Zinesters display their latest issues at the zine fair

Broken Books hosted a zine-making workshop on April 2 and a zine fair on April 28 to promote zine culture.

Broken Books hosted a Zine fair on April 28 from 2 to 5 p.m. Zine
 creators, such as Valerie Webber (left), could sell or give away
 their zines without being charged for space with customers. Melissa Wong/My Online Journalism Blog

By Melissa Wong
My Online Journalism Blog

Mark Brown create a zine called "Welcome to Surreal Land" and went to his first zine event at Broken Books.

Brown described his zine as a "chat-book-like thing."

A zine is a homemade magazine.

Valerie Webber is a zine creator in St. John’s who
 organized the zine fair on April 28 and the zine-making
 workshop on April 2. She promoted the event and attended
 it. Melissa Wong/My Online Journalism Blog

"It was my first foray into writing" 

Valerie Webber has made zines since she was 13-years-old. While growing up in New Brunswick, Webber met a friend through a punch rock zine called "Senseless Ramblings" encouraging people to send in articles.

"It was my first foray into writing," Webbers said. "And getting published as a young kid with my sort of irreverent ideas and so we got chatting through the mail because this would have been in the mid-90s."

After writing an article about sexism in pop bands, Webber became pen pals with the zine's creator and began making her own poetry zine she wrote with her friends. 

"The delightful, terrible high school poetry that we all know and love," Webber said smiling. Webber continued to make zines in high school and college.

Birth of the zine fair

Webber sold her zines at Broken Books because there was a lack of platforms to share zines. While talking to Matthew House, owner, and operator of Broken Books, they decided to have a zine fair.

According to House, he would let "zinesters", such as Katie Little, sell zines without charging for space or taking a cut for the sales.

Little said she made a "silly zine" for the fair that philosophized the use of candy heart inscriptions as the inscriptions on tombstones.

The zine creators were only asked to donate two copies of their zine to Broken Books for the shop's archive and to enter a contest for the door prize. The zine fair came to an end at 5 p.m. and House asked Broken Books employee, Steven Power, to draw a winner for the door prize.

The winner was Christian Brown.

Zine creators were asked to donate two zines by Broken
 Books. One for the archive and the other to win a
 door prize. Melissa Wong/My Online Journalism Blog

For the record

According to Broken Book's Facebook, the winner would receive a catalogue of the whole fair. Broken Book's zine achieve is unusual because zines are printed in small batches and are not usually documented or catalogued.

According to Broken Book's Facebook, zines have an "ephemeral quality" to them.

"There is a certain irrelevance to zine-making and it's not always a precious thing," Webber said. "It's handcrafted, but not precious." 

According to Webber, the zine fair was "a way to kind of reintroduce zine culture (to St. John's) as it's gone a little on the wayside in the last 15 to 20 years."  

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©Melissa Wong