Collected Goat

On my website, in my new Comics section, (please give a visit) I've just put online my comic strips about the Goat and Rabbit, two characters I drew in the 90s, and had adventures in what was essentially the Canadian literary world.

It was published for a year, 1990-1991, in a magazine called Books in Canada. That used to be a nice little book review magazine I remember from high school and college days, and then it got glossy, and I was published in it. Thanks to editor Paul Steuwe, who gave me my run. The mag doesn't exist any more, but before it died, it was bought by an outfit which made it kind of right wing. Then it was shut down, and all the articles on it were published online without the writers' permission.


Drawing everyone in it as an animal I thought that would help me in a satirical way, because you're not drawing Margaret Atwood, you're drawing a seal, and you can make points about racism, etc, using lions and sheep. I don't know if anyone got it, but I met a couple of fans. The strip was cancelled after a year and replaced by reruns of Drawn and Quarterly strips. Still, I'm pretty happy with it. I put out these strips as a zine, and am now putting them online, so you can all enjoy them. And, it spurs me on to make new stuff.

Trouble with Poetry Contests, and E-zines

I just wrote the following as a letter to an e-group of writers that I belong to (please contact me privately if you want the address to join, but it's pretty small, and unchanged since about 1994 or so). Anyways, thought it looked like a blog post, so I may as well put it up here.

I thought this was an interesting article about poetry contests. (warning: pdf file!)
http://rattle.com/eissues/eIssue5.pdf

It came from this post in a blog I enjoy reading:
http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2008_10.php#013576

I'm thinking about participating in a local e-rag. The problem with it, unlike even the most miserable and small-circulation zine, there's nothing to hang on to afterwards. Nothing you can point to on your shelf and say "I was published in that." Even my 1991 only-ever-published short story is in a neat glossy magazine in a file somewhere.

If it's halfway decent writing I think there'll be some audience. And I have been keeping a blog pretty regularly, all the way since 2004 (and I know a few of you do Livejournal, etc.).

Still, it's a little sad, and I don't even know if 'back issues' or archives of blogs or e-zines I like are even easily accessible. I usually don't even try: just reading the latest thing and then moving onto something else.