how did you get involved in zines/d.i.y. publishing?
Basically, through punk. I grew up in a tiny town on Vancouver Island that had a surprisingly active DIY punk/hardcore scene when I was a teenager. Despite the town being isolated and unknown, there was a sincere bunch of kids who created a tight-knit and heartfelt community of sorts. At all of the first shows I went to, there were scrappy personal zines being handed out or sitting on tables at the back. Some of the older kids also had a zine distro stocked with stuff from all over, and after buying a few zines from them I was hooked. As I got more involved in the scene, and the older kids moved away, I started a record and zine distro with a friend. My mailbox became a tenuous connection to the punk/zine underworld even before I had made my own zine.

The local scene had a definite urgency and rawness to it. Beyond that, everyone seemed to just be doing whatever they wanted to do without asking permission—starting a band, making a zine, booking a show. And that influenced me profoundly and was something I wanted to revolve my life around. During those early years, there were dozens of personal mixed with political zines being made locally, and I was blown away by the honesty and emotion of it all, even if now I would look back on a lot of it as angsty ranting. So I feel like the desire to write a zine came out of this context, to contribute to something going on around me and to tell my own story like all the ones I had read.

It took a while for me to actually put something out. After many embarrassing attempts I’m glad I never reproduced, eventually me and two friends challenged each other to make zines before a show in the summer after I graduated highschool. That was "One Way Ticket" #1, almost six years ago. In the months after that, I got a lot of encouragement both from the punks at the giant collective house I moved into and from some reviews. There were some orders and some letters and after that I was hooked.

why do you continue making paper zines in the age of the internet? how do you think the internet has affected the world of paper zines?
I wasn’t doing the zine before the internet was around, so I’m not sure how well I can gauge the changes. I don’t think the internet has or will change people’s desire to read things that aren’t on screens. I hate reading stuff on a computer even though I’m a total nerd. When I put out a zine there is an immense sense of tactile reality to it: folding, sorting, stapling, holding. Turning the pages. Handing it to someone. Carrying it in my pocket. Stuffing envelopes. I think that this visceral quality changes the way you feel when you read the text, and that’s why I put out print zines. It can enable a more intimate connection between reader and writer. At least, that’s how I feel like when I read a really good zine. Recently, I was reading "Rice Harvester" #13 on my loft bed by the light of my headlamp and I was overcome by the intensity of his story. It felt like the most intense thing I had ever read. Now, if I was reading someone’s blog or something, I doubt it would have been the same.

what is your writing/editing/layout process like?
Difficult. Frantic. Exhausting. I don’t write all the time and even though writing is a creative and exhilarating experience, it requires a lot of discipline for me, forcing myself to get things done.

As far as process goes, I usually have an idea or a few sentences that sort of congeal in my brain and I work them over while I’m walking around, on the bus, biking, watching bands. When a bunch of stuff builds up in there, it becomes sort of unbearable and I decide to make another zine. Then I work furiously to make some deadline I’ve set for myself, like a trip or a zine fair, and never seem to have enough time. I write everything out in by hand in notebooks or on scraps of paper, then type it up and print it out and edit it. Editing for me involves scribbling all over the print outs, cutting out tons, adding in entire new parts. I used to spend a painstaking amount of time on cut and paste layout but I’ve since become more interested in type setting and typography, and have realized that sometimes good layout involves the details that you don’t notice. I also got tired of people telling me my zine looked like "In Abandon", even though it did. For the last zine I used InDesign because I’m addicted to ligatures, Photoshop to make fake half-tone photos, and rub-on letters to do the headings. My natural handwriting is nearly illegible if I don’t spend concerted effort on it, but if I have time I’d like to handwrite parts of zines or whole zines in the future, because handwritten zines have always impressed me. I still feel like each issue is an experiment, and I don’t want to give that up.

how do you think the zine community or the process of making zines haschanged since you've been involved?
I’m sort of on the outskirts of the zine community and haven’t been involved for that long. It does seem like people don’t order zines based on reviews anymore, but I’m sketchy and change addresses a lot, so that might just be my personal experience. The zine community also seems like more of an institution now: big annual zine fairs, established magazines, monopolizing distros… but that trend is pretty old if you think about it. It seems less people are making weird, explosive zines in one night just for the fuck of it, and it’s too bad because I always really liked those sorts of zines.

are you "out" to people in your life as a zinester? how do you explain it to people who don't understand?
I wouldn’t call myself a zinester but everyone in my life knows I write zines. My mom helped proof read #3 and remains a thoughtful critic. Recently we were talking about how after I graduate university this summer she’ll be at a loss for what to tell my relatives since I’ve got no career ambitions or solid life plans. I said, ‘Just tell them I’m a writer,’ and we both laughed.

what do you like best about the zine world? what do you like least?
Best: The friends and penpals I’ve made, trading zines through the mail, the excitement of having things pop up in my mailbox, having a reason for all-nighters spent screen-printing and putting zines together, hanging out at kinkos, being part of a murky and complicated secret world, having an expressive outlet to keep me mentally stable, the fact that I can probably meet and talk to all of the zine writers who’ve inspired me.

Least: shit that’s expensive, zines that are boring, when we forget to live our lives because we’re too busy writing about them, when institutionalization and routine makes things devoid of passion and excitement, zines as identity, any sort of emerging zine canon.

do zines play a political role in your life? are you involved in other d.i.y. projects? do they play a political role?
The zine changes the way I live, to a certain extent. It has changed the activity of my daily life through personal connections, events, travels and such that revolve around my zine or zines in general. To the extent that politics is about altering our immediate experience of the way we live, then the zine plays a “political role,” I suppose. But I write stories about my life because I have difficulty with abstraction. Politics is a strange beast, especially in so far as it involves the abstraction of our lives. I’ve been an anarchist since high school, involved in fleeting ways with a lot of different projects (Food Not Bombs, Books to Prisoners, an anarchist reading group, a radical bookstore) and yet still approach “political” projects with caution and difficulty. These days I read a lot of philosophy. I find that I have more open and unanswerable questions than solutions, answers or programs. I’m not an activist and am not interested in most political “organizing,” but part of living my life in a fulfilling and meaningful way often involves social and community action of some sort, and that’s been reflected in my zine. I’m trying to figure a lot of these things out right now, and am less sure than ever about conclusions.

what advice might you have for someone who is new to the zine community?
Just be honest and give your zine to lots of people for feedback. Write lots of letters. Remember that the content is important, so get out there and experience the world intensely so you have something worth writing about. Don’t think that it’s easy to write or make a good zine, but all that sweat, heart and soul shows through. Show your seams, lay yourself bare, and try not to get turned off by the exclusivity or snobbishness that we can sometimes get carried away with. Remember margins (this took me five years). Don’t believe or trust people who tell you it’s too hard to steal photocopies these days.

what role do you think distros can/should play in the zine community?
I’m really glad there are big US distros because I could not afford to keep my zine cheap and send it out to very many people in the US because of Canadian postage rates. Canada Post is a fascist organization. I don’t like it that a distro like Microcosm is so huge that at times it seems like the de facto censor of the zine world, even though they’ve helped me out a lot and been great people. And there are other distros and more stores that sell zines now, so I’m unsure if my critique is fair. Distros are good for setting up tables at shows and events to make zines accessible without compromising our DIY ethics. I think there should be more distros, and I’ve personally done two and know how much effort is involved. I gave up on it but I’m glad others haven’t. I’m also partial to thinking that it’s ok if distros come and go and serve more limited purposes, and while establishment and longevity has its benefits, it shouldn’t be our only goal.

are there changes you'd like to see in the zine community or your own zine creation?
I’ve always felt sort of on the fringe of the ‘zine community,’ and my identity isn’t bound up with my zine. There are things I like and things I don’t, but overall it seems to be a constant source of surprise and inspiration, if at times frustrating. What seems more interesting than the general trends of the zine world is what you find when you look below the surface. There are always a few misfits and maniacs just doing zines that get me stoked despite the frustrations I might have with the zine community as a whole.

My zine is constantly evolving. I’m excited to be finally finishing university because it sapped a lot of my writing energy and has forced me at times to lead a pretty boring existence. I have some ideas for different types of zines and projects in the future: an in-depth view of straightedge with interviews and stories from different perspectives, a series of introductions to contemporary philosophers in zine format, a guide to DIY karaoke, a west coast bike/zine/mayhem tour… and whether any of these see the light of day is another question… "One Way Ticket" #6 should be done before the summer with stories from highschool that will hopefully make people laugh.

you can get julian's zine, "one way ticket", through the distro.