This the closest thing I have to a photo of myself/my stall at Zinefest.
You can see my arm in the top corner.
It was a hoot.
Still plenty of copies left at Matchbox (166 Cuba St) and online.
Photo credit: Ben K. C. Laksana
Here it is, issue four.
Six more anonymous interviews on the stories parents once told us, the people they once were, and how they made us who we are now.
The first story recalls the interviewee’s childhood in Makara, surrounded by rocks as rough as the women who made her, seas that steal engagement rings, and tales of the people who built her home. The second deals with two people who married out of fear and the subsequent regret, anger, and outbursts of irrationality witnessed by their children. The fourth is the story of a grandfather who spent generations attempting to reconcile with his misdeeds. The sixth interviewee tells of the few and fleeting glimpses of their parents’ lives before them.
The zine will be available first at Wellington Zinefest at Mighty Mighty (104 Cuba St) 17th November, 1 - 5 p.m. As of 19th November the zine will be available over on the online store, and from Matchbox Studios (166 Cuba St).
28 pages, B & W
Zine by Simon Gennard
Edited by Elise Brinkman
Thank you to Ben Speak, Dilohana Lekamge
Well, here we are. We’re ready to go. We’re definitely ready to go. We’ve been offline for a while but the online store is back up and you can purchase issues 1 - 3 once again.
Even if you already own a copy, you can buy another one! These editions have been redesigned, and edited slightly and most importantly, the price has been reduced! Issues are now $4 (US) with shipping within New Zealand $1 and $2.50 for everywhere else. Wellington residents can pick up a copy from Matchbox Studios (166 Cuba St) without having to wait for shipping. And, of course, you can visit me at Wellington Zinefest at Mighty Mighty (104 Cuba St) on 17th November, 1 - 5 p.m.
Issue One explores heartbreak. It features six interviews on love, loss, whiskey and regret. First published February 2012.
In Issue Two we talk about unfinished arguments, including interviews about marriage, drugs, breaking up and John Malkovich. First published May 2012.
Issue Three tackles former beliefs. It features six anonymous interviews about God, death, sex and womanhood. First published July 2012.
Did I mention these make great Christmas gifts? By which I mean these make great Christmas gifts for those you think very little of.
Once again I’d like to thank everyone who had helped put these together. Anna Duckworth, Josh Hall, and Elise Brinkman for helping with proofing and editing. Ben Speak and Dilohana Lekamge for help with finishing and binding. My sister, for allowing me to use her sewing machine.
I’m less than a week away from having the online store back up, I swear.
Issues 1 -3 have been redesigned, refined and proofed a few more times (I can almost promise you that there will be errors remaining) and reprinted.
I also managed to complete Issue 4. We’re all printed, ready to be cut and bound.
I will keep you updated.
Okay, yeah. We can do the Facebook. This is a thing we can do. We’re all young here. And that’s how marketing works, right? Just throw information out there and hope something sticks? Right?
Those of you who have read issue three will know that I stole the theme from an episode of This American Life. I don’t have wide enough of a readership to warrant accusations of plagiarism, but I have this crushing guilt complex and the only way I can reconcile with my actions, after all these months, is to make the source material for the issue as easily accessible as possible (I daresay it is more accessible than the issue itself). I did try an embed the audio on here, but the player looked very ugly on the grey background, so instead, allow me to direct you to this link, which will launch the TAL player.
It seems like everyone on the internet is familiar with This American Life, but for those of you who are not, allow me to share my favourite episodes as a starting point for you: #204 81 Words, #359 Life After Death, #429 Will They Know Me Back Home, #472 Our Friend David, #322 Shouting Across the Divide, #95 Monogamy
It’s been over a month, I apologise for that. I can, however, report that issue four is in its final stages and will be printed, bound, and ready for sale in time for Wellington Zinefest (17th November, Mighty Mighty).
You may notice that I’ve redesigned the website. It’s a little more streamlined, a little easier to read, still a work in progress. I’ve also taken down the MagCloud links because, as a mentioned a while ago, I’m no longer printing with them. This does, however, mean that I have to reprint the first three issues and keep some on hand, rather than being able to let them handle it. I’ve made a few changes to the design and layout and binding and such, all of which I will be glad to show you once they’ve been printed.
Now, because you’ve been so patient, I have a surprise for you. The following is an addendum or kind of epilogue to an interview I conducted at the beginning of September. All my questions had been more than satisfactorily answered and I had left my recorder going. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to fit it into the final story, but I thought it was very sweet, and poignant and worth sharing on here. I have left it unedited.
Me: Those are all my questions, is there anything else you want to add?
J: There was a story that my mum told and I want to work on again, about my mum being naughty. And that’s often, kids like hearing about their parents being naughty, and there was one that my mother told me that I find very poignant. She went to buy the bread, and she, it was, you’d buy it in a loaf like this and there’d be a break in the middle where they’d break it into two loaves, and if they broke it into half a loaf, it was kind of all soft and white on the inside and you could just eat it as you went along, I mean we used to do this anyway, you’d just eat the bread from the inside and just take a little bit and think that no one would notice and then you’d end up taking more and more and more and she did that on the way home one day. And even when I say that to you, did she do that or did she think she might do it, I can’t remember her version of the story, but in my version she just starts to eat it without even really thinking about it and gets home and realises that she’s taken this whole big chunk out of the bread and her mother was sure to know. And they didn’t have very much money and she was going to get into trouble.
Stories about people you know who have grown up, there are things that you hear about grown ups that suddenly make you think of them as a child, and as a kid that’s a very perplexing thing to think. So my dad used to say to us, or used to say to me at least I don’t know if he used to say it to the others, but I’d be upset about something and he’d say to me, “I really understand, I was a little girl once too” and you know I absolutely believed that for years, that he’d been a little girl once. Why not? You know, I mean little chickens grow into roosters. Babies grow into huge, great grown ups, why would you not swap the sexes, and I believed that for a very long time, and I don’t even know when I stopped believing it, but I did believe it for a very long time, it was very reassuruing, that he was a little girl once too. See, I don’t know if he’s ever told my sisters that, and it never seemed important to ask them, and it never seemed important to say to him afterwards, did you really feel you were a little girl once? What is going on here? It’s just something that kind of held by itself. It’s quite funny when you think about it, that he would say that, but it was so reassuring. Made me feel so much better.
