Happenings: Canzine West – Saturday, October 16 – Vancouver, BC

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