My debut novel, Temporary Palaces, centers around a short-lived illegal squat in Ottawa, the city where I grew up. In part, it is a tribute to a real squat opened by activists in 2002. Their goal was to bring attention to an emerging housing crisis that, now, twenty-plus years later, has become endemic to the city and has come to define urban life across North America.
The fictional squat is just one of the many creative solutions to cheap living that form the backdrop for the punk, art, and activist communities that populate Temporary Palaces. Sprawling industrial lofts-turned-artist studios, communal punk houses, urban campsites on the secret fringes of downtown, ephemeral concert venues and art installations. These spaces mirror places I lived and frequented. A series of cheap lofts and apartments in post-referendum Montreal allowed me to dedicate time to working on my zine Ghost Pine – which is how I became a writer.
Creativity requires space, and time. Inexpensive living goes hand in hand with new movements in art and enables the conditions for political ferment. From a Booker-winning novel to surreal graphics, on this list I recommend titles that feature (or were created within) alternative living arrangements and forms of community-making, most with a punk or anarchist bent.
War in the Neighborhood by Seth Tobocman
The co-founder of underground anti-war graphics magazine World War III Illustrated, Seth Tobocman spent most of the 1990s creating this voluminous graphic novel about the community of Lower East Side squatters that he belonged to. In addition to detailing their battles with police, Tobocman doesn’t shy away from portraying the internecine conflict that drove the squatter community apart. These go beyond mere disagreements over political tactics, and include class differences, bullying, the influence of drugs and alcohol, and racism. In a blocky illustration style that evolved from his early work as a stencil artist, Tobocman presents a nuanced chronicle of a radical political movement in the making and unmaking.
Clothes Music Boys by Viv Albertine
Viv Albertine’s memoir Clothes Music Boys is a fierce and funny recounting of a life of creativity. Drawn to glam rock as a teenager, the gender fluidity of Marc Bolan convinced Albertine there is a place for girls in rock ‘n’ roll. A key player in the emergent punk scene around Vivienne Westwood’s Sex shop, Albertine taught herself to play guitar while sharing a squat with Sid Vicious, and her legendary band The Slits were born. Albertine’s narrative voice is companionable, wry, and wholly unconcerned with rock ‘n’ roll hagiography. By turns funny, sad, and electric, Clothes Music Boys is a compulsive read.
The Encyclopedia of Doris by Cindy Crabb
Both tight-knit and diffuse, the 1990s zine scene produced an embarrassment of compelling, type-written, photocopied riches. Among them, Doris remains a highlight. Published by Cindy Crabb while she lived in a variety of punk houses and collective spaces, her zine took on massive topics like sexual assault, chemical dependence, and abuse, and discussed them through a personal lens. Her voice, always questioning, always intimate, lit up dozens of issues with her personal stories and political thoughts. A deep thinker, The Encyclopedia of Doris shows the reader Crabb’s world, her hopes and regrets, her political commitment and her fallibility. This book is incredible.
No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte
In Sam Lipsyte’s brilliant caper, a mystery is set in motion when Jack Shit’s junkie roommate disappears with his Fender bass. A punk noir ensues, complete with murder, red herrings, and, finally, a sense that the truly culpable remain exempt from punishment. No One Left to Come Looking for You is set in an early 1990s Lower East Side punk scene brimming with bohemian characters, and their note-perfect fictional bands Annihilation of the Soft Left, Vole, and Mongoose Civique. Interrogating gentrification, corrupt developers, and how long to cling to one’s dreams of making it big in the underground, this novel is a moving portrait of a scene on the brink of changing forever, shot through with Lipsyte’s snickery wit. Nobody does it better.
Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels brim with everyday problems. In Offshore, the protagonist Nenna’s chief concern is keeping her leaky vessel Grace afloat. The home to her and her two children, Grace is temperamental, as are many of the boats it is moored alongside in London’s Battersea Reach. Nenna is part of a community of shaggy boat dwellers living on the literal margins. And yet while she worries about the future, and suffers the judgment of her sister and the nuns that teach her girls at a nearby school, there is an exhilarating, sometimes terrifying, freedom to Nenna’s life. Perpetually surprising, Offshore is so vivid the reader feels as if they have been mudlarking on the Thames shore.
The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S by Jaime Hernandez
One summer when I lived on the Plateau in Montreal, a huge new library opened. I didn’t have a job, so most days I walked down the big hill to the Bibliothèque nationale, usually returning home with another volume of Jaime Hernandez’s forty-plus year comic epic Locas in my backpack. I’d be hard-pressed to find a story that had a bigger influence on Temporary Palaces. Recounting the intertwined lives of Latinx queer punkers Maggie and Hopey, in the hundreds of pages of Hernandez’s comics the pair age from punk teenagers with shaved heads to middle-aged productive members of society. While the entire storyline is collected in thick hardcover editions, I recommend new readers start with the cinematic storyline “The Death of Speedy” collected here.
Ninja by Brian Chippendale & Multi-Force by Mat Brinkman
Fort Thunder was a sprawling art space housed in a former cotton mill in Providence’s Olneyville district. Before it was leveled and replaced with a supermarket, it was a venue for raucous punk shows and DIY wrestling matches, as well as ground zero for a new generation of underground comic artists who lived there.
A continuation of a comics series he drew as a child, Brian Chippendale’s Ninja is an oversized tome of pages dense with ink and line. Embodying a dream logic where narrative is fragmented, Chippendale’s panels editorialize on imperialist politics and gentrification even as the characters scramble through science-fiction landscapes.
Mat Brinkman’s Multi-Force is Slacker meets The Lord of The Rings. It follows two unnamed characters as they wander through a lo-fi fantasy landscape characterized by bullying cops and no loitering signs. On the hoof, Brinkman’s protagonists encounter an escalating cast of epic fantasy tropes, swordfights, monsters, demons.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JEFF MILLER is the author of the award-winning creative nonfiction collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, and he frequently publishes criticism. Jeff holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives in Nova Scotia.