Description
Ghost Pine is one of my favourite zines of all time. Jeff’s writing is so open-hearted and delightful, ranging between lovingly wry observation and gut-punches of sincerity. It’s suffused with a deep love for the mundane spaces and interactions that make up a life, in a way that will make you want to romanticize and cherish the small details of your own life. As Jeff introduces the zine in the opening paragraph of issue #5,
“Henry Kissinger once said, ‘history is the story of nations,’ and just like a lot of the other things he said, he was dead wrong. History isn’t in the nation states, but in our lives that are superimposed over them. It’s the story of our lives, the connections between them, and the places our paths cross.”
While selections from these zines are available in the wonderful anthology Ghost Pine: All Stories True, this is a rare opportunity to pick up some copies of the originals, which Jeff very generously scrounged up for me, including a ~highly collectible~ 1999 (!!!) issue!
- Otaku #5: Maps, ghosts, street art, hitchhiking, coffee, saints, midnight, history, secrets, love, luck, and calamity. (1999)
- Ghost Pine #7: Blood: Thoughtful stories about a variety of encounters with family. Travelling, staying at the cottage and at home, and getting mugged and skinny dipping at work! (2003)
- Ghost Pine #8: Wolf: Carefully observed and recorded tales of cities and city life. Includes Chicago, New York, and of course Montreal. Magpies! Teenage MCs! Strange encounters! Friends! (2004)
- Ghost Pine #9: Bees: The buzzing “bee” sides: a miscellany of stories and bits of writing from bursting notebooks. Thoughts on music and movies. Stories about travelling and death. (2005)
- Ghost Pine #10: Wires: High-school was a weird time. Here I write about the snotty punks, surly gays, and Lebanese hip-hoppers who were my friends in the day. Also metal-heads. Plus: bonfire reviews! (2006)
- Ghost Pine #11: Crows: Stories about broken hearts and broken teeth, high school activism, and working as a night-watchman. (2007)
- Ghost Pine #12: Water: On being lost in translation in Japan, visiting the community museums of Nova Scotia, fish n chips reviews. Plus: literary cat dreams and working in a depanneur. (2010)
- Ghost Pine #13: Boys: Fifty-six pages of love, youth, and foolishness. Nine new stories about matching tattoos, my high-school punk band’s first out-of-town show, a snapshot of life on tour with Kepler, dancing late at night, and an elegy to Will Munro. (2014)
- Ghost Pine #14: After an 11-year hiatus, Ghost Pine is back with a new 56-page issue: it includes memories of growing up in suburban Ottawa and discovering coffee and punk as a teenager, as well as glimpses from Jeff’s current life in rural Nova Scotia, excerpts from correspondence with friends spanning the decades, and memories of the late Silver Jews singer David Berman.
