February 9, 2010 Literary Arts

Striking the literary lottery

Here Be Monsters features stories, plots pulled out of a hat

by Christopher Olson

You never know what you’re going to find in Here Be Monsters, even if you’re one of its writers.GRAPHIC GABBY LEON

Imagine a world where people spend their entire lives on the Internet, and where a group of friends must defend themselves from a psychotic artificial intelligence who also happens to be the president.

Now, does this sound like a story that someone pulled out of a hat?

Here Be Monsters: No Room On the Life Raft, a self-published anthology compiled by Alexander Newcombe, Duane Burry and Vincent Mackay, is the result of a literary lottery consisting of story elements conjured by its three members and selected at random.

“We got together every week or so and did these writing exercises,” said Newcombe, a recent Concordia creative writing graduate. “Eventually we decided that we wanted to put together a collection, both as a goal for ourselves to have polished, finished stories, and because we thought it would be a good way to get something out there.”

Each member of the group would write down story suggestions, such as the location a story might take place, a specific genre, a character or a subject topic, and turn around a story in 20 minutes.

“It can be completely unrelated, but that’s the idea: to get us thinking of things that we wouldn’t normally think of,” said Burry, currently doing his master’s in linguistics at Concordia. “It’s to add a bit more variety and take us out of our comfort space.”

“It breaks the patterns, too,” said Mackay, the group’s only francophone member. “It just sort of throws you off balance and makes you try new stuff.”

“That’s one of the big draws for me,” said Newcombe. “We have a structure in which you have to make an idea, and also a structure in which it doesn’t matter if it’s terrible. I mean, some of the stuff we write is terrible. It’s only meant to be read for those two minutes when you read it out.”

The stories that appear in Here Be Monsters are those that have managed to survive subsequent drafts, as well as the input of the other members of the group.
“[They] go through the same process that any story would go through,” continued Newcombe. “It’s just the initial germ that’s created by this wacky lottery.”

The anthology held its launch party at Burritoville this past November, where audience members were encouraged to shout out writing prompts which the three writers then had to spin into stories proper.

“We went to the back of the bar and came back 20 minutes later with three pretty ridiculous stories, but everyone was pretty well lubricated at that point, so it was okay,” said Newcombe.
Proving that good things come in threes, the trio has plans to release a new issue every three months and hopes to expand the zine into a proper anthology with a call for submissions.
“The goal in the beginning was to at least break even,” said Burry. “If people read it and say, ‘When’s the next one?’ then all the better.”

“There’s always a little stigma surrounding self-published work,” said Newcombe. “But now that it’s out and I’ve looked at some of the other zines around town, I think that we are putting out something that’s not identical to anything else.”

You can find copies of Here Be Monsters at the Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore (2150 Bishop St.). You can follow them online at herebemonstersanthology.blogspot.com. The launch of Issue 2: Safer Where You Are will take place at Burritoville (2055 Bishop St.) on March 12.

Here Be Monsters
Alexander Newcombe
Duane Burry, Vincent Mackay
70 pp