This is the story of riot grrrl montreal how i lived it and how it started to the best of my recollection.

While i hate to be pegged as leaders, the idea to start rgm was our own, us being me and anne. We met through a mutual friend at a local suburban punk show in vaudreuil (20-30 minutes west of montreal) in 1997. We bonded over the fact that we were both girls who played music and we had a common interest in girl bands and feminism. A year and a half later, we had a conversation which found us stumbling upon the concept of riot grrrl and decided that montreal needed a chapter. But how did you start a riot grrrl chapter? We became web nerds. I failed my computer class at school learning html and working on the rgm website instead of doing assignments. We elaborated our plans. Having contacted various riot grrrl chapters around the continent we got a general idea of things 2 kids could do to get the ball rolling. A zine, postering and finding some goddamn girl bands to play an all-girl show. We made our first flyer : riot grrrl montreal, for the creation of bands and zines. We always kept them in our jacket pockets but i don't believe we gave a single one away... taped one at the entrance of montreal's anarchist bookstore and a girl named zoë gave us a shout.

We had our first sort of meeting and it was really awkward as meeting strangers always is. We had no idea what to do and decided to wait till there were more people. Another girl called and we had a few meetings at corporate coffee shops and started constructing plans and more elaborate posters. We left flyers in the girls' bathroom during a ninety nine show at jailhouse in june and bloodsisters called us offering support, which was truly cool. we submitted stuff for their zine and they gave us advice on how to start ours; like set a deadline! It works much better! But that summer anne and i got full time jobs and we had a short hiatus. I moved away from vaudreuil and into town and joined the alternative bookshop collective, and that's when things got a lot easier. More and more people were emailing us with interest to participate and we now had an anonymous mailing address and a private place to meet which made things so much more comfortable. Local girls seemed to keep stumbling upon our webpage and a couple of people responded to the things we had written in the bloodsisters zine. We met an all girl band called beauty dropout. Amber who came to meetings had a band and all they needed was a drummer. Anne's band the frenetics played a show with the generatorz and manon pleaded her to join her all girl side project the nags. A show was underway. We had meetings with 12 people. We had meetings that felt so inspiring they lasted 5 hours. We set a deadline for zine submissions and they were coming in.

February 26 2000 was the date of the first riot grrrl show at jailhouse; montreal venue with a 300 person capacity, the show sold out. Every band was amazing, and it felt so good to be able to pay everyone and put out the zine without using any of our own money.

We took a short break and decided to celebrate the quieter music we put out by holding an acoustic show in may at a shiny club called zone. The turnout was small as it was not only Sunday but mothers day (bad move!) but fun and good nevertheless. We kept having meetings which felt like get-togethers between friends more than anything else... it seemed sort of wrong but when i stopped to think about it we really had come a long way from the awkward meetings among strangers... being comfortable at meetings was something we strived for, it just seemed that now that we had put out a zine and a successful show, what were we to do?

The perfect kick came with a trip to ladyfest. Seing all those bands and all those kids you never knew existed in a tiny tiny town where it all started, going to workshops and watching performance art, dance parties at the midnight sun, not showering for 10 days straight and sleeping outside in a stolen sleeping bag for the love of it all. Saying we came back inspired is an understatement. We had regular meetings again and more people were joing us every time. More importantly, rgm became this great networking tool to meeting local and out of town people who were doing cool things. We started out as 2 suburban girls alienated from a drunk punk scene we didn't feel a part of because of gender and differing interests to a huge bunch of faces all familiar to eachother, and constantly opening up to new things. Trading zines and patches and addresses and telling out of town people where to go when visiting montreal. So many people wrote notes saying i really respect what you're doing and it made us feel so good. We designed stickers and started compiling issue #2 of our zine and we met a couple of new girl bands so we put on another show in april of 2001 at cafe chaos, which is a little bit smaller then jailhouse; that show also sold out.

It's october 2001 now, and we haven't done much in a long time for so many reasons... i'm still doing a lot of mailings out of my bedroom but that's about it. I think back on how active we once were and things seem pretty dead at the moment which we all think is sad but i don't feel like we are totally gone because we are all friends. In a sense i feel like we sort of accomplished what we set out to do... we met some girl bands and pushed them to play shows and now they do. We networked with tons of people and it's not over. Most of us are working on personal projects like zines and bands, records and postering and various forms of art, and i didn't see many of these things happening when we first started nearly 3 years ago.

I remember reading similar riot grrrl chapter stories when we were starting out and feeling saddened, it seemed no one was really active, it seemed that everyone had all these projects that were never realised, but until you go out and actually do it (especially trying to organize within a big city) you don't really understand the dynamics involved in working within an open group like this... there were many times that since i had the key to our meeting space i felt like almighty leader and i really disliked that. A lot of people came to one meeting and never spoke a word, because they had no ideas, or didn't want to upset plans already established, or probably felt uncomfortable within a group of strangers just like we had when we started... when you have regular meetings for two years and all you're doing is trying to think up projects things become redundant, and i burned out. We always had conversations on how to expand to a world less punk, and while i respect that and think it's a wonderful initiative, i don't really know how to do that... so if anyone reading this wants to take it on- if anyone wants to organize a feminist hip hop show, if anyone really wants to do the video zine that was talked about at the last meeting, if anyone wants to have dance parties or poster the street or take over a radio station- ANYFUCKINGTHING, contact me and i have a long list of people who are or who at least were at one time interested in riot grrrl and i really really wanna see things keep happening, so don't let the life of our chapter rest on my shoulders please... keep it alive.

-Victoria, the formerly blonde one.