Interview With Hal Niedzviecki

Hear the interview by clicking the play button above!

Meet Hal:

Hal Niedzviecki, Canadian novelist and founder of Broken Pencil Magazine, shared his thoughts with us on the industry, starting his own magazine and how to keep things interesting in a 25 year strong publication. Listen to our conversation to hear what he had to say.

Broken Pencil:

Home of Canzine, the BP Zine Awards, and the Indie Illustrator’s Deathmatch, Broken Pencil is a mega-zine dedicated exclusively to exploring independent creative action. The quarterly publication acts as an entrance into underground art culture. Stellar thoughts on stellar ideas, discover more on the Broken Pencil website.

Recap:

For those who need to rush off, here are the main moments:

• When beginning Broken Pencil in 1995, the underground scene was filled with cool and new independent publications brought on by digital print. Magazines like B&A and Rush Hour Revisions were starting up, supporting one another along the way.

According to Hal:

• Intentions, as you achieve your goals, become more ambitious. Things you set out to do in your twenties are different from those later on. You figure out if you can do something, then you build on how far you can go with it:

As you evolve as an artist and a thinker, your work evolves...otherwise, it gets boring.

“Magazines are all about new ideas and fresh aspects in a familiar package”; the branding remains consistent while the content is energized.

• When struggling to connect with readers in enough ways to remain sustainable, Hal and the Broken Pencil team branched out with festivals like Canzine, the BP Zine Awards, and the Indie Illustrator’s Deathmatch. Attendants received copies of the magazine and, through the events, the team reached a fantastic collection of new subscribers who felt close to the magazine. The festivals also worked as a forum to discover new talent they could review and include in upcoming issues. Canzine was the first ever zine festival.

Digital vs. print:

• With the internet pow in the late nineties, many of the local (book and record) stores Broken Pencil relied on went out of business (as well as many of their other distributors). This was a huge loss to community culture, creating a strain on the underground scene BP readers and writers relished. To stay with it, Hal focused on the subscription model, finding that this was one aspect the world wide web was helpful in - subscribing online is simple, fast, and effective.

• Fully digital magazines may struggle with developing commitment or true enthusiasm in their readers that the haptiles of printed publications create naturally. In many ways, the magazine is already the perfect technology for its purpose - this makes it difficult to replace.
  

Looking to the future:

We’re just looking forward to doing what we do and being able to stand up and be proud of alternative voices and independent voices and the commitment people still have for print. To doing things the hard way and doing it right.

...

We don’t know what’s coming next, but we have the institutional knowledge and the will to get through [it] because we have a community who loves the magazine and who believes in it and that gives you a desire to continue.

- Hal Niedzviecki