Zine dream

After 13 years of self-publishing, writer
Jeff Miller puts his words in a bound copy

YOUTH IN REVOLT: Miller

by VINCENT TINGUELY

While writer Jeff Miller’s ongoing documentation of youth culture has begun to find its way into anthologies like The Art of Trespassing, his inspiration finds most of its outlet in DIY work, including the Otaku and Ghost Pine zine series, story posters, the indie writing workshop Soulgazers, and a reading series and zine distribution housed at the Dépanneur le Pick Up.

Miller’s birth as a writer happened in the heady ferment of Ottawa’s hardcore punk culture of the mid-’90s. “They just did shows in this one old TV repair shop,” says Miller. “It was a really funny little room, there was nothing on the walls. It was totally the opposite of a bar, it was this real Protestant stoicism. And at shows, people would go around through the crowd just selling their zine, ‘Zine for a dollar, zine for a dollar, zine for a dollar.’ So many of the books that I read were by dead authors, but to have a writer in your face selling you a zine was so immediate.”

Miller was inspired to start Otaku (later Ghost Pine) as a way to take part in the scene. “There was no audience, there were just producers in dialogue with each other,” Miller says. “You could do a zine or you could do a band or take pictures or put on a show. It didn’t really matter just as long as you were taking part. Being this kind of isolated suburban kid and suddenly having this small community of Ottawa writers, but also, eventually, a broader North American community of zine writers, that was a huge influence on me, because it got me out of my own head.”

This spring, Ghost Pine: All Stories True will document Miller’s 13 years of zine writing. It will be released by Invisible Publishing, an indie press that focuses on emerging Canadian talent. “It’s going to be divided into different subjects that I’ve written about, one part regular short story collection, but also somewhat of an archival document and an example of this great flowering of zine culture that occurred in the ’90s and zeroes.”

Despite fears about the viability of the entire paper-based print industry, Miller remains optimistic about the future of publishing. “I moderated a panel at Expozine about this sort of issue,” Miller explained. “Peggy Burns at Drawn & Quarterly said that, just in the same way that people still go to see movies on the big screen, even though they can sit at home and watch it on their tiny computers, book-making is going to move in that direction. There’ll have to be more of an aesthetic value in the actual design of the book.”