by SAMER ELATRASH

Ali Naccarato attended her first protest at the age of five, when her alternative school in Toronto was threatened with being closed. At 15, she gave her first spoken word performance, and joined a theatre group that performed in poorer Toronto neighbourhoods on themes of “youth and violence,” she says. These days, Naccarato is a Montreal poet, and says her writing and activism have always been interrelated.

“My direction was always artistic,” she says, attributing it partly to her parents, both artists. “There was always a really strong emphasis in my house on expressing yourself through art.”

For Naccarato, poetry and theatre go beyond self-expression and into fostering communities. “It offers an opportunity for dialogue, and a community develops out of the interaction between the performer and the audience.”

After she moved to Montreal three years ago to study creative writing at Concordia, Naccarato became involved in Apathy Is Boring, a Montreal non-profit that uses art to encourage youth to be politically active, while continuing to self-publish her poetry, which she has collected in two books. A year ago, Naccarato founded Lip, a quarterly zine that publishes emerging artists and tackles social and political issues. “I was performing constantly in a community of emerging artists, and I felt there was a need for a representation of women, and also art that is political,” she says.

In its first year, the zine found distributors in Montreal, Halifax and Toronto, and the next issue is due in January. Lip is now published by a growing team of editors and contributors. They haven’t restricted themselves to publishing zines, however. In place of the last issue, the Lip team decided on a “public zine,” posting art in public spaces in Montreal and performing theatre in metros and parks. “When you walk anywhere, most of the images you see are corporate. Instead, we’re putting up art,” Naccarato says.

Naccarato encourages Montrealers to send their art to Lip for the next public zine in April. The zine reproduces the art for free, but artists have to decorate the city themselves. Send 11 x 17 posters to lipzine@yahoo.ca and see www.naccarato.org/lip/ for more info.