Zines

At the 2025 Powell Street Festival in August, Mata Ashita’s Community Collage Zine invited festival-goers to pause, reflect, and create together. Using fragments of text, photographs, and found materials, participants of all ages contributed to a living, collective artwork that captured the textures of Japanese Canadian memory, joy, and resilience. The project transformed the act of zine-making into a shared, intergenerational experience—one where stories were not only told, but assembled side by side, piece by piece, into something vibrant and communal.

Mata Ashita’s second zine, Talking Across Generations, gathers voices in conversation—elders, youth, and those in between—tracing the threads that bind memory, language, and identity across time. Through essays, poetry, and visual art, contributors reflect on inheritance and rupture, on what is carried forward and what must be reimagined. The zine becomes a meeting place where stories speak to one another, honoring the past while making space for new ways of being, reminding us that dialogue across generations is not just preservation, but transformation.

During the first half of 2021, 61 emerging writers from Japanese Canadian communities across the country joined authors Joy Kogawa, Sally Ito, Michael Prior, Jeff Chiba Stearns, Lillian Michiko Blakey, Hiromi Goto, Erica Hiroko Isomura and Ruth Ozeki for monthly writing-for-wellness workshops, giving participants a chance to build community and rediscover their family histories during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This zine features some of the incredible work created during our first season together.