The room is buzzing, chock-full of earnest smiles and people peddling their homemade bundles of paper.
The summer edition of the Ottawa Zine- Off took place in the toasty Pressed Café on June 22. People came and went over the evening, trading zines they had one month to make before bringing them to the swap.
A zine is a magazine or book of sorts that has a small circulation, and is DIY from top to bottom with people creating the content, artwork, and publishing it themselves.
Though it started as a fun gathering in a friend’s backyard, Carleton grad JM Francheteau helped organize the fifth Ottawa Zine-Off as a public event, allowing anyone and everyone to come for free regardless of whether or not they had made a zine.
Francheteau said the Zine-Off helps with spurts of creative energy and allows people to make something without inhibition.
“The two hardest things about doing any new project is starting and finishing,” he said. “And this has both, because you know when it starts and you know when it has to be done.”
Where creativity can sometimes be stressful, Francheteau said zines allow people to stop psyching themselves out from doing expressive work and require so little capital, that anyone can make one.
“They give people of different statuses, and economic form, and attitudes or approaches to doing something creative, a good opportunity to get something out without a lot of pressures associated with it,” he said.
First-time zine-maker Geoffrey Bates created 16 issues of his zine for the swap. Bates said he originally wanted to make each issue unique without making any photocopies, so his art-based zine would be all original artwork—simple and touching line drawings.
Bates said he ended up hitting his limit at eight originals. One drawing labelled “GOBLINS” shows three faces of what must be goblins with their chins held high, captioned “your ugliness is our beauty.”
A fourth-year Carleton English student, Bates said he mostly decided to make a zine at his friend’s suggestion.
“I thought it would be a neat opportunity to get some of my work out there and see who was interested and it turned out really awesome,” he said.
For zine veteran Alanna Yaraskavitch, the Zine-Off was an avenue to connect with other people in the zine and get out the latest issue of her perzine—a personal zine where she talks about her life, dildos, seeing the Pixies, her grandma dying, and trying to have “slutty college years.”
Yaraskavitch said she started making zines when she was 14, after finding a fanzine at a music festival and realizing people were doing “rad shit” in Ottawa.
“I was like, man there seems like there’s a really wide and hip scene of DIY punks and writers here involved with this somehow and nobody wanted to start a fucking band with me so I started making zines instead,” she said.
Although Yaraskavitch said she wrote more prolifically when she was younger—”I made 10 issues in a year because I had no life”—zines have taken on a new meaning for her.
“It’s become the way I exist. The way I survive is by writing,” she said. “I just like sharing it with strangers because if I share things with strangers, maybe I can be more honest with myself, maybe I can be more honest with my family. If I tell strangers secrets then I can tell the people who are close to me secrets too.”
