Undoubtedly, one of the hardest and scariest things about making art is putting it out into the world and adding a period at the end of the body of work by encapsulating it in what you hope is the proper form to convey the message you wish to share with others.

Well, dear readers, this is where we are today, or at least this is where I am. Please join me in celebrating the launch of the first zine in a series of four titles I will be releasing bi-weekly until the end of October.

I will start with “The Divided Heart,” a project about the Decarie Expressway in Montreal’s west end that I worked on for over a year. If you have been following along for a while, you would have seen it before, but today, I am finally presenting it in zine form for purchase!

The zine includes one of my poems, and I hope it delivers the mood and setting I intended to put across at the opening of the zine.

I chose to print all the zines on 100lb Satin paper. The zines measure 5.5 inches by 8.5 inches and are staple-bound. “The Divided Heart” is 64 pages long and contains 30 monochrome images from the project. I am very happy with the print quality from Mixam, whom I used to print all four zines.

The work focused on the claustrophobic, bisected, noisy, chaotic, polluted, and poorly planned Decarie Expressway and its surroundings along the shouldering service roads, which used to be part of the Decarie Boulevard before the city dug a trench highway through the middle of it to create a North-South passage in anticipation for Expo 67 (the world’s fair) forever changing the landscape of the area and leaving a deep scar that affects the area even more so today then it may have back then.

Living next to the expressway, I felt a need to confront it. I would walk from the southern highway interchange to the northern interchange at the opposite end of the expressway and photograph what I emotionally responded to as I tried to make sense of what kept driving me to do this work.

There are many photos I am proud of from this body of work, and editing into a zine was no easy task for me as I will fully admit to being a terrible self-editor and that creating this zine series was part of the process of working on that weakness of mine and strengthening it for future projects.

In sequencing the images, I took inspiration from John Gossage’s technique of varying the image size on the page to create excitement as one turns the pages and avoids making the images feel too repetitive.

John Gossage and Michael Schmidt were both subtle mentors in the making of the work and later in trying to mould it into a physical form for others to enjoy; namely, Schmidt’s book “Waffenrhue” and Gossage’s “Should Nature Change” both acted as gentle teachers for me to learn from (and to continue learning from I might add).

With all that being said, I am finally putting this body of work and three others out into the world for others to enjoy and to get the images off a hard drive or out of the print drawer to give myself some closure at the same time.

I have a few more images to share, and then we will get to the details at the end of today’s newsletter if you are interested in purchasing a copy!

The zine is $20.00 Canadian, and shipping will vary depending on where you are (unfortunately, shipping costs in Canada are very high, and I strongly considered only making this available in Canada, but I want people to have the opportunity to purchase a copy if they want to): shipping within Canada will be $5.00 Canadian, to the United States $10.00 Canadian, and to central Europe $15.00 Canadian.

If you are genuinely interested in picking up a copy, I will be making seven copies available for sale online (the rest will be sold locally at a zine expo in November, and whatever is left after that will be made available online afterwards). You will need to send me an email (do not comment; email me) at matthewpoburyny@gmail.com to reserve your copy.

I will only accept payments via PayPal unless you are in Canada. Then, we can do a bank transfer if you prefer.

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to stop by and read my words and view my pictures; that alone means a lot to me. But if you can financially support me by picking up a zine, then that would mean the world to me and help support my current project back home in Cornwall, which has travel costs involved that this would help out a little with.

As always, take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you in the next zine launch and September roundup newsletters; sincerely, Matt.