Take a Look at Happy Tapir
Garnering numerous reviews by Zine-Scene stalwarts Xerography Debt and Broken Pencil, Happy Tapir has quickly become one of the most talked-about new zine series. Eschewing modern technology, Happy Tapir is produced by hand in the greatest of zine traditions.
Praise for Happy Tapir
One of the best attributes of Masiulewicz’s writing is his use of understatement. It’s ironic, because he seems to personify Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem “Chicago” — “Stormy, husky brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders.” Still, he shares this understatement with another Chicago-area native, Ernest Hemingway.
Tim Gilmore – Folio Weekly
Johnny’s comparative analysis of his own dreamy storm fears, and the manufactured fear he sees around him, is illuminating reading. He takes a dive into the unconscious to suss out a deep, inherently human fear from one that is implanted in people by others.
Joshua Barton – Broken Pencil
Irreverent and a bit strange – Xerography Debt.
…a must read for any Floridian. – Dakota Boyer, author, Edge of Stardust.
About Johnny Masiulewicz
Johnny Masiulewicz is the author of two poetry collections: Keywords: a dada experiment (HT Press) and Professional Cemetery (The Puddin’head Press). His work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, websites, and anthologies, including: Curbside Review, The Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, Nerve Cowboy, DeadPaper, and The Alembic. A native Chicagoan, he now lives and works in St. Johns, Florida.
Issue #1: the first apartment
Published by The Happy Tapir Press
Stapled Chapbook, 35 pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2016
$3.00
After graduating from Northwestern U., the Happy Tapir moves into a studio apartment in Chicago’s artsy Lakeview neighborhood. Jinx both high and low soon ensue, instigated at any given time by, amongst scores of other things that go along with a first apartment in an artsy neighborhood, a starfish-shaped blind lady, soft-core biker magazines, and one failed altruistic butter-shopping incident.
Issue #2: Wenatchee, WA (A Summer of Five Almost Deaths)
Published by The Happy Tapir Press
Stapled Chapbook, 40 pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2017
$3.00
The Happy Tapir travels cross-country to spend a summer with a high school friend working the fruit orchards in the Apple Capital of the World. Perzinate for him, and incarnate via artesian quicksand, a hungry wolf, and a few other native features, it soon becomes the Near Fatal Happenstance Capital of his lucky life.
Issue #3: A Cup of Holiday Fear
Published by The Happy Tapir Press
Stapled Chapbook, 35 pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2017
$3.00
Shortly after relocating to the heart of America’s Hurricane Zone after being born and raised at the apex of America’s Tornado Alley, the Happy Tapir see first-hand how his adopted hometown of Jacksonville ghoulishly celebrates the start of Hurricane Season as if it were a holiday. He still hasn’t bought a generator.
Issue #4: Tom Cruise & Jim Harbaugh Had Sex in my Second Apartment
Published by The Happy Tapir Press
Stapled Chapbook, 38 pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2018
$3.00
80s VHS porn and seeing David Mamet are the least of things that shape the Happy Tapir’s life when he moves south to the Rush Street neighborhood, ground zero of Chicago’s bawdy party scene. There was also that thing with the two titular famous guys, and a unique detente with the cohabitant vermin.
Issue #5: Unstuck In [4/4] Time
Published by The Happy Tapir Press
Stapled Chapbook, 44 pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2019
$3.00
Equal parts memoir, Top-40 radio, and skipping erratically through the passage that wave-particle duality allows all wrapped in a Kurt Vonnegut meta-literary convention, this issue find the Happy Tapir sporadically and suddenly plucked from the present to be dropped at various points along his personal space-time continuum. One note of incidental mall-music could suddenly find him in a minimart parking lot during the New Wave-ian late 1980s.
Issue #6: To Bake at The Drake
Published by The Happy Tapir Press
Stapled Chapbook, ? pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2016
Coming soon!