73: The HowieZine Cometh, Part V

Summer brings with it the latest incarnation of the HowieZine (I won't describe the project again, but you can click here for all the info you'd ever want). Themed lost toys, the seventh issue of the group project might seem easily comparable to HowieZine 5 (theme: lost and found), and the new theme gave contributors possibly the tightest boundaries yet to work with. However, the narrow focus made me really think hard for a suitable angle, and the search for inspiration led me to a standout childhood moment when I lost one of my favourite toys – an Inuit ookpik named Ija – on a Greyhound bus trip to my grandparents.

I wanted to build something akin to a scrapbook page, and I remembered I had written a book about it as a class project in elementary school. So the zine page was essentially written by me – as a ten-year-old kid. All I had to do as a 30-year-old adult was to find the words in the book, scan them and turn them into a cohesive Coles notes version of what went down that day in 1985. About 90 per cent of the words popped up in the book; the remainder I had to create by building an alphabet out of individually-scanned letterforms (this led to a few moments chastising my kid-self for not having a better vocabulary – and misspelling Winnipeg, my home town for chrissakes!).

Once the story was pieced together, the visual elements fell into place – including a doodle of Ija, a photo of my brother, me and some ookpik toys, and a scanned excerpt from my diary the day it all went down. The backside of the zine page (below) features a self-written bio from the original grade six book project. You can click here for a closer look at the layout of the first page.