I grew up on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. Every story I set out to tell starts off that way.
When I was about six years old I had a subscription to a popular Canadian children's magazine called Owl. In one issue, they had a page you cut out, cut up and collated into a mini-book about birds. In 32 pint-sized panels The Owl Mini-Book of Birds introduced twenty-seven orders of birds beginning with the most primitive, flightless birds, and ending with the most advanced, perching birds. I’ve moved house at least 12 times since, but somehow that wee book never got lost in the shuffle. I still have it.
In high school I painted horrible abstracts in acrylics on canvas board, wrote excruciating poetry and studied classical guitar. I could sight-read music, but am completely tone deaf so a career in music was out. It was a toss-up between writing and visual arts until, when I was fifteen going on sixteen, I spent a summer in New York studying life drawing and anatomy at the Art Student’s League. I decided to apply to art school.
I moved to Montreal to attend Concordia University. For four years I worked at the Concordia Fine Arts Library. There I became simultaneously addicted to the disordered stacks of the now defunct Norris Library and the Fine Arts Slide Library photocopy machine. I used the hell out of that photocopy machine. I carried obscure anatomy books out the library by the armload, photocopied all the diagrams and returned the books unread. There were complaints. I almost got fired a number of times. For more on my tawdry affair with the photocopier, read: A Little Talk About Reproduction.
This was in the early nineties, before personal computers came along and made themselves accessible. The drawing classes at Concordia were not quite on par with those at the Art Students’ League of New York. I took an excellent collage class with David Moore. There were photos I didn’t want to cut up. So I photocopied them. There were books I didn’t want to cut up, with anatomical diagrams in them more beautiful than anything I could draw, and there were also diagrams for all my other favourite things: botany, embroidery, analytical geometry, you name it. So I photocopied them, called them "found drawings" and found uses for them.
The first mini-book I made as an adult bore the slightly adult title, Bound For Pleasure. It was based on a poem of the same name and was illustrated with an erratum of diagrams ranging from a garter belt to a bandaged foot. The poems got better over time. The collection of found drawings grew. In art school I made four mini-books: Bound for Pleasure, The Confrontation, The Probability of Mummification, and The Basement Family Pharmacy. They’re no longer in print. Mostly I gave them all away.
In 1993 I discovered the Internet, got a Unix shell account and set out to learn everything there was to know about computers. By 1994 I was no longer working at the Slide Library and thus no longer had illicit access to an after-hours photocopy machine. In 1995 I did a 10-week thematic residency at the Banff Centre, which was call the Banff Centre for the Arts back then.
The theme of the residency was: Telling Stories, Telling Tales. The first story I told them was that I was a writer, which, as far as I knew, I was not, but they let me in anyway. At Banff I attempted to make a number of mid-sized mini-books using the computer, but they never went anywhere. I made this one book based on a circular story. Because it was a book, when people got to the end they just stopped, because that’s what you’re supposed to do with a book. Then the guy in the next studio over pointed out that if I made it into a web page I could link the last page to the first page so the reader could keep going around and around. So I did. My first ever electronic literature project was designed for Netscape 1.1 and it still works: Fishes & Flying Things.
I didn’t even think about making another mini-book for years. Too busy paying off my student loan. Luckily web art led to a few marketable skills. I’ve since worked in every aspect of the Internet industry, as artist, designer, programmer, teacher, consultant, and even, once, a three-year stint as the manager of a multi-national web development team.
After three years in the corporate world I never wanted to look at the web again. So I began writing a novel. About eight months in, I realized how long it would take. Needing to finish something immediately in order to sustain my sanity, all of a sudden I found myself making a mini-book. Not surprisingly, that book, Down the Garden Path was all about how incredibly long it takes to "make a thing which then exists and maybe it is beautiful."
Once the post-corporate traumatic stress disorder has worn off, I began making electronic literature again. My first novel came out in the fall of 2008. It remediates texts from four previously "published" mini-books. Three of the most recent mini-books are based on web projects: Entre Ville, The Cape, and How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome. The web is nice, but nothing beats cutting stuff up with scissors.
I distribute these and other mini-books in person at readings and other events, through various ongoing postal zine exchanges, at Expozine, an alternative press fair held in Montreal every year, and through the DISTROBOTO, a network of cigarette machines repuropsed to sell cigarette-packaged-sized art for $2 at various cafes, libraries and music venues around Montreal.
Or just ask me next time you see me – there are usually some zines in my purse.
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