On the Eve of Expozine: Interview with founder Louis Rastelli

In the blur before the 5th Anniversary Expozine, Louis Rastelli generously sat down to scribe some answers to quick questions about the annual epic zine fair he founded; how it happened and what makes it heroic…

- What is your role in Expozine and how did you get involved?

I founded the fair with a few other people who publish and make zines,
after we found ourselves driving to Toronto and Ottawa and flying to
Vancouver for small press fairs every year, while wondering why there
were no fairs in Montreal. For several years we bitched about that and
everybody would say we should just do one. I had started my own magazine
Fish Piss the same way in 1996, after bitching about the lack of a
varied zine with an open submission policy, and everyone said I should
do one. Fish Piss always published work by tons of different writers of
fiction and non fiction, as well as graphics and comic artists, so I
already knew lots of people active in the small press community. Another
founder, Andy Brown, had published a magazine called Index in the 90s
dealing with local literature and spoken word. Billy Mavreas was always
drawing comics and illustrations for just about every zine and magazine
in town, so we eventually decided we had to go ahead and finally have
our own fair. There was actually a short article by Andy and Billy in
the short-lived magazine put out by Casa del Popolo in 2001 called
“Zinebec: When will it come?”, begging someone in the city to start a
zine fair. When we finally did, luckily Billy thought of the name
Expozine, and by a narrow vote among us (and other early organizers like
Ian Ferrier and David Widgington), that’s what it got called.

- What are some of the highlights of Expozine 2006? (ie: zines, writers,
small publishers that you’re particularly excited about)

More of the local artist community will be out. The Saiydie Bronfman
center will have a table, as well as galleries like Articule and La
Centrale, and artists like Nadia Moss and Amy Drover. Drawn & Quarterly
will have a special guest signing books, the artist Gabrielle Bell. I’m
also excited about some zine distributors being there, which means a lot
of zines from outside Montreal (Canada, US, Europe) will be available.
(This is important because there’s no alternative bookstore in town that
carries zines, although several alternative comic book stores sometimes
have a few.)

The main reason to be excited is it’s the 5th anniversary edition and is
the biggest yet.

- How has the event grown and changed in the 4 years since it started?

It never really changed: our philosophy is to cater to the small
publisher and zine maker who has few opportunities to sell their work –
few bookstores that will take their books, few events to sell them at.
Expozine has become THE big event, and our secret is that we focus on
making sure the largest possible crowd comes out and buys the most stuff
from all the publishers who work so hard making it. Aside from hoping to
expand the event to 2 days, we don’t intend to distract the public who
comes to buy zines by holding workshops or readings or having
entertainment going on. And it seems to work: the public always says
it’s a struggle to see everything they want to see and buy everything
they want to buy, and every year the publishers say they sold more than
last year. That never changed, and the growth is evident in the numbers:
in five years it’s gone from 60 to 100 to 140 to 210 to 240 exhibitors,
all while turning more and more away every year because it fills up
fast. We’ve moved 4 times to a larger location and each time the public
complains it’s too crowded — a great sign. The tiny website keeps
having to add bandwidth every year because around Expozine time, it
nearly crashes from the traffic. And in the past couple of years, we’ve
added a free brochure listing the exhibitors, sponsors and their
coordinates so that people can follow up on zines or order things they
didn’t have a chance to buy. We also added last year the Expozine
Alternative Press Awards, with a gala ceremony every March that gives
Expozine and its exhibitors a second occasion to promote the local small
press.

- What are the biggest challenges of organizing Expozine?

A shitload of volunteer work is involved, and real costs like space
rental, table rental, web bandwidth and sheer time and work involved in
managing so many more exhibitors and sponsors makes it very hard. (I’ve
worked through to sunrise and sunset twice in the last week, for
example, and I’ll be lucky to get a few hundred bucks out of whatever
small surplus we might generate after costs.) The main reason it’s
remained so difficult is that we only get one small grant and it has
never increased since the beginning, even though the event quadrupled in
size. A similar problem plagues our other main project, Distroboto (the
non-profit culture vending machines in town), where the popularity and
demand just keep growing but the funding doesn’t grow at all. There is a
sense among funding agencies that if we charged more for tables and
charged the public to attend and charged much more for sponsors, we
could all make a living, but the fact is, the small press community,
from publishers to its potential sponsors, are all already on a knife’s
edge financially, and charging people for the chance to maybe buy a 2
dollar zine just doesn’t seem right.

EXPOZINE
Saturday November 25, 2006 from 11 am to 6 pm,
at 5035 St-Dominique, between St-Joseph and Laurier. Map
Also- there’s an after party!
Thanks to Lickety-Split for letting us know about it! You can bet they’ll be there, in all there smutty goodness, and Worn Journal will be there for sure as well. And the rest of us from team indyish will be there too, looking to make new connections with artists who might be interested in being indyish… and also doing our xmas shopping.