Small press, big ideas

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2016 (2797 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When she was in high school, Meg Crane didn’t spend a lot of time at home. Instead, she could be found at the park, hunkered down with a bundle of pencil crayons and printer paper, diligently folding pages, sketching images, composing prose, creating issue after issue of her personal periodical. As she completed them, she would photocopy each issue and distribute copies to her friends.

“I think as a teenager you feel really powerless in a lot of ways, and this is a way to make you feel like you can make a difference in the world,” Crane said a decade later, sipping coffee at Stella’s on Grant Avenue.

Unlike the glossy pages of Elle or Vogue, Crane’s magazines never saw an editor and they weren’t typed on a computer. Instead, Crane functioned as her own editor-writer-publisher — taking the process of content creation and distribution out of the hands of media companies and into her own.

She was making zines: self-published magazines named by shortening the word, a fitting simplification reflecting the pared-back, personal style zines often embody.

Now 26, Crane is still zining (yes, it’s a verb, too) as the editor and publisher of Cockroach — “For eco-feminists who give a damn and wanna have fun!”

It’s more professional than her teenaged creations (typed on a computer and following a two-month publication schedule) and more collaborative, its pages filled by a network of contributors. But Crane still folds the pages herself, still staples each issue with coloured staples. At a moment when it’s easier than ever to publish content through the Internet, she’s part of a small but growing group of Winnipeggers who are keeping the medium alive.

Defining zines in the most general sense is easy. They’re self-published. They’re usually limited-run, typically ranging from 50 to 200 copies per issue. They’re magazines, essentially, but cheaper to make.

Once the ground rules are set, pinpointing what is and what is not a zine gets trickier. Winnipeg publications have ranged from how-to guides for fermentation (if you’re interested, check out the publications from Edible Alchemy) to photography (Cam Nikkel’s Pancakes and Skateboards is a beautiful example) to one zine that reviewed Winnipeg churches through the eyes of a deeply skeptical observer (Wholly Shit, now defunct but still legendary among local zinesters, by Stéphane Doucet).

There are also those that more closely resemble traditional magazines, such as Crane’s Cockroach, or Unity Zine. Both are collaborative, multimedia publications produced on regular schedules and feature everything from proper articles to recipes to playlists, art and more.

“I think people are very confused about what zining means,” said Natasha Havrilenko, one of the women behind Winnipeg zine rip/torn. Like Cockroach and Unity, rip/torn is collaborative and frequently veers into the confessional. “Zines can be anything.

“Certain zines are very niche, and they’re kind of more hard to explain. And there’re certain zines that are just about society, social commentary, aging…” she said. “The limit is really you and your imagination.”

Zines and zine-like publications have been around in one form or another for decades — even centuries, depending on how broadly or narrowly you define the medium, after all, people have been writing things down and spreading it around for a long time. They’re often connected with counter-culture communities or radical political groups, but they’ve just as frequently spilled out of those boundaries. As a result, the history is hard to pin down and different zinesters, as they’re called, will tell different stories of how they found them depending on where they looked.

By the 1980s, in North American literary communities, you could find chapbooks, small publications usually containing poetry or creative writing, that are a close cousin to contemporary zines. Tim Brandt, the custodian of a Winnipeg zine library belonging to anarchist group the Junto collective, remembers selling them at bookstores where he worked and making them himself.

“Some people say (the name) comes from ‘chapter,’ just like a chapter of a book, rather than the whole book,” he said, sitting in his book-filled living room in the Earl Grey neighbourhood. “And some people say it came from an old British tradition of chaps selling their books on the streets.

“Whatever,” he concluded with a laugh.

He recalled hunching over a typewriter in the 1960s, writing “little journals and stuff” with his brother. In the ‘80s, it was chapbooks. Gradually, it became zines.

By the 1990s, true zines were being embraced in the queer and punk worlds, notably by the Riot Grrrl movement in the Pacific Northwest in which the two collided. Underground feminism, driven by powerful, pissed-off women such as Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail, found physical form in zines such as Girl Germs, Bikini Kill, Jigsaw and Riot Grrrl.

Winnipeg’s own underground punk movement was what introduced Dany Reede to zining, in small, crowded venues as promoters and fans handed out handmade publications detailing the latest and greatest in punk rock. Now, Reede and his wife are the creative force behind Sad Haus Press, the name under which they release a variety of zines full of Reede’s art.

“I probably made my first zine when I was 16, 17,” Reede said over coffee at a long table in an Exchange District café. “I was going to a lot of punk shows and stuff, basement shows, community centre shows. Zines are a big part of that kind of culture: fan zines.

“People were doing zines about the local scene to trade with people in other cities and stuff. Around that time, people were using zines to connect with people, kind of like social media these days,” he said. “It was a way to send your zines to different people in different cities and make connections, stuff like that.”

“The whole history of zines is pretty badass,” said Sarah Carr, editor of Unity Zine in Winnipeg.

Carr’s first real experience with zines was through the queer community, at a zine-making workshop offered by one of the people behind trans.zine, a support publication for transgender people in Manitoba operated out of Brandon.

“That’s when I was like ‘Whoa, I could actually do this,’” Carr said. “That was really interesting, especially just (learning) that it doesn’t have to be perfected pieces of work. It can just be expressing what you have to say or what you feel.”

For many Winnipeg zinesters, a big part of the medium’s allure is its accessibility.

“It allows anybody who wants to put their work, or their opinion, or their art or whatever, out there the opportunity to do so,” said Crane. “Not everybody has access to the Internet and a computer, but pretty much anybody can get their hands on a pencil and paper.”

The concept of a low-barrier artform was part of the appeal for Carr, too.

“It just seemed the most accessible, I guess,” Carr said. “I could really incorporate so many different types of art forms that way. Not as much as like a website or something… But I personally just really like physical things, and also you can just give it to someone.

“Things get lost in the web so easily, and you’re constantly having to promote (your work),” Carr said. “But if you just have a little table, you can have your zines and people can look through it, see if they like it, and it’s a lot easier to get out there if you have a physical copy of something.”

Carr said the goal with Unity was to tap into that idea and create an accessible platform for people to express themselves.

“I notice a lot of artists, especially young people, are really insecure about sharing their art. They feel like they’re never good enough,” Carr said. “Submitting it to an art show or something like that, that’s really intimidating. But having a small place where you can submit your stuff and feel like you’re getting out there, getting practice having projects, that was the point. I felt like a lot of people could use that.

“I wanted to make people value the work they were making, and show them that by sharing what they’re doing, it can inspire others,” Carr said. “That was more the purpose, to help people who feel isolated in their situations by talking about different issues and having a wide, diverse spectrum of experiences that people are sharing.”

The concept of sharing is an essential piece of the zine ethos, Havrilenko said, down to the distribution of the zines themselves. When she and friends began rip/torn, it was the first time she’d written anything for public consumption.

“It’s one thing to write it down for yourself, to have that output, and it’s another thing to share it with other people,” she said. “It’s almost like it’s twofold, in terms of getting something off your chest and getting your voice heard.”

Rip/torn and Unity both offer contributors the option to make submissions anonymous, and Carr said protection might help foster the confessional tone in many zines.

“Maybe there’s like this whole thing about wanting to — thinking about yourself and thinking about what you could have used to see, and thinking about the authentic truth of something and wanting to provide that to someone else when it’s not provided a lot elsewhere, I guess,” Carr said. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

Opinions differ on how much zines are really on the rise in Winnipeg. Stéphane Doucet, the mastermind behind Wholly Shit and a handful of other similarly irreverent zines, said he doesn’t think zining is gaining momentum.

Others disagree. Crane, an organizer of the Winnipeg edition of a national zine fair called CanZine, said she sees zines gaining momentum across Canada, and first noticed more zines popping up locally around the time she started her own in 2014.

“It seems to be a bit of a movement, right now,” Crane said. “People sort of moved to digital, and it seems that people are going back to having physical copies of things, especially younger people.”

“Maybe people are just more interested in knowing what they’re buying and buying directly from artists, and supporting local artists at that kind of level,” Reede said. “I know, in Winnipeg, that’s a trend that’s been happening, people wanting to know where their stuff comes from and supporting locally made things.”

Like Crane and Reede, Carr perceived some buzz around zining. Zining workshops in the city are easy to find (offered, for instance, at Martha Street Studio) and new names continue to pop up, although fans are also mourning the death of Sappho, a feminist collective zine that closed its doors last year, although it donated some of its last money to Unity to help it get started.

“We’re used to the technology, we’re used to the blogs, and the web-series, and stuff like that. But making something physical – I don’t know,” Carr said.

“I think it’s really easy to feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the different possibilities. It’s like, ‘Oh, I can do this, I could start a GoFundMe or a crowd whatever it is, I can help these people, I can create these different things.’

“Everybody’s doing so many different things now, and it’s just a lot of work. But zines are just – they’re small, and they can bring whatever you want to put out there, I guess.”

The idea of creating the content you want to consume, filling the gaps in a culture where you see them, could be part of the allure, Carr said — and also part of the elusive definition.

“It’s making it your own, I guess,” Carr said. “Maybe that’s part of it.”

This year’s CanZine Central is scheduled for the Millennium Public Library, Oct. 22, from noon to 6 p.m.

aidan.geary@freepress.mb.ca