Although we’ve been prepping for it for the better part of a year, Susan and I began the project in earnest a week ago today: her name is Sidney Amelia Bustos Munroe, and she weighed in at 7 pounds, 14 ounces.

It’s been going great, it’s a totally engrossing and fascinating process. Susan and I have made a bunch of things together, but Sid’s by far the best. Imagine a human being, but an implausibly adorable one, and you’ll have an idea of what she’s like. And if you’ve having trouble picturing that, check out the pictures interspersed with some of my early observations. Read the rest of this post »

Just coming down from the high of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival where we not only found an excited audience for our new graphic novel (we sold 90 copies in two days!) but I got to sit beside my favourite comic maker at the convention, Carla Speed McNeil — who, incidentally, I first heard about through the first TCAF when we were on a self-publishing panel together. I did a quick 20 minute interview with her and we talked about why she creates anachronistic science fiction societies, how she gets around the fact that her work is complex and hard to promote, and the development of her sin-eating aboriginal bad-boy. Click play to hear it.

 
 Carla Speed McNeil interviewed at TCAF 2007 [20:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Keep reading to hear about the other amazing cons I went to this summer, as well as some tips for enjoying them! Read the rest of this post »

I’ve always prided myself on the fact that the DIY publishing articles on this site have a certain lack of, shall we say, bullshit. And normally, a book called How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead would smell a little funky to me. However, Ariel Gore, Hip Mama mag creator and indie culture maven wrote this book, and like all her books (I’m particularly fond of her memoir Atlas of the Human Heart) it is excellent. As well as sharing her own considerable experience, she interviews folks like Ursula K. Le Guin, Dave Eggers, and even me, and manages to pack more wisdom and practical advice than I’ve ever seen in a book of its ilk. (It had an extremely high nods-per-minute ratio.) She even gets the folks she interviews to give “assignments” at the end, making it a writing class unto itself. Plus it’s extremely readable — I intended to skim to find something to excerpt but I found myself sucked in and reading most of it. Below is one of my favourite sections in the book. Read the rest of this post »

Revolver #2, which consists of an excerpt of Salgood Sam and my upcoming graphic novel Therefore Repent!, has been nominated for the Expozine Alternative Press Award for best comic. It’s an offshoot of the awesome Montreal zine fair, one of the more successfully bilingual events I’ve been to. This is the second time they’ve done the award and, although I have fairly ambiguous feelings about prizes and competitions, I think the attention it draws to underexposed artists is definitely a Good Thing.

Case in point, a nominee in last year’s Expozine competition The Hero Book by Scott Waters.

Scott’s a pal, and the book is great, but he’s a curmudgeon. Not likely to tour, or do readings, or talk to people, he’s not exactly a media magnet. But awards like the Expozine Award give a context in which to talk about him. Or, in this case, interview him. Read the rest of this post »

Mark Slutsky is an old friend and longtime collaborator — we’ve written screenplays together and he’s acted in shorts of mine — and his studio, Automatic Vaudeville, has recently released a hilarious comedy under a Creative Commons licence for free download. The Recommendations is a 55 minute mockumentary about the horrible violence bubbling just under the genteel surface of Canadian literature. A showcase for their obvious goofball humour as well as their subtler cultural savvy, it’s my favourite of the Montreal movie studio’s almost fifty productions. To watch a trailer, read a short interview with Mark, and find out how to download it, keep reading. Read the rest of this post »

On the day I met Helen and Paul, we had just made the long train trip from Montreal to Halifax and I was trying to decide between showering and eating before my book launch — I figured it might be hard to find vegan food in a new city and I didn’t have time for both. Paul, who’d picked us up, ushered us into a cosy kitchen to meet Helen. She offered me some stew, and regretfully — both because I was hungry and because I always felt bad rejecting people’s hospitality — I told her that I was hard to feed: I was vegan.

“We’re vegan too!” Helen exclaimed.

This was a lovely introduction to the delightful paradox of Helen and Paul. Read the rest of this post »

Susan’s birthday is today, and last night she finished off the last academic assignment for her doctorate. That’s only one of the many things she’s pulled off this year — being her husband I might be biased, but I think her 33rd year was pretty amazing.

As a biochem grad student, Susan has pretty much a full-time job at a lab where she’s been publishing papers, training students and doing real science type stuff with gels and microscopes and a labcoat of her own. Last year she started a group on campus and a zine (LadyScientist) to talk about the issue of women in science. (Interesting fact that we just discovered this week: University of Toronto has the widest wage discrepancy between male and female professors in Canada.) This year she’s been dealing with the same issues, just in a fantastic variety of ways… Read the rest of this post »

I’ve finished a first draft for our lo-fi sci-fi movie script Infest Wisely. It’s got a Voltron-inspired story structure, with seven segments that stand alone but come together to form a feature length piece. Since we’re planning to shoot it next month, I’d rather just release it than talk a bunch about it, but if you’re curious you can peek behind-the-scenes — it’s our unofficial “whiteboard” website where we’ve been amassing ideas/considerations.

Talking about unusual shorts, McSweeney’s has put out a “DVD magazine of unseen films”, Wholphin, and were nice enough to trade it for my DVDzine Novel Amusements. I did a phone interview with the editor Brent Hoff where we discuss subtitling foreign sitcoms, trailblazing with distributors, cepholopods, films about beards, not wasting people’s time, and the world’s most illegal game of volleyball — press play to hear it.

 
 Brent Hoff interview: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ryan North does a daily webcomic which features the same six panels with three talkative dinosaurs and a tiny woman about to be crushed. 70,000 people a day check out Dinosaur Comics, for good reason — it’s hilarious and inventive and occasionally thought-provoking, which is a lot to wring out of T-Rex clipart and MS Paint.

I was on a panel with him at Ad Astra and discovered he lived in Toronto, too, and so we got together last month to chat about being an adult who still wears pajamas, funding free comics with t-shirt sales, the positive sum game of webcomic linking, his programming side-projects, and his beautifully designed new book Your Whole Family is Made Out of Meat.

 
 Ryan North interview [17:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.
Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

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.
Read the rest of this post »

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.
Read the rest of this post »

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.

Read the rest of this post »

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.
Read the rest of this post »

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.
Read the rest of this post »

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!
Read the rest of this post »