First appeared - January 31/04
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My Life in Zines (and Boys) In 1994, at 14, I laid eyes on a zine for the first time. It was called Phree, done by my boyfriend at the time, and a couple of his friends. I was smitten and instantly hooked. I would go to She Said Boom on College Street, and Rotate This on Queen Street and all the small record stores that carried some and buy as many zines as I could afford. By the time Canzine hit Toronto the following year, I had teamed up with a good friend, Anna B, and we started work on Ultimate Nosegooo. It was full size, on (alternating) pink, mint green, and blue paper. We'd take them to any all ages show we could get to and carried copies on us all the time. Money was never the goal. We just wanted to get as many people as we could to see it, read it, share it, because we had made it ourselves. We managed to get a decent review in Broken Pencil (THE Canadian zine directory). We were pleasantly surprised, and very happy to actually have someone impartial say that we didn't suck. Looking back on that zine and that review, I'm honestly surprised, because it wasn't very good. Though first attempts rarely are, (you should have seen the first design of this site..or maybe not). In 1997, Anna and I drifted and the boy and I broke up and I started working on Special Watermelon. It was my first solo venture, but I did have art help from my very talented friends Brigitte and Tabytha (the boy at this time was not interested in zines in the least). The Special Watermelon release show was the worst show I have ever put on -EVER. And sadly, it wasn't my first, so I have no excuse. Brigitte was there for semi-intoxicated support during the show, and the guys and I went out after to try to make it go away. There's nothing like a scary fortune teller on the street in Chinatown at 4am to make you forget about a bad day. (Well, there is, something, but we wont get into that now). I attempted to make Special Watermelon a little different by combining elements of a per-zine with elements of a fanzine. The next few issues were sporadic and while they had heart, they lacked the punch in the gut that I was going for. So, in late 1998, Special Watermelon was laid to rest (and so was the boy). 1999 brought the birth of NUG (National Urban Geographic), with yet another boy. I think he loved that zine more than I did. We'd walk Yonge Street at night taking pictures of the goings on and then go home and write about it. It was probably the most fun I have had making a zine because there was so much adventuring involved, and it was then that my love of photography began. Life got in the way and we only made one issue. The entire concept of the zine was so great that I'm not going to write about it here, because pursuing it is still burning in the back of my head (the zine, not the boy). While there was a lot of talk about making a new issue and really getting it to deal with all the things we wanted it to deal with, life pulled us in opposite directions and it never happened. I spent the next couple of years reading stuff I admired to get me in the right mind set. In that time a lot happened. One more failed relationship and a little trist later, and I had a lot of material for a heartfelt (but not whiny) per-zine. I started working on it without a name, and was almost done when I moved in with the man I'd marry about a year later. By then, the material I had written seemed unimportant and outdated. Moving in with a computer geek certainty had it's advantages. I learned html, and in time I learned some php. Before I knew it, more than 2 years had passed, and I found myself living in Sudbury after leaving Toronto. I had started working on Virus as a print zine, but with all this new knowledge and a computer of my own, I put it online. I am happy with what Virus has become in the last year or so, but I do miss creating something tangible. I'm working on a side project, to get that out, but there is no way I'd be able to jam all this into print form and be able to pay for it. My journey with zines (and boys) started out exciting and rocky at the same time, and I'm glad to say that I'm quite happy with how it worked out for me in both departments. The direction Virus is taking is one that I'm very excited about, it has a lot of potential to be something great and I really think it is going to live up to that potential, but my journey with printed zines is far from over. |
