Photos courtesy of Grilled Cheese

Catherine Ouellet-Cummings was working from her old home’s dimly lit basement, scrolling on Facebook, when she saw her friend liked a Belgian kids’ magazine’s page. It was called Cuistax, which published in Dutch and French—two of Belgium’s official languages. She immediately informed her husband and work partner, Julien Boisseau, about the Belgian zine.

Cuistax used risograph printing—an eco-friendly, stencil-based printing method popularized in the 1980s as a cost-effective way of printing. A year before discovering Cuistax, the couple started experimenting with risograph printing; they’d just bought their first machine for $50. As co-founders of L’abricot, a Montreal-based multidisciplinary creative studio, Ouellet-Cummings and Boisseau loved what Cuistax was doing and contacted them to exchange information: “We didn’t have a big plan. We just wanted to have some fun, work with friends, and make something for kids.”

An hour after learning about Cuistax, Ouellet-Cummings posted on L’abricot’s Facebook page: “Ça, c’est tellement notre genre de projet! Quelqu’un est game d’en partir un à Montréal?” (That’s totally our kind of project! Anyone up for starting one in Montreal?) Just a few months later, in June 2014, the couple published their first issue of Grilled Cheese—a Canadian bilingual kids’ magazine that publishes two issues for different age ranges triannually. At first, they planned for it to be a zine, but people kept asking for subscriptions, so they decided to publish more regularly.

They’ve had help from their son, Henri Boisseau-Ouellet—who was 5 years old at the time—through his feedback and ideas. “He came with us to the first meeting we held with the person who started the project with us. She was there with her son as well. So they gave input from the very beginning,” says Ouellet-Cummings. Grilled Cheese has become part of their family life. “It’s really hard to trace the line where our work starts and ends, and where our family starts and ends. So it’s all kind of mixed up together in a really fun way.”

With a roster of freelance writers with interest or experience in children’s literature, illustrators, proofreaders, and translators, each issue contains a short story, cutout projects, small games, and an “interview” with an animal. Grilled Cheese’s recent issues—Issue 26 for ages 2-4 and Issue 35 for ages 5-ten—focus on the theme of opposites, only utilizing blue and green in its pages and covers and reimagining classic games, such as Snakes and Ladders.

For Ouellet-Cummings and Boisseau, picking out the next theme is done through a vibe check: “We’ve been working with the same small sheet of paper the past 10 years, and whenever we get an idea for a theme, we just write it down, and we go through our list.”

Boisseau-Ouellet, who is now 17, remains involved with the production of Grilled Cheese. From writing “interviews” with animals to creating his own zines, he writes in an email interview that he “doesn’t remember a life” without the magazine. “Grilled Cheese gave me my first work experiences, and I learned a lot of things. I am always happy when I get to write for the magazine and I’m proud to show them to the people I care about.” Boisseau-Ouellet describes his own zines—such as Très doux fanzine—as “soft and peaceful,” using risograph printing that emulates the same texture, vibrant colours, and playful visual feel seen in Grilled Cheese.

With Grilled Cheese going on 12 years now, Ouellet-Cummings hopes that its readers mainly have fun, and that the magazines bring families joy as they read together for years to come.