What's Your Favourite Memory?

Janell has previously made the compzines The Perfect Day and Dear You: Letters to Lost Friends. She has a special talent for coming up with interesting compzine ideas, finding great contributors and bundling them all up in pretty packages. I love Janell's zines and have contributed to her two previous ones and will be working on writing up my own favourite memory for her newest project. Why not take a stroll down memory lane and send in your own favourite memory to her newsest compzine project: What's Your Favourite Memory? For more information about the zine and how to submit your favourtie memory, please visit her info site: http://rememberzine.tumblr.com/
Deadline is October 31st, 2012 (or the first 100 submissions).

398#12: The Candy Maker's Daughter

What is the secret ingredient to the Candy Maker's most delicious chocolates? Love. But since the death of his wife, his one true love, the Candy Maker has lost the ability to create his most special chocolates. When a foreign king demands the chocolates, the Candy Maker's Daughter takes it upon herself to go on a journey to find true love and save her father. But will her heart ever find what she is seeking? And will she make it back in time to save her father? 

398 is a litzine of fairy-tale-like stories by Elizabeth J. M. W.

398#12 is just one story: The Candy Maker's Daughter, but it is much longer than previous 398 stories. This zine is 1/2 sized, 44pages and text heavy.

Cover art by Nicholas Beckett. (saintbeckett.net) (etsy.com/shop/sonofsamorr)

Available at my Etsy store.

The Boy Who Owned the Forest

New zine available. It's a story I wrote about a decade ago for my zine 398, but it's been newly illustrated and printed by the Australian zinester Nicholas Beckett (saintbeckett.net). It's fully coloured and even has a metallic silver cover.

Broken Pencil Reviews

I reviewed a few zines for Broken Pencil issue #54. 

Little Pinches

Pinch #1 and #2

By Anne Emberline, anne@thelostworkshop.com, anneemberline.com

Don't be fooled by the extreme cuteness of these very-mini zines. The covers may be full of whimsy and there are illustrations within, but the stories range from escaping an abusive relationship, office sex, drug addicts and Alzheimer's disease. The tales are quick little flash fiction pieces, but Emberline doesn't skimp on the emotional content that comes across in just a few short paragraphs. 

Yard Sale #8 and #9

By Harley R. Pageot, waltzingwiththeopensea@hotmail.com, alongwaltz.etsy.com

785 Wolfberry Crt. / Oshawa, ON / L1K 2J2 / Canada

While issue #8 is a perzine including New Year's Resolutions (for January 2011…I got really behind in my zine reviews, obvisouly) and Christmas 2010, issue #9 is all fiction pieces by Harley. I like how at the end of the zine Harley explained why/how he came about writing the pieces, several of which were for his university creative writing course. There's a combination of poems and short stories. I enjoyed the selection of song titles for music yet to be created. One of my favourites, The Winter Moon, is from a raw writing exercise where you just let the writing flow non-stop for five minutes.

"Snowy hilltops, snowy fields, and you trudge along, directionless. We never learned how to love. They don't teach you that in school. So we add and subtract and we label adjectives and verbs in the hope that this might help us understand."

Hair and Glass

Flippancies

By Laura Rosenbaum, laurenrosenbaum.com, etsy.com/shop/LauraRosenbaum

From the very cool cover art, to the pages printed to look like school notebook paper, the stitched binding and the marvelous stories themselves, I loved everything about this litzine. The subtitle for this zine is "four short stories about girls flipping their hair". It seems like a pretty odd starting point and one might wonder, how can someone write one story about girls who flip their hair, let alone a whole zine of stories? But Rosenbaum pulls it off, effortlessly writing stories about life as a girl in middle school or high school. Her characters are fresh and believable and you can clearly picture each glossy strand of flipped hair. Here is an excerpt from the story titled Meryl:

            "Other girls on the bus wear their bobby pins in sport, but I wear mine out of dire necessity. Their bobbies pin back their wispy bangs creating a swoop, like drapes across their foreheads. Mine are strategically inserted into zones of conflict, regions of turmoil, where they must act like police officers keeping the peace and containing escapees and rioters."

Shards of Glass in Your Eye! #5

By Kari Tervo, shardsofglassinyoureye@gmail.com

In the intro for this issue Kari explains her love for the last page of magazines and decides to try and make issue #5 a whole zine of "last pages". Kari writes her zine with a witty sense of humor and mixes longer non-fiction pieces with short little tidbits of randomness, like a picture of some guy on break on Rodeo drive or a list of amusing homeopathic cures. Her two longer pieces are about thieving dry erase markers in a dorm (and if you've ever lived in a dorm, you know how important those markers are) and why it's best she doesn't drive. 

Two of the Zines I Read This Summer

Narcolepsy Press Review #7

By Randy Robbins, PO Box 17131 / Anaheim, CA / 92817-7131 USA / narcolepsypresszine@hotmail.com

Randy opens his zine with some quotes, his Top 5 TV Shows and his Top 5 “most remarkable and beautiful celebrity girls”: that girl who played Ramona, Kaley Cuoco and Kate Middleton, to name three out of five. There are some cute illustrations by his daughter, which have an anime feel to them and he writes about some books he recently read…and then the extensive letters section begins. I can’t imagine having to type up that many letters from their handwritten originals so they will print nicely in a zine! Most of the letters are sent from prison or non-incarcerated zinesters. This issue's zine reviews include many reviews for fellow zine review zines – I had no idea there were so many! And here I am, a zine review zine reviewing another zine review zine. In one of the letters Randy’s correspondent mentions “the possibility of there one day being nothing but zine review zines reviewing other zine review zines”.

Beautiful Mess #2 and #3

By Sarala, sleepswthghosts@yahoo.ca / sleepswthghosts.etsy.com

I read a review for Sarala’s zine in Broken Pencil and contacted her about trading, which she agreed to. Her zines are beautifully done cut n’ paste perzines. In the introduction of 2009’s issue #2 she agonizes about why she even makes zines, but I think for a lot of us zines are sometimes creative therapy. I think it feels good and helps me understand things more when I write things out. A lot of the writing in these zines reminds me of my own journal writing when I’m trying to clear my head. Issue #3 is the Polaroid Issue and is printed completely in colour. The vibrant colours really showcase Sarala’s talent for the art of cut n’ paste zines.