The snail gods

Updates on creative practice

My underworld journey is finally, hopefully coming to a close. In the past month I have been grieving the sudden, unexpected death of a friend and pillar of my local community. I have been wrapping up and integrating the lessons learned in my year of reckoning with incest. I have been wheatpasting writing from The Realm of Unreality all over Montreal, to promote my upcoming launch on December 6th. It feels poignant and extremely extra of me to wheatpaste writing about incest trauma, and how my mother threatened to sue me to silence me, on walls and streetlamp poles in physical, material shared space. I am very much refusing the calls for my silence and instead taking opposite action, making the realm of unreality something that can be spoken in public. It feels absolutely correct, and daring, and like a necessary ritual of closing this chapter and moving on to the next. It’s also bringing me back to my younger years when I used to plaster the city of Toronto with feminist flyers. There is something about wheatpasting that takes me back to my calling as not just a writer, but a zinester. Zinesters don’t just write, they publish. And they do so in a way that steals the space needed for their voice. They don’t wait for permission. They just go.

I went to a launch for the newest issue of Zine de zines, a zine that documents and promotes zine culture in Quebec, which included a review of my zine The Eyes Looking Back. Zine de zines is bilingual, and mostly in French, and does an incredible job of dragging zine culture from the depths of memory into the present moment, vibrant and pulsating with life. I got to the event on time which meant I was an hour early so I spent an hour talking with the editor of Zine de zines, Izabeau. The conversation was deeply inspiring and felt like a bell ringing in my subconscious, pulling me back to myself. I’ve always had both an online and in print writing practice. When I was a kid that looked like zines and online diaries. These days it looks like zines and a substack, plus my instagram. Not much has changed. But in the past few years, post cancellation, I have really struggled to write perzines.

For those who don’t know, perzines are a subgenre of zines that publish memoir-style reflections on the writer’s life. The per stands for personal. They usually have multiple issues, when they don’t they’re called a “one off.” I’ve often explained perzines as like a band project for indie writers, and the issues represent different albums. In a music context, a band offers a creative container and each album is a smaller creative container within the larger creative container of the band. Each album is in conversation with the larger body of work of the band. And when a musician chooses to break from a band all together and start something different, it represents a major creative break — the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. A band or a perzine series will last as long as the container is vital and generative, hopefully not longer, and hopefully not ending before the creative flow has changed directions.

My last zine series was Fucking Magic, the first twelve issues of which I compiled into a book. Issue 12 ends at the very beginning of the pandemic. Just before I was cancelled and everything in my life changed. Amidst the wreckage of my former life, I tried to find a way to keep writing perzines. I put out a couple more issues of Fucking Magic but it didn’t feel right. I had changed so much that I didn’t know how to continue writing in that old container. I wrote a couple one off perzines to explore different possibilities but nothing stuck. In the last few years I have been focused primarily on my online writing, publishing essays here and micro writing on instagram. I’ve been making zines out of the essays I write here, to free them from the shackles of the internet, but I haven’t been writing a perzine.

The Zine de zines launch and the conversation with Izabeau took me back to the energy I need to write perzines. It is a distinctly offline energy. It is somewhat whimsical and magical, shot through with a kind of audacity and daring. There is a felt sense of secrecy, knowing that while the writing will be read widely, it will move through the world by being passed from hand to hand. A slower spread, and a deeply personal practice of sitting down to read something you are holding in your hands. I count myself fucking blessed that I get to write and make zines for a living, that all the work I’ve done over all these years has led to the absurd but inevitable outcome that I’m a professional zinester. But I miss the practice of perzines, and that writing is not something I can force. I needed the ringing bell of Izabeau’s dedication to zine culture to break me out of my post cancellation despondency and return me to a kind of generative and life sustaining magic that I’ve known since I was a kid.

I am starting a new perzine. I don’t know what it’s called yet. But I can feel the edges of the creative container, the form that it is beginning to take, and that feels exciting and extremely different from the writing I do online. Paid subscribers to this substack will get a discount code for the zine when it comes out, as a thank you for funding that writing too. This substack makes my writing practice sustainable, it gives me time to write, but I’m realizing that some of the writing I need to do needs a different container in order to do different kinds of magic. So keep an eye out for this new project. More will be revealed. In the meantime I will continue to write essays here, but I think I will also do more writing like this, giving you a window into my creative practice as it unfolds.

Lately I am deeply reflecting on my relationship to the snail gods. Some gods are tiny. Some gods are slow. And the snail gods teach me a lot about creative practice. In the hustle and output fetishization of capitalism, there is little space for the deep, meandering, underground work of creative practice. Creativity is not a to do list. Creativity is a wild god. And in order to have a relationship with a wild god, you must be willing to surrender. You must be willing to listen. You must be willing to have all your plans destroyed. You must be willing to change directions, get lost, fail, and look ridiculous. The creative practice, if done right, will transform you. You will be someone else on the otherside. Therefore, there is no way to plan for this or control it. It’s a lot of allowing. It’s a lot of being willing. And it’s a lot of daring, of boldly going into the unknown.

Related to this is my reading practice. In this day and age it takes boldness to insist upon a reading practice. No one has time and no one has an attention span. To insist that reading is necessary, life giving, and fundamental means giving reading and giving reading focus. Insisting on this is one of the most difficult parts of being a writer today because our time and attention are under brutal attack. But the snail gods say read. Not in a weird shame filled exercise of “healthy habits” but like a daring wanderer crossing through portals into other worlds. I don’t know how to tell you this but writers read. Reading is a fundamental part of being a writer. And so in the spirit, in the returning to myself as a writer and the kind of writer I really am, I am returning to my reading practice. Stealing it back from the attention fraying algorithm. In March, I will be teaching at Breitenbush again. This time my class will be called Writing is a lightning strike and it will be about insisting on our creative practice as writers. I’ll share the link once registration opens.

L'autre chose que je me concentre est devenir québécoise. J’apprendre le française et cette une process tellement generative. Il faut que je complètement change. C’est ben tough lmao. Je sais que tellement de choses devenir possible quand je change et c’est le grande change dans ma vie. L’apprendre le française est une grande part au mon pratique creative. Merci pour votre patience avec mon française. I will be inviting my broken French into my work from time to time, as a humbling practice of transparency as I become Québécoise.

The thing about the snails gods is that they show us how much fits into the tiny space of a moment when you give it the attention it deserves. When you slow down enough you cross over into another dimension of spacetime where a lot becomes possible. In order to listen to the snail gods we have to let the little things “count.” In the spirit of this wisdom, these little scraps of my process are offered with the generosity of a full heart.

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Clementine Morrigan is an independent writer, cultural change maker, truth teller, and moral philosopher. She writes essays and literary nonfiction about ethics, politics, relationships, sexuality, violence, trauma, and unconditional compassion. Her cult classic zine, Love Without Emergency, has sold more than 11,000 copies (that’s a lot of stapling). Her podcast, Fucking Cancelled, independently toured the United States. Her readers have created and disseminated amateur translations of her work in several languages. If you have spent time in a punk house or queer collective house in the last 20 years, you have probably flipped through one of her zines in the bathroom.

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