Canada’s Largest Zine Fair and Festival of Alternative Culture

Sunday, October 24, 2010
1pm – 7pm
The Great Hall
1087 Queen Street West
Toronto

Entry is $5, but you get a free copy of the lastest issue of Broken Pencil

Canzine Toronto Schedule
1-7pm Giant Zine Fair

Over 100 zines, book publisher, comic artists and crafters will take over The Great Hall. Plus play homemade video games on the Hand Eye Society’s video console and buy tiny poems from the Toronto Poetry Vendors poem vending machine.

2pm Workshop: The Arduino and what it can do for you

Join Derek Winkler and Brooke Ford as they show you how to add computer power to your art or how to hook your art to the Internet using new, surprisingly simple technologies available at low cost.

Derek Winkler is the Broken Pencil web king. His first novel Pitouie is forthcoming from The Workhorsery.

Brooke Ford is a graduate student and a Broken Pencil associate editor.

3pm 1-2 Punch Book Pitch

Live on our mainstage in front of a crowing crowd, you get two minutes to pitch your book to our panel of judges. They get one minute each to tell you why you’ll never get published in a million billion years or why they want to see your manuscript in their in-box asap! The winner gets bragging rights and a Broken Pencil Prize pack worth $200! (This contest is open to all, but space is limited and participants should register in advance to avoid disappointment: to do so email canzine@brokenpencil.com with 1-2 Punch in the subject line. Include a short description of the project you want to pitch, along with your name, email and phone number.)

The 1-2 Punch Judges:

Jenny Sampirisi – Managing Editor, Book Thug: Jenny Sampirisi is the author of is/was, a novel. She’s the managing editor of BookThug, co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing and associate director of the Scream Literary Festival.

Emily Schultz – Editor, Joyland.ca: Acclaimed writer Emily Schultz is co-founder and editor of Joyland.ca and author, most recently, of the novel Heaven is Small (House of Anansi Books).

Hal Niedzviecki – Fiction Editor, Broken Pencil: Hal Niedzviecki is the publisher, founder and fiction editor of Broken Pencil magazine. He is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction. His collection of short stories Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, will be published in Spring 2011 by City Lights Press.

4:30pm Puppet Slam

For the first time ever puppets and puppeteers are coming to Canzine! In Canzine’s Puppet Slam, five competitors will take the stage, using various styles of puppetry (from sock puppets to marionettes) to impress the audience in five-to-10 minute skits until one is ultimately crowned winner of the Puppet Slam. Participants include Jamie Shannon who will re-imagine the Ugly Duckling fable as an adult puppet comedy and Adam Earle who will tell the story of Sreb, a guy who wants to help people with next-to-impossible tasks, but seems to hinder more than he helps. Come explore the world of underground puppetry.

6pm Radical Reading Series

Every year, we present the best and brightest of the independent press at the Canzine radical reading series. Featuring:

Mark Sedore – Snowmen a novel (3 Day Books): Mark Sedore is a writer and graduate student living in Toronto. He is the winner of the 2010 3 Day Novel Contest. He enjoys writing, dancing and visiting the cold places of the Earth. Snowmen is his first published novel.

Teri Vlassopoulos – Bats Or Swallows (Invisible Publishing): Teri Vlassopoulos lives and writes in Montreal. Her first collection of short stories, Bats or Swallows, will be published by Invisible Publishing in October 2010. She’s been making zines for over 10 years and wrote, photocopied, stapled and sometimes sewed the zines Melt the Snow and The Second Part. Her most recent zine, Places and Things, will be also be available in the fall.

Damian Rogers – Paper Radio (ECW Press): Damian Rogers was born and raised in suburban Detroit. She has published poems in various North American magazines, including Brick, The Walrus, Matrix, Maisonneuve, This Magazine, and MoonLit. Her first collection, Paper Radio, came out with ECW Press in October 2009 and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Rogers lives in Toronto.

Daniel Scott Tysdal – The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Tightrope Books): Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006), which received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). His second book of poetry, The Mourner’s Book of Albums, is forthcoming in the Fall from Tightrope Books. He teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Canada’s Largest Zine Fair and Festival of Alternative Culture

Saturday, October 16, 2010
1pm – 7pm
W2 Storyeum
151 West Cordova Street
Vancouver, BC

Event Schedule:

1-7pm Giant Zine and Craft Fair

The heart of the festival! Over 100 zine, book, and comic publishers, and some of the area’s best independent crafters. Also interactive fun: All day comic jam and collage areas.

1-2pm Canzine West Radical Readings

Kicking off Canzine with 3 readings by some of Canada’s most exciting writing talent, radical readers culled from the best of the independent presses. Featuring:

Anna Swanson – The Nights Also (Tightrope Books): Anna Swanson has paid the rent by planning festivals, selling books, serving drinks, making maps, walking on stilts, bowling with teenagers, writing press releases and watching for forest fires. She lives in Vancouver and works as a children’s librarian.

Grant Buday – Dragonflies (Biblioasis): Grant Buday’s most recent novel, Dragonflies was shortlisted for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. He has a story in the latest Best Canadian Stories anthology, and his poem “Even Orc’s Get the Blues,” won second prize in the subTerrain magazine Lush Triumphant contest.

Amber Dawn – Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press): Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker and performance artist. She is the author of the novel Sub Rosa, editor of the Lambda Award-nominated Fist of the Spider Woman and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn. Her award-winning, genderfuck docu-porn, “Girl on Girl,” has been screened in eight countries. She is the director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

2-3pm Lecture and Discussion

Peep You: Exploring the rise of Peep Culture with Hal Niedzviecki
Noted cultural observer Hal Niedzviecki will explore how Peep Culture (blogs, social networks, video sharing, Reality TV) is replacing pop culture and teaching us to love watching ourselves and our neighbors. Is Peep Culture the triumph of indie culture, or its ultimate demise? Discuss.

Hal Niedzviecki is Broken Pencil magazine’s founder, fiction editor and publisher. He is author, most recently, of the acclaimed book The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors (City Lights Press)

3:15-4pm Readings from Can’t Lit:

Presenting The Vancouver Area Contributors to Can’t Lit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine (ECW Press)

McKinley M. Hellenes: A Vancouver ex-pat, McKinley M. Hellenes lives and works in Mission, BC. Her stories have appeared in magazines such as Broken Pencil, Kiss Machine, The Frequent & Vigorous Quarterly, and Joyland. She is currently writing a novel about postwar Vancouver.

Kevin Spenst: Kevin Spenst is the author of Fast Fictions, which was launched with a 50-venue, one-day-only reading tour of Vancouver. To date he’s written over 1,111 short-short stories online. His latest adventure in persistence and technology has involved writing poems online everyday since December of 2008. He’s working on a poetry manuscript and pursuing his MFA at the University of British Columbia.

Josh Byer: Josh Byer is a journalist, screenwriter, and copywriter living in Vancouver, Canada. A Journey Prize nominee, he is also the winner of a Praxis Story Editor Internship, and a Canada Arts Council grant recipient.

4-5pm The 1-2 Punch Book Pitch

Live on our mainstage in front of a crowing crowd, you get two minutes to pitch your book to our panel of judges. They get one minute each to tell you why you’ll never get published in a million billion years or why they want to see your manuscript in their in-box asap! The winner gets bragging rights and a Broken Pencil Prize pack worth $200! (This contest is open to all, but space is limited and participants should register in advance to avoid disappointment: to do so email canzine@brokenpencil.com with 1-2 Punch in the subject line. Include a short description of the project you want to pitch, along with your name, email and phone number.)

The 1-2 Punch Judges:

Kris Rothstein – Literary Agent: Kris Rothstein is a literary agent with the Swayze Agency. She reviews books for magazines like Broken Pencil, Herizons, and Geist and is the proprietor of a micro-press, Smart Cookie.

Hal Niedzviecki – Author/Editor: Hal Niedzviecki is the publisher, founder and fiction editor of Broken Pencil magazine. He is the author of eight books of fiction, and nonfiction. His collection of short stories Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, will be published in Spring 2011 by City Lights Press.

Brian Kaufman – Publisher: Brian Kaufman has been passing judgment on other people’s writing since 1988. He founded subTerrain Magazine to promote emerging and experimental writers and, under the imprint of Anvil Press Publishers, has issued upwards of one hundred books into print in all literary genres.

5-6pm Poetry & Improv Armando

Poetry and improvisation go head-to-head! Fear the poet, not the poem! Heckle or just sit back and enjoy as poets and sketch performers riff off each other’s work to create spontaneous works of genuine weirdness.

6-6:30pm VJ/DJ Sammy Chien

Watch as emerging creator Chien merges cinema, sound art, new media and dance into stunning performance pieces.