Orientation Week Serves

 orientation_bnr.jpg

Would you like to become a published creator by the end of your first week at Western? Want to learn more about the rich history of zines (from “fanzine” or “magazine”) and make your own in collaboration with other first-year students across the disciplines? Would you like to learn more about the London arts and culture scene from local artists and faculty members in your community?

On Saturday, September 9th, the Faculty of Arts & Humanities and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies are teaming up to host our first ever zine-making workshop, “The OServes Community Zine Project,” featuring an exciting lineup of guests: local musician and zine artist Jillian Clair; London artist and cartoonist Jacqueline Demendeev; author and local bookseller Jason Dickson; FIMS faculty member Tim Blackmore; student writer-in-residence Gray Brogden; and the Words Festival Artistic Director Josh Lambier.

The Orientation Serves Community Zine Project will offer you the opportunity to reflect on your first experience of Western and connect with other students who have an interest in creativity, the arts, and community. Our zine-making session is for beginners, so you do not need any previous experience making zines. This event is for everyone! All you need to do is bring your laptop or smartphone, bring any material you have collected from your Orientation Week experience (e.g., programs, brochures, handouts, pictures, tweets, video, texts, and more), and bring your O-Week memories!

Zines are often short, DIY (“Do it yourself”), self-published books or magazines. They often have an organizing theme, involve collaborative practice with other creators, and include a multimedia collage of images and writing. The OServes Zine will have the theme of “community,” will capture your experiences of Western and London during O-Week, and will collect your contributions to create a collaborative zine!

In September, we will bring together a group of students and Writing Studies faculty members to edit the submissions together to produce our OServes Community Zine!

What: Bring your friends, roommates, and floormates to make a community O-Week Zine!

When: 9th September, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Where: The Great Hall How: Bring your laptop, bring any found materials that you have picked up along your O-Week journey

Example Zines from Western and the London Community:

Words Festival’s WordsFestZine: http://wordsfest.ca/zine

Atrocities Against Indigenous Canadians for Dummies: https://www.atrocitiesagainstindigenouscanadians.com/

Textures of Your Pandemic Experience: https://lib.fims.uwo.ca/2022/04/08/textures-of-your-pandemic-experience/

Zineography: https://www.londontourism.ca/events/zine-fiends-presents-zineography


Speaker Biographies:

Jacqueline-Demendeev.jpegJacqueline Demendeev is an artist with the heart of a storyteller. Working primarily as a painter and cartoonist, she takes inspiration from storybook illustration, surrealist imagery, and her own cultural heritage. Jacqueline also has a body of performance and theatre work, and she considers sharing stories through education an important part of her practice. She strives to create works that nourish imagination, curiosity and empathy in audiences of all ages.

 

 


Blackmore.jpegTim Blackmore is a professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University. He writes about popular culture, particularly science fiction (in prose, film, animation, jello), but also comics and comic strips, science fiction film design. He also focuses a great deal on what Leo Marx called The Machine in the Garden, and the persistence of the pastoral in this weird age of post-everything and all-transparency. Robots, AI, cyborg bodies, all grist for my mill. He writes a great deal about war, real actual war and also fictional war. 

 


Dickson.jpgJason Dickson is the author of Clearance: Selected Journals of Dr. Michael Purdon, Parapsychologist; The Hunt; Glenn Piano by Gladys Priddis (all published by Book*hug); London: 150 Cultural Moments (written with Vanessa Brown, Biblioasis, 2017); and Michael Bidner: Raw (written with Tom Baynes, McIntosh Gallery, 2019). He lives in London, Ontario with his partner Vanessa who, with him, co-owns the antiquarian bookshop Brown and Dickson Bookstore.

 

 


clair_jillian.pngJillian Clair has been making zines since 2013. For her, zines were a way of circumventing the gatekeeping which takes place in alternative and countercultural spaces. Her zines are often an exploration of a topic she is fired up about, such as censorship, the benefits of safe consumption sites, the benefits of vaccines, and Nicolas Cage. Her background is in library and information science, so please get in touch with Jill if you want any recommendations.

 

 

 


gray_th.jpgThe current Student Writer-in-Residence at Western University, Gray Brogden is a passionate writer, poet, and performer, currently studying English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including The Sudbury Star, Western University student publications, as well as local, provincial and national anthologies, and she was the 2023 recipient of both the Lillian Kroll Prize in Creative Writing and the Marguerite R. Down Canadian Heritage Writing Award. In her spare time, Gray can be found obsessively writing and revising, binge reading, or working on jigsaw puzzles. You can find her on Instagram @graybrogden16