Last Poem" by John Grey
"The Aviary" by Joanne Merriam
"Meth Beauty Queen" by Samuel Minier
Go here to access the new fiction and poetry:
http://chizine.com/fiction.htm
There's also a new column by David Niall Wilson here:
The site also features book reviews, films reviews, and a bunch more. Please stop by and give it a read. Broken Pencil digs it and so should you.
Truth.
Brett Alexander Savory
Link
posted: January 3, 2008
An Articulate Defense of
I've never seen this kind of articulate defense of so-called "torture porn", a la the Hostel and Saw films. I've seen the first two Saws and both Hostels, and I have to say that this article pretty much reflects my own views on them. Sure, they're not the best-written films in the world, and they're certainly not everyone's cuppa, but I also don't think they deserve a lot of the scorn people heap on them.
Check out the article; at the very least, I think you'll agree that the writer raises some fairly solid points.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hilden/20070716.html
Brett Alexander Savory
Link
posted: January 2, 2008
The Machine Girl, coming 2008!
No words need be used.
Brett Alexander Savory
Link
posted: December 14, 2007
Bitter baggage
I attended Centennial College for their Book and Magazine Publishing program back in 1997. My teacher was a woman who some of you reading this have probably either heard of or have had as a teacher yourself. While some of the stuff she taught was good—and overall, I quite enjoyed the course—she did one thing that, to me, was unforgivable.
I can’t recall what the assignment was, but I remember that, for whatever reason, she asked us to bring in one of our favourite books or stories. I, being the sole horror-head in the class, brought in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood—specifically the short story “In the Hills, the Cities.” I explained that I thought it was one of the best stories I’d ever read, and was my favourite of all-time. It still is to this day.
Well, she went away and read it, then called me in to her office a few days later. She told me how the story was rubbish and that basically Barker was a hack. She said that when she worked at a major Canadian publisher, his Books of Blood manuscripts came across her desk . . . and she rejected them. Whoa, good call; she very nearly bought a collection of books that would’ve made a veritable assload of money.
But fine, whatever, everyone to their own tastes and all that, right? Sure. Except that right after telling me about how terrible Clive Barker is, she launches into a speech in which she tells me I’ve got to (paraphrasing) “stop reading and writing all that horror crap.” She told me it’d get me nowhere and that I should be reading all the greats of CanLit, etc. Then she said if I’m going to read genre material, it should be stuff like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which is an alright book, I suppose, but nothing even remotely like Clive Barker.
It was all fine and dandy and well within the realm of a teacher’s opinion until she actively tried to dissuade me from what was clearly my passion: dark fiction. That’s what I found unforgivable, and that’s why, after all these years, as petty as I know it is, there’s always been this driving need for me to prove her wrong, to show her that I was on the right path for who I am and for what I loved to write. That’s why getting the starred review in Quill & Quire for my novel In and Down meant so much to me. And then for them to include it in their “Books of the Year” round-up was icing on the cake. I want desperately for this teacher to see that. I want her to know that I have an agent who represents W. P. Kinsella, Miriam Toews, Will Ferguson, and a bunch of other heavy hitters. I want her to know that a major American publisher is inquiring about rights to the book, as is an Italian publisher. I know it’s small of me, but I don’t fucking care—and here’s why: If I’d been a weak-willed, more easily intimidated student, she might have actually convinced me to give up weird/dark fiction and try to fit into the CanLit mainstream. But I didn’t and I want her to know that I’ve had these successes in spite of her prejudice and poor advice.
At various times in my career, I’ve come up against people who snigger at horror or make fun of Stephen King, Clive Barker, etc., saying how they’re hacks and that it’s all so worthless beside the literary greats. It’s just fluff and shit and not worth the paper it’s printed on, right? Well, fuck those assholes, I say. You can’t dictate what people should write. You can’t tell someone to stop writing horror or surreal fiction, just like you can’t tell people to stop reading it. What right do you have? What level of fucking arrogance do you need to possess the nerve to tell someone that what they love writing will never amount to anything, and actively try to dissuade them from pursuing it?
Would I have had the same success if I’d turned away from this style of writing, as Colleen suggested? I’ll never know, obviously, but most likely not, because I wouldn’t have been writing what really interested me.
So yeah, today’s blog is basically just a big fucking middle finger to teachers who try to crush their students’ dreams just because they harbour prejudices against those dreams. You don’t like horror? You don’t like weird fiction? Fine, you’re entitled to that opinion, but you’re not entitled to verbally beat it out of people who do like it, and who want to make their careers out of writing it. Especially as a teacher. They should, in fact, be ashamed of themselves.
So, yeah, I’m grateful for the useful, practical things this teacher at Centennial taught me, but I hope she reads the starred Q&Q review of my deeply weird, surreal, dark, disturbing novel.
And I hope she chokes on it.
Next time: Hopefully less bitter baggage!
Brett Alexander Savory
Link
posted: December 13, 2007