On the back of the jacket of Smell It, Hal Niedzviecki's first collection of short fiction, the Toronto writer, editor and guru of independent/alternative creative action in this country, looks like . . . well, like a drooling fool.

His mouth hangs open, his eyes are hooded slits, he's unshaven, and on his knees is a large manual typewriter.

Niedzviecki doesn't use a typewriter. He says they're too slow, that the instant editing capabilities of his computer, along with all its other interconnecting bells and whistles, make writing a breeze. He puffs incredulously at the suggestion that some novelists still write in longhand, with pens and pencils - and enjoy it.

When he showed up for breakfast at an authentic 1940s diner on Dundas St. W. yesterday, he was shaven, bright-eyed, lucid, polite, communicative . . . no drooling fool at all.

Over his scrambled eggs and onions drenched in Tabasco sauce, he never once mentioned the gross bodily functions, noises, emissions and odours that seem to preoccupy him in Smell It, apart from admitting his writing has a certain "visceral" quality, and that it was the beginning of what was shaping up to be a perfect day.

He was up at 8 a.m., "not hung over" and prepared for the rigours of promoting his book, on television talk shows and in print interviews.

Smell It, published by Coach House Books, makes its debut at 8 tonight at the Lava Lounge, 507 College St., where Niedzviecki will read from it and perform his own "punk-folk" songs "for light relief.

"My stories are so dark," he said.

Well, dark and bitterly funny. They shift from contemplating death and suicide, to expressions of extreme paranoia, loneliness, alienation and terror, to quirky vignettes about seduction, masturbation and chicken soup as emergency sustenance.

The book of short stories - one is six words long - has already been published electronically (www.chbooks.com), and readers are asked to pay a $3.50 "tip."

"It's wonderful," Niedzviecki said, "that Coach House has made my work available around the world, and it's free."

Sounds a little like a pitch, doesn't it? Niedzviecki, lauded in the underground media where self-publishing is both a right and virtually expense-free, is reluctantly stepping into the mainstream.

The recognition is not surprising, considering his output. He co-founded, publishes and edits Broken Pencil magazine, the guide to Canada's alternative culture, and is one of the organizers of Canzine, the annual exposition of the country's independent publications.

For McClelland & Stewart, he's editing Concrete Forest, an anthology of new Canadian urban fiction to be published in the spring. He has regular music contributions to CBC Radio's Brave New Waves and the alternative music magazine Exclaim! His stories have appeared in magazines in Britain, the U.S. and Canada.

And now a book, a real book with a publisher's imprint and a hard cover.

"I hope it will be read, become part of the pantheon of new urban writing in Canada, an emerging culture," he said. "But I don't expect to make piles of money out of it."

Money at this point isn't high on Niedzviecki's wish list. In the current issue of This magazine, he expounds the theory that menial, dead-end jobs, as long as they provide the means of survival, are the only way to escape the idiocy of full-time employment and to stay clever, free, creative and sane.

In the current issue of Broken Pencil, he writes about what he calls "the malaise culture," where apathy and depression are defined as conditions induced by an uncaring society, and as "pro-active affliction(s), something that has to be worked at."

He eschews the notion that such ideas have been held through the ages by artists who worked at any meagre job to engage their muse.

"It's different now," he said. "Young engineers are a dime a dozen, and they can't find work of any kind. There are no choices now. There's so much irony in even declaring an ambition. Media images and counter-culture politics reinforce the hopelessness, the cynicism.

"Still, I don't feel sorry for myself. I drive a delivery van to get what I need to survive, and it came as a surprise I could make money writing articles and stories I believe are true and honest, without being a journalist."

Still, he added, he'll keep on driving his van, or ushering at concerts, doing whatever mindless work he has to do. "I don't want to write things I'd rather not write."

Born in Brockville, Ont., Niedzviecki lived in Ottawa till he was 11, and moved with his family to Washington, D.C., for his high school years. He studied English literature and philosophy at U of T, and graduated in 1994.

"I knew I was going to be a writer at the age of 6, but I never had any real expectations. I learned from Ondaatje, Joyce, Beckett, that it's possible to write in different ways, and though I enjoyed reading the existentialist philosophers, it was their language, how they wrote, that fascinated me."

Niedzviecki doesn't talk in the short, unadorned, crystalline sentences that characterize his writing.

His fiction is intensely personal, internal, often bleak, more like snapshots of people and things first encountered in the corner of the writer's mind. The prose/poetry moves with the speed and precision of a well-edited movie.

"Well, I'm a child of the movie and television age," he said, " and I'm influenced by the style and speed of film, and my sceneography - is that a word? - is generic, mostly an empty, strange landscape. What's important is how we see ourselves, not how we want to see ourselves."

Welcome to the underground
by John Terauds
The Toronto Star, Thursday, October 3, 2002

Thoughtful and soft-spoken, Hal Niedzviecki is not an obvious poster boy for the crazy underground world of 'zines.

Comic booklets, screeds, quirky stories and odd assemblages of words and visual art, 'zines are the hand-made markers of alternative thought and creativity pricking at the smooth beige underbelly of mass pop culture.

Many 'zines also morph into Web sites, grainy video montages and spoken-word performances, but the idea is the same: Getting an unconventional message out into the world using unconventional means.

Yet over a leisurely brunch at the Swan on Queen St. W. last Saturday, Niedzviecki comes across as more the quiet explorer than noisy demonstrator.

But there has to be a lot of steel under the velvet exterior, because Niedzviecki has founded and, for the past eight years run Broken Pencil, a magazine mirror of 'zine culture, and Canzine, "Canada's Largest Zine Fair and Festival of Alternative Culture," which gets its annual airing on Sunday.

Niedzviecki has also somehow found time to write regularly for newspapers and magazines, and has four books under his belt (as editor of a collection of new urban fiction, Concrete Forest, from 1998; author of We Want Some Too: Underground Desire And The Reinvention Of Mass Culture, 1999; author of the novel, Ditch, 2001; and co-writer of Cyborg, the story of Steve Mann, 2001).

A fifth volume (The Original Canadian City Dweller's Almanac, written with Darren Wershler-Henry) will be published next month by Penguin Books Canada and he is hard at work researching book No. 6 ("on individuality and conformism," he says)- and he's still only 31.

"I like to tell the story, not the argument," Niedzviecki says of his own approach to writing, pointing to how the world does not work in absolutes of black and white, but in shades of grey.

In the case of Broken Pencil and Canzine, he has provided hundreds of other people who either don't have or don't want access to mainstream media the opportunity to express their stories in an open, creative way.

Torontonians get two chances to experience this free expression this week.

Tomorrow, Niedzviecki and company launch the 20th issue of Broken Pencil and a new 15-track CD of spoken-word performances at the Big Bop on the Queen West strip. The festivities get underway at 9 p.m. and the $15 admission includes a copy of the CD and the magazine.

Catherine Kidd- "the best spoken-word artist in Canada," says Niedzviecki- guests alongside music by Boygina, the Bar Mitzvah Brothers and DJ Elizabeth Bromstein.

Sunday at 1 p.m., the free-admission Canzine 2002 gets underway at the same location, running to 7 p.m.

Visitors to Canzine will be able to browse and purchase the wares of 'zine exhibitors, view underground film and video, listen to live readings, attend a panel discussion on independent Canadian culture and take hands-on seminars in bookbinding or starting an on-line radio show.

There are 140 Canadian and U.S. 'zines signed up for the show, which is the most ever for the one-day event, making this "probably the biggest 'zine gathering in Canada, if not all of North America," says Niedviecki, adding that he expects about 1,000 visitors to the event.

Even if you're not a 'zine-culture fan, visiting Canzine is a great way to remind yourself that there is a vibrant world of artists and writers toiling beyond the magazine rack at Shoppers Drug Mart and the big screen at your local Monsterplex theatre.

Voice of a new generation:
Hal Niedzviecki's fiction has the courage of its bleakness
by Ian Mcgillis
The Montreal Gazette, September 15, 2001

In a short time Hal Niedzviecki - fiction writer, satirist, columnist, essayist and magazine editor (his Broken Pencil, a collection of underground writing, is in its sixth self-sustaining year) - staked a spot for himself as the Canadian most likely to provide a soundbite when the subject is pomo culture. But it seems no matter how cyber/millennial/digital/alternative he may be, there are some things a writer just can't help writing, and one of them is love stories.

"The core of human life is how we communicate, who we relate with, who we find love with whether it's for a day or a lifetime," says the ebullient 30 year-old Torontonian as we're menaced by wasps in Outremont Park. "I don't think you can write a good novel that isn't about those things in some way."

"In some way" is an important qualifier. The lovers in Niedzviecki's new novel, Ditch, are the title character, a 23-year-old van driver and virgin who lives with his mother and Debs, a teenage runaway living in the apartment upstairs who takes naked photos of herself and posts them on a Website that gets 18,000 hits a day. Together they set off on an ill-advised mission to find Debs's extremely creepy father. Sleepless in Seattle fans needn't apply.

"Ditch desperately wants to be in love with something or someone, something to lose himself in," says the author of his hero. "He's as much in love with the idea and the image of Debs as he is with the person, who seems to be a different person for each man or woman she encounters."

Niedzviecki has written in the past about people for whom pop culture is the only reality, but Ditch and Debs don't even appear to possess that much.

"What I realized in the course of writing Ditch is that there's a new generation using the Internet as a sort of identity multiplier, and they're coming out of a void. We (the 30-40 somethings) at least have some central images. We had our three or four channels, and our hallmark movies that can be broken down and reassessed for our own purposes. Now there are thousands of Internet sites, thousands of channels. It's total fragmentation. So what happens to that generation? What are they going to latch onto?"

A risk in having a novel's characters be aimless, of course, is that readers themselves may feel adrift. Even the older people in Ditch are nowhere near any nuclear-family ideal.

"But it's a not a question of ideals. I don't think we can look at past generations and say 'They had it right! They were really on top of things!' "

Ditch is bleak but it has the courage of its bleakness; you may not find the characters cuddly but you get the satisfaction of seeing their story come to a logical, if fantastically downbeat, conclusion.

"Yeah, there's no Michael Ondaatje happy ending, like in Anil's Ghost. That was so Hollywood I couldn't believe it. I feel no pressure whatsoever to provide people with that."

Neither is there any authorial gnashing of teeth over the ethics of Internet pornography; in Ditch it's simply a part of the landscape.

"The world of Internet porn is almost impossible to avoid if you spend any time on the Internet, and it's not a world without its beauty and its possibilities. You look at these amateur sites, of which there are hundreds of thousands, and you think 'Who are these people?' There's a sense of dehumanization, but it's also people using their own power to reinvent themselves as sex gods or whatever, even when the people displaying themselves aren't all that attractive."

In his culture tome We Want Some Too, Niedzviecki celebrated collage artists, guerrilla billboard vandals, graphic novelists, and other out-there figures. There must be some temptation to tackle some of those forms himself.

"Not really. My sensibilities are permanently embedded in writing. It's my only skill, unless you count blabbing, which is probably an offshoot," he laughs. "I'm fascinated by a lot of that (hybrid) stuff but I don't necessarily want to do it. As a novelist I want to harness the energy I see in the zine work I constantly come across, and in film and video and the Net, but still bring in my love of literature and the story, so that it's not just a bunch of babble."

Later the day of our talk, Niedzviecki was to read at Casa del Popolo, nerve centre of Montreal's teeming spoken-word scene. That and the fact that he has cited our city as a hotbed of "post-work" culture invites an enquiry about the differences Niedzviecki sees between Montreal and Hogtown.

"You see a lot more careerism in Toronto. It's much easier there to be sucked into the commercial culture. You're much more likely, working in the arts, to be running into people who put dollar signs in your eyes. The Montreal scene is smaller and tighter and more supportive. I can't imagine a figure like Ian Ferrier in Toronto, for example."

Finally, asked about his position as a zine-culture zealot with one foot in the mainstream, he shows signs of wearying of the topic.

"I'm not preaching smash-the-state rebellion. I'm not saying let's demolish the publishing house and bring down the conglomerates. I'm preaching something much simpler - people being able to speak to their times and to each other. As for indie vs. mainstream, there will always be that conflict between art and commerce, that danger, as you reach a certain level, of taking on the trappings of fame and becoming someone who just speaks at people and can't be spoken to.

"But let's not forget, (commercial success) is less of an issue for a Canadian writer. I mean, we're not talking about private jets here!"

In pursuit of the great un-Canadian novel
by Eric Shinn, Lana Slezic
The Toronto Star, Wednesday, August 29, 2001

"I spend most of my time alone in my house. I guess if I thought about it that would be pretty much what a writer would do."

Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki may let on like he knows where he is, but in reality, he is neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.

As the founding editor of Canadian alternative zine-culture magazine Broken Pencil, and a regular contributor to This and Shift magazines, he has been called a "guru" of independent culture. But he also wrote an article for Maclean's about Toronto's failed Olympic bid, and in 1999 his first novel, Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac, received enough praise for its distinctive fractured narrative that he could almost be called mainstream.

Niedzviecki, 30, revels in placelessness, but tomorrow he'll definitely be at Barcode (8 to 10 p.m., 549 College), reading from his new novel, Ditch.

The curious tale takes its name from its enthusiastically apathetic Torontonian twentysomething protagonist, a slacker hero who finds himself by erasing his own identity on a wild ride from Ontario to Maryland with his teenaged lover Debs, while she posts porn of herself online in an effort to connect with her long lost father. Terse prose describing the familiar yet alien surroundings of Ditch's Toronto- Interlog online becomes Interlock online, Tim Hortons becomes Good Time Donuts and Deli, yet U of T and the 401 keep their names- alternates with email excerpts from Debs' eerie online diary.

The effect is jarring, and it takes a lot longer to think your way through than you'd think for a 229-page novel. There's something in between the lines, though. It's not necessarily fun, nor is it boring. It doesn't go anywhere, but it moves. It's a certain perfectly understated truth that assures Niedzviecki has somehow channelled the dissociated in-between landscape we Canadians are often fearful to admit we live in. It's edgier than Douglas Coupland, and more realistic than William Gibson. Though fans of those authors would easily follow his style.

As Niedzviecki explains, "Ditch would not be considered a great Canadian novel. It's urban and it's cyber. 'Touching tales of new immigrant life in Canada' Ditch is not. It's a picture of Canada that I think the country is very ambivalent about, even though it is the real Canada."

Niedzviecki began working on the novel in 1998 while he was finishing the editing of Concrete Forest: The New Fiction Of Urban Canada. With all of his other commitments, the novel took several years to write, because Niedzviecki is a busy guy.

"There's so many distractions in life," he says. "Everything I do is a distraction from something else I want to do, with fiction being the thing I often want to do the most, and seem to do the least."

Still, he worked at the novel, with the close advice of friend and novelist Ken Sparling, as well as his editors at Random House. One of the main problems he faced in developing the text was deciding whether a story that takes place in digital and real space would be best told by incorporating a digital element. Why just write Debs' email diaries when he could post her porn diary online to coincide with the novel?

"You don't need to write about the Internet on the Internet, just as you don't need to paint to discuss art," says Niedzviecki.

"There's a lot of garbage about interactivity going on. A well-told story is a beautifully interactive thing with the reader's imagination, as opposed to 'choose your own adventure' endings on the web, or these kinds of questionnaire-type things you'll find online."

Characteristically, he contradicts himself when defending his choppy writing style. "We do sort of live in this very terse existence where everything ends abruptly and shifts quickly, and so I was really working to have the style evoke that world. You have to try to find the style that is going to work best with the story you're trying to tell. Maybe you do need to use short abrupt sentences to describe a short abrupt world, I don't know."

If Niedzviecki is confused, it only helps him relate to his characters. His writing shows a genuine empathy for their wired disconnectedness, following them to stupid parties, into shower-stall masturbation sessions and self-mutilation sessions in bathtubs. He shows a genuine curiosity to assemble the mediated personalities that he feels somehow represent the confused Canadian urban everyman.

Part of this fascination, Niedzviecki says, can be attributed to his work with Steve Mann, the U of T computer science professor and cyborg who invented wearable computers and sees the world through digital goggles. Mann began collaborating with Niedzviecki toward the end of the writing of Ditch on a manifesto that explains his "humanistic intelligence" theory. The idea is to use technology as an extension of our selves, rather than subordinate ourselves to technology as it permeates our existence.

Mann's iconoclastic views that debunk the imagery that defines us definitely shine through in Ditch, and the duo's manifesto, "Cyborg," will be released this November. At that point, perhaps Niedzviecki will carve out his place among Canada's established writers, though he says, "It's a lot easier to sell the pseudo-wilderness of Roots than it would be to sell Canada as a really eccentric, Steve Mann kind of picture."

For Niedzviecki, maybe its best if he does stay slightly below the radar, as he is now.

"I'm a pretty low profile kind of guy. I want to be in a position where I can write and be read, and I think that's where I am. That makes me happy. I'm glad to be here, wherever here is."

Writers ignore 'urban, weird' reality of Canada, author says
by Todd Babiak
Edmonton Journal, November 14, 2001

In October, Hal Niedzviecki read at the prestigious International Festival of Authors at Toronto's Harbourfront.

"It was nice," he says. He means nice, in all its blandness. As we speak on the phone, Niedzviecki checks his e-mail. "More than anything, it was a chance to introduce my work to an audience who are not in my target market of young, edgy, slacker hipsters."

Can he say this out loud? Will the slacker hipsters allow for such an obvious declaration? Will Edmonton's slacksters chide him at his reading tonight?

Niedzviecki doesn't care. "I say what I want to say."

He says lots of brave things, even daring to criticize Canadian literature. The canon is too rural, he says, too concentrated on small towns and characters like eccentric but well-meaning butchers.

"We have a long way to go before we can say fiction in Canada represents the way we live in this country. We still have this obsession with Alice Munro-like fiction, the cliche of the poignant ending where the grand truth is realized. Enough, already. The reality is urban, disembodied, weird, not pretty to look at."

Not to be an apologist for his own aesthetic, but his second novel, Ditch, is urban, disembodied, weird and not pretty to look at. The awkward protagonist, Ditch, delivers newspapers in Toronto and falls in love with an extremely troubled young woman from Maryland, Debs, who writes e-mails to her porn-obsessed father.

Niedzviecki is actually supporting two books this year. He also co-wrote Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer with inventor and acclaimed Canadian weirdo Steve Mann. In 1998 Niedzviecki edited a collection of urban, disembodied fiction that is not pretty at to look from across the country titled Concrete Forest: Writings From Urban Canada. If that isn't enough, he also edits and publishes a magazine called Broken Pencil: The Guide to Alternative Culture in Canada, out of Toronto.

Thanks to his blatant skew to cultural edginess, Niedzviecki feels he doesn't get enough sugar.

"I don't necessarily get the respect and attention as a writer that I'd like to get," he says. "People don't take my fiction seriously. I'm not a Can-lit heavyweight. Not to be conceited or anything, but I feel like I've done a lot of positive things for Canadian literature."

Indeed he has. Concrete Forest was widely distributed in 1998, and offered selections from some previously marginalized urban types. Broken Pencil points the young, edgy, slacker hipster set in the direction of some great, creative work.

Since the imagined lives of eccentric but well-meaning butchers are well represented on best-seller lists, people like Niedzviecki do a lot for the cyborgs and city cafe dreamers.

"We're evolving," he says. "Publishers are open to books like Ditch now, and I don't think they were three or four years ago."

Find your specialty, culture guru says
Joel Rubinoff
The Waterloo Record, Friday, May 19, 2000

Lifestyle culture. Mr.T. Stupid Jobs. Evel Knievel. The death of the underground.

All these things have their place in the unorthodox world view touted by Hal Niedzviecki.

"Increasingly, more and more people are living their lives through pop culture," said the Toronto-based author and alternative culture guru, speaking to a small but loyal crowd at the K-W Book Store Thursday night.

"Their ideas are informed by it and they want to be part of it."

But how to be part of a monolithic, corporate-controlled culture that advises you to "seize the day," "go for it" and "just do it"?

"It's not as simple as a sitcom plot shows it to be," says the twentysomething author, whose new book We Want Some Too expounds on this dilemma.

"We can't all be the pop star, the celebrity, the model, even though we're told we should be these things.

"So in the process of having our lives lived through pop culture we become frustrated and disassociated."

The answer, he says, is to take control on whatever level you can, whether it's touting yourself as the world's foremost authority on Tarzan memorabilia or, as he did, starting your own alternative culture magazine, or 'zine.

"If you go out and do something and announce yourself, however tentatively, people come to you and look to your opinion," he says, elaborating on his sudden transformation into alternative culture "expert."

"It's a fascinating and vaguely pathetic process."

But it's important, he says, to "assert ourselves as human beings."

"The way we take control of our lives is through an active sense of being able to create. If you want to make music, put out a CD, put on a concert in your parents living room, or start a pirate radio station or newspaper. That's the starting point."

Niedzviecki himself is a case study in self-determined empire building.

Unwilling to subject himself to the "brain numbing idiocy" of full-time employment, he took a series of low paying but low stress "stupid jobs" that allowed him the freedom to think on his own terms.

Usher. Security guard. Delivery boy. Data coordinator. Publishing intern. No job was too undemanding or menial if it spared him the torment of corporate culture.

On his own time, he wrote articles for alternative magazines, edited his own 'zine, Broken Pencil, and eventually wrote three books - Lurvy, Smell It and We Want Some Too: Underground Desire And The Reinvention Of Mass Culture.

Winning a National Magazine Foundation award last year as best new magazine journalist, his days of ushering at Bruce Springsteen concerts are officially over, though his alternative sensibilities remain happily intact.

"We make the stuff that isn't supposed to matter, matter," he says, elaborating on society's obsession with pop culture.

"We elevate the meaningless. But if we can work it to our advantage, it can be a good thing . . . we can all be our own experts."