Flannel Magazine: ‘This is Maine’

“Maine art is more than lighthouses and pictures of the waves,” Sean Collinson said. “No one from Maine wants a lighthouse painting. My mom doesn’t have a lighthouse painting; I would never enjoy looking at a lighthouse,” the 24-year-old senior University of Maine new media student finished, only half-joking.

He’s the founder of Flannel Magazine – a free, homemade product full of black-and-white photography and interviews on 8-inch-by-8-inch paper, tied together with string.

Would he take a picture of a lighthouse?

“If something terrible was happening to it,” he said.

“If it was on fire,” chimed in Travis Bourassa, a 24-year-old UMaine broadcast journalism student and Collinson’s colleague.

Flannel’s mission, proclaimed on the first page of Issue One, is to display “what we love about the state: the great outdoors, the creativity and the do-it-yourself mentality.”

Excerpt of an interview with Flannel founder, Sean Collinson:

Flannel Magazine: What are you into?

Sean Collinson: Bad quality.

FM: What?

SC: I’m not really into glossiness or professionalism. I like a more organic feel to things.

FM: Explain.

SC: Just capturing an experience.

The first issue took a year to complete from thought to page. Collinson’s final project for a graphic design class set off a long-burning creative fuse; he had to make a book.

Reading art publications, Collinson sensed the misconception that only a few U.S. cities were where important art was occurring. His zine’s premise was complete.

“Flannel came about because we think Maine is just as culturally significant,” Collinson said.

Bourassa said they want to give a voice to typically overlooked or unseen Maine art.

Pine Tree State stereotypes included?

“Hunting, woods, driving four-wheelers through the mud – Flannel stands for that stuff,” Bourassa said. “It doesn’t stand for the touristy Maine. It doesn’t stand against it, but …”

Jessica Harvey, 19, the third leg of Flannel’s tripod, finished his sentence: “There’s more to Maine than the coast.”

“This is Maine, and it’s not Bar Harbor, and it’s not Portland, and it’s not on the water,” Bourassa said. “There’s already a voice for that Maine. Flannel is the hidden Maine that only Mainers know.”

Bourassa enjoys the coast and lobster. But he also recognizes Maine as “going to Old Town and seeing some fat guy on steps drinking a 40 ’cause he just got out of work at the paper mill.”

“It’s an art and culture magazine, but we’re not taking ourselves seriously,” Collinson said. “And I don’t think Maine people take themselves seriously. A lobsterman is a lobsterman because he likes to get lobster. I am a Mainer, proudly. I hope I have an accent, and I hope I sound ridiculous.”

The zine’s final product is a crossroads of crisp and coarse. Two editions in, the plan is for all issues to feature interviews with contributors and showcase their art. At this time, contributors must be from Maine, although where they live or make their art is open.

“This is for people from Maine that love Maine,” Collinson said.

Flannel doesn’t roll off a printing press – it’s built. Issue One was assembled in Collinson’s basement, hand-cut with X-Acto knives and tied with string, while they watched VHS tapes on a tiny television. They moved at a clip of about six copies per movie.

“It just sucked, because there’s no natural light, it’s dusty, it’s gross,” Collinson said. They crossed the basement with an extension cord to access the single working outlet.

The zine is printed on laser printers and copier paper.

“It’s basically the worst quality you could get, but I think the integrity of the photos still holds up,” Collinson said.

Flannel is the kind of publication that embraces grit and grain honestly – there’s no irony in a contributor praising Steel Reserve, a lethal brew that has six-packs priced at next to nothing, as his favorite beer. Or the bassist of Belfast punk band Afghan Banana Stand saying he and the drummer couldn’t play their instruments when they joined the group – they learned as they went. Kind of like Flannel.

The zine didn’t need to have all its pieces in line – advertisers, a business bank account, arrangements for glossy prints. They interviewed their friends, a girlfriend or two, and showed the diversity of their neck of the woods with pictures of guns, embroidered Web speak and tattooed dudes doing cannonballs into above-ground pools.

—

There was no plan for Flannel to make money. Then the first order came from a girl in Kansas – a girl no one involved with Flannel knew.

“She just found it,” Collinson said. “We never said, ‘Go to the blog, get our magazine.’ We just started getting orders. So then we just started running with it.” The majority of the orders for Issue One came from the Internet.

Keys to Flannel’s success:

MC: How many days a week do you wear Flannel?

Sean Collinson: Most days.

Jess Harvey: Sometimes a couple times a week, sometimes I don’t even wear one in a week.

Travis Bourassa: I’ve got one flannel.

MC: How important are your mustaches to the zine?

TB: Incredibly important to the cause.

SC: I would not consider being clean-shaven.

TB: Could you imagine me without a mustache at this point?

SC: No. You’d look like a damned joke.

“We couldn’t keep up with the orders. We were getting them out like three weeks after they were ordering them,” Collinson said. He estimated 50 requests in two weeks.

The Flannel crew planted copies in Bangor stores and the University of Maine Art Museum, where director George Kinghorn was smitten – he called the next day and asked to meet them.

“We still can’t come to terms with the fact that something we made, people are interested in and want it and would be willing to write a letter to us and be like, ‘Can I have a copy of that?’” Bourassa said.

Bourassa browsed his e-mail for a message from Bangor High School student Hannah Hirsch.

“Finally we have a cool, hip, independently produced photography/art zine that focuses on the true meaning of Maine: finding the true beauty in the grimy and gritty,” Hirsch writes. The message concludes with her asking what the “process for subscribing is.”

“When Sean and I read that, we were like, ‘Subscribing?’”

—

Collinson and Bourassa are sitting at their workspace. Bourassa is wearing corduroys and a bolo tie. Collinson wears a red-and-blue flannel shirt and jeans. Both have mustaches. Neither are wearing shoes. They tap away on MacBook Pros, working to finish Issue Two before a Friday night party.

It’s being produced in nicer conditions than the inaugural issue; Flannel recently secured a space at the Foster Student Innovation Center on campus. They were offered an interview on 101.3 WVOM on their first day.

The second Flannel doubles the amount of contributors and stacks to 52 pages – up from 36 in Issue One. There’s a death theme – contributors spoke about their near-death experiences, ghosts and the afterlife.

“We were a lot more excited about Issue Two because we felt like we built kind of a fanbase,” Bourassa says. “We were a lot more motivated to get it done and do it for the audience.”

They feel more professional in the Innovation Center.

“It makes you feel like what you’re doing has more worth,” Bourassa says.

The creative and production side, although time-consuming, is the simple part. Business decisions are tough.

Flannel is printed at home and on a university printer, but Collinson and Bourassa dropped some of their own cash on supplies and charge $2 for shipping. They’ll soon spend $60 to have Flannel copyrighted.

While the zine isn’t turning a profit yet, it is now produced without a cash loss.

“I haven’t given making money much thought,” Collinson says.

“We’re the least business-minded people in this business building,” Bourassa says, gesturing to the Innovation Center, where video producers and software engineers hang their hats. With a long desk and natural light pouring in from floor-to-ceiling windows, Flannel is now a far cry from a shoestring setup in a musty basement. They have support from the business-savvy Innovation Center staff and 24-hour access to their workspace.

Rubbing shoulders with entrepreneurs and dedicating so much time to Flannel, is it crossing into career territory, or still a hobby?

“Definitely a hobby,” Collinson says.

“Both,” Bourassa says.

“It’s a hobby, but we want it to be our job,” Harvey says.

“We can say it’s a passion. We’re working on this at the level where we’d like it to be a self-sustainable thing, like this could continue happening. This is not a school project that you do, and you get a grade and you’re done,” Collinson says.

Bourassa worries his girlfriend will dump him if he works on another issue; he’s so absorbed in Flannel, he tends to forget plans with her.

“I get stressed out, constantly,” Collinson says. “It’s a good stress. It’s not a stress where we hate to do it; it’s just a stress where we’re constantly pushing ourselves.

Collinson forgot to show up for his job recently; he was working on Flannel.

“We’re gonna make real good adults someday,” Bourassa says.

“I have a really hard time keeping track of anything. Jess is our staff,” Collinson says. He tells her every detail, and she serves as his memory. She’s also his girlfriend.

They face tough questions on an almost daily basis.

“‘Where do you see the zine in five years?’” Collinson mimics.

“In a Dumpster. In my woodstove,” Bourassa answers.

Bourassa had been skeptical about creating a paper product he’d hand directly to people, but said it trumps the ease and forgettable nature of a blog.

“Turning the pages, I think that gets people really into it,” he says.

“If they know next month there’s going to be an actual physical copy of something waiting at the door, people get way more impressed by that,” Bourassa says. “It looks like a magazine. That’s what I want it to do.”

Collinson and Bourassa hope to include new artists in every issue, as well as more writers and articles. Their immediate business goals are to earn advertising revenue and secure professional printing. They want to increase in thickness and expand their painting and multimedia content.

Collinson hopes to build up the Flannel Web presence to a space that can advertise artistic and DIY Maine happenings. Flannel will be the organization behind a multi-genre rock show for the Keith Anderson Community Center on April 17.

Their highest aspiration is to become, as Collinson puts it, “an art collective, where there’s this art group of young artists who are not doing what’s in most Maine galleries.”

“We want it to become more than just a magazine,” he says.

To order Flannel, e-mail order@flannelzine.com. Flannel is online at flanneldotcom.blogspot.com, Facebook and its new Web site, flannelzine.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.