March 9, 2010 Zine Scene

Fun is Free Press

by Christopher Olson

Concordia alumnus Paula Belina, founder of the Fun is Free Press zine distro, has been living for the last year entirely off the charity of strangers and proceeds from her zines. After a year spent on the road, Belina, a native Montrealer, currently lives in a shed in London, Ont. but plans to return to the city once she gets back on her feet.

Winner of Mirror’s best zine award in 2003 for Street Eaters, which ended its 39-issue run in 2006, Belina’s zines run the gamut from block prints to collections of surrealist games and tips on how to make your own zines on the cheap.

The Link: How did you end up in London, Ont.?

Paula Belina: I couldn’t find a place to live [in Montreal] and ran out of money, so in July I tried to walk from Montreal to London. It was going to take 20 days. I made it all the way to Kingston and pretty much was starving. I ran out of ideas of what the hell I should do, and then finally, I just got a lead about someone who had a shed in London, and they were totally like, “Yeah, I’ll feed you, no problem.” I did her dishes and helped clean a bit and she let me live in her shed all summer. I still feel the connection here to Montreal, because I walked along the St. Lawrence and could see how the history of the architecture moved along down into Ontario. So in my mind I still feel like I’m with family here in London.

Did you make a lot of sales at last year’s Expozine?

I think I did okay. I mean, whatever I made was gone within a couple of days to pay for gas, to pay for food. It wasn’t anything sustainable, long-term. My mission at the end of my tour was to somehow prove to myself that I could survive, but what it proved to me was that there’s an isolation paradigm in our culture that suggests that every person must do everything by themselves, including making their own money, paying their own way—like if you ask for help you should be ashamed of yourself.

How did you come up with the name Fun is Free?

I think I got that in Boulder, Colo., and it was a spraypaint stencil that said “fun is free.” I’m very dedicated to the things I do being accessible and being made in such a way as to flow really easily between people. Since I stopped Street Eaters four years ago, I’ve been mailing out zines that I make. I did one called Sparkplug, and now I do GoodGoodBonBon. I had to stop Sparkplug because I just didn’t have money anymore, but now I made GoodGoodBonBon really small. I know from the feedback [that] it goes through people’s hands, lots of people get to look at it. I like that it’s not elite, I’ve always liked zines for that.

How many zines are you working on now?

I’ve gotten contributions [for the Birdcage zine] from New Orleans, New York, London, Ont., Montreal, Victoria—they tend to be like that because I guess I’ve travelled around enough and I try not to lose touch with friends who have thus scattered from Montreal. And then I collect surrealist games, so I have a bunch of zines that I continue to do called Fun is Free (Association), and those are all surrealist games or just absurd, ridiculous games that I invent by myself or with friends.

I find ways to make zines out of everything, pretty much. Like my friend in Portland just called yesterday, and she’s like, “What do you do every day there in London?” So I’m trying to make a zine for her tracking the next five days of what I do. [Zines are] just such an amazing format that I just keep coming back to. I just adore it, and because of my budget I’ve been making tiny, tiny zines now. There’s an instruction in GoodGoodBonBon about how to make an eight-page zine from one piece of paper, so even with no money I figured out a way to make zines—I did a miniature pocket-sized emergency surrealist poetry zine that I slip into people’s pockets or I leave on the bus.

You can order copies of GoodGoodBonBon and other zines by contacting Fun is Free Press at funisfreepress@gmail.com. You can follow Paula Belina on her blog at funisfreepress.blogspot.com.