Category: Inspiring Creators

One of the gems I received in response to my offer to trade books was a thin volume named The Giant Squid in… Holiday Hijinx. It preyed on my love of underwater creatures, the antiquated absurd, and needlessly cruel narrators. I’d enjoyed the Ask the Giant Squid columns online for their uppercrust tone and sharp-beaked attacks on monkeymen, but it wasn’t until I read them collected that I began to appreciate the characterization and narrative tentacles twined through. I interviewed the writers(s) via the interweb mail service, mostly with Dave Nelson, about their “3-pronged writing attack” and publishing experience.
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Joey Comeau’s Lockpick Pornography isn’t just a title tease: it puts out plenty of sleaze and theft in a smart and funny queer adventure story. The narrator puts his foot through a television, pulls together a genderfucked super hero team and launches a figurative and literal attack on the straight man’s world. Starting life as an online novel, it’s become a beautifully designed physical object courtesy of Vancouver’s Loose Teeth Press. Joey is launching it with a reading with Derek McCormack at Toronto’s This Ain’t The Rosedale Library Bookstore (481-A Church St) on Tuesday, March 21, 7 p.m. Free.

I asked him a few questions over email about the book.

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It’s a rare time that I like an art show so much that I’ll buy a catalogue — I find the writing in them does nothing for me. They’re as bad as artist’s statements, usually, which (along with the obligatory reading for authors) I consider to be a cultural convention that is deeply broken. But despite the fact that A Beginner’s Guide to Quantal Strife is a catalogue for a show that I hadn’t even seen yet, I read it cover to cover. It’s a thought-provoking and breezy read.

Sally McKay, past editor of arts magazine Lola and an artist herself, is responsible for bringing together Quantal Strife. I know her and two of the three artists personally but I was still left with lots of questions as to how she managed to pull this off.
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I met Missy Kulik at an indie media conference where I was doing a DIY Books seminar. I picked up a couple of her comics and we’ve kept in touch ever since. Her first book, Personal Charm, was self-published in June: or as the copyright page more originally puts it, “First Pressing June 2005.” We chatted by email about her book, which has its roots in ten years of zine making.
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Sherwin Tjia is a Montreal artist who makes everything from Scrabble-tile lapel pins to schoolgirl comics to mini-CDs inviting us to listen to his friends masturbate. His latest book of poetry, The World is a Heartbreaker, is a collection of three liners: “i don’t want to say/ payback, but you know it’s/ pretty much payback”. It renewed my faith in the power and relevance of poetry the way that the best song lyrics do. I asked him a few questions over e-mail about the book’s development.

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Almost ten years ago, at the Imperial Pub at Dundas and Yonge, Jeff told me about his plans for a new zine. Quite different than Yip, his humor zine, it would be about exploring off-limits places. I was concerned about having such a narrow focus for a whole zine. I suggested he give it a broader theme, relegating the exploring to a column or subsection. “You could call it Sneak,” I said, brainstorming other sections for scams and other naughtiness.

Out of spite, Jeff (AKA Ninjalicious) published twenty-five issues of Infiltration, a zine about going places you weren’t supposed to go. And next week, his definitive book on the subject — Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration — is being launched in Toronto, to the dismay of lazy security guards everywhere.
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I met Nicholas Johnson at a Seattle zine fair nearly a decade ago. He was peddling Shark Fear, Shark Awareness at the time, and through a mail correspondence I kept up through his zine projects that were engrossing accounts of his time as a sperm donor (Burning the Ancestral Chi) and an ESL teacher (Kongju-si: Letters from Korea). His fast and trashy vid making was a big inspiration to my own initial forays into making little movies, and he actually wrote a DIY article for this site.

Big Dead Place (Feral Press, 2005) is his latest and greatest project to date. Nicholas spent the last couple of years living in Antarctica, doing the joe-jobs that keep the research labs based there functioning: washing dishes and compacting garbage. I knew from the couple of e-mails that he’d sent that his stories about the place would be hilarious and fascinating: what I didn’t expect was how deftly he would weave together the historical tragedies of Sir Robert Scott’s bungled exploration with the bureacratic tragedies of bungled room assignments. Populated by lewd characters and outlandish scenarios, it nonetheless ignores the easy targets in favour of putting forth a journalistic work of depth and craft.

I shot him a couple of questions via e-mail.
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While I rarely found myself sitting beside friends in classes where the teacher decided to place us in alphabetical order, I do find myself in exceptionally good company in the “M” section on the bookshelf. Three of my favourite authors are Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami and China Miéville. If you don’t already know them, come meet my neighbours!
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