Mark Paterson
I guess I always wrote but I didn’t notice it felt like art until I collaborated on two zines in my early twenties. Some high school friends and I started up Drug of the Nation when we went off to different universities. This was 1991, prior to the arrival of the Internet in everybody’s life, and this personal zine was a creative way for us to stay in touch. The guys away at schools in Ontario would mail their photos and stories back to us who’d stayed in Montreal and we’d type them up and print them and cut them out and paste them and take everything down to a photocopy shop near the Roddick Gates on Sherbrooke Street and they’d churn out twenty or so copies in a magazine format for about $75 and that plus the postage to mail the issues to all the guys seemed like an outrageous amount of money but it was a real riot.
We retired the Drug after a couple of years and seven issues but I had enjoyed the experience so much I started a new zine with my brother, Mike, called Cob. By then it was 1993 and grunge was huge and you started to hear about “alternative” music in the media in a way like never before. Cob was a reaction to all of that. We created a fictional, suburban music scene called Swill™ and reported on all of its goings-on. Acts like Sweat & Beef Chunks, Five Guys Who Really Hate Each Other, and Mr. Tea vied for media attention and money with elaborate gimmicks and stunts, all of which had some sort of “alternative” bent. We compiled a Swill™ Top 40 and had two regular columns: “Twinkie Talk”, a report on depanneur food by our brother Nic, and “Suicide Notes From Summ” by our friend Summ. After three jam-packed issues, Cob died. Happily, Summ did not.
I started writing fiction in 1995. I joined up with a group of other beginning writers and we put on a series of intermittent readings under the moniker The Caravan Collective. Throughout 2001 and 2002, I co-hosted the monthly cabaret series Grimy Windows at Hurley’s on Crescent Street. We featured writers, comedians, musicians and wrestlers, and we screened short films. My short stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Joyland, Matrix, Geist and carte blanche. I wrote two short story collections, Other People’s Showers (2003) and A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine (2007), both from Exile Editions. Currently, I’m writing a novel called With the Lights Out.
