While bookstores are lined with the memoirs of the easily famous--from baseball players to high-rolling prostitutes--the more interesting personal revelations sneak up through the underground, within the pages of handmade or carefully printed zines, where the cut-and-paste culture of DIY publications creates the illusion of breaking down the author/reader relationship... if only until you get to the last page. Thanks to the combination of zine culture and the Internet, there are now more tell-alls than people who care to listen--but a writer like Al Burian is a quick cult hero in the genre, making the art of printed storytelling as intimate and interesting as a face-to-face conversation.

Burian, a sharp-witted 31-year-old punk who grew up on Iron Maiden (and jokes that, in the world of mood lighting, he has two settings: "naked light bulb and total darkness"), offers selected entry into his life through Burn Collector. Since the mid-'90s, he has released a dozen issues of this zine as well as a book, also titled Burn Collector, that complies the first nine installments in the series. Each issue offers a different keyhole view into a specific time in Burian's life--from his depressed, drunken preteen years in Italy during his parents' divorce, to his Greyhound adventures with convicts and runaways, to undermining the temp system and detailing relationships that break off only to start again with the help of alcohol and Halloween costumes.

The name Burn Collector comes from the idea of being a pack rat for unpleasant experiences, Burian tells me by phone on the weekend before he leaves to tour as the bassist for Milemarker, one of his many artistic alter egos. He explains his zine's moniker: "It's the idea that you're taking bad experiences that you'd ordinarily just tune out, and becoming like a wine taster for them, a connoisseur of the way it makes you feel. It's about the conceptual burn."

Along with that burn comes the sting from Burian's dry sense of humor, which works to balance out his starker revelations with humble, self-depreciating passages.

Burian started Burn Collector out of necessity--broke and bored during a couch-surfing stay in New York, he started writing, copying, and distributing his own work. "I was inspired by the idea that I could just make something and get it to people directly and they would read it--rather than try to write for a magazine or submit something somewhere, the classic 'papering your bathroom with rejection letters' sort of scenario."

The instant response can also be a little rattling for Burian, as he's become almost like a one-way mirror, where strangers can see into his world but it's impossible for him to see back into all of theirs. "It's almost sort of nerve-racking at this point, because [the response] is instant and very intense and sincere... it's often pretty weird. I was at a hardcore punk fest recently and I had this realization, standing in this big, anonymous crowd, that I could probably just walk around and find someone pretty easily to talk about pretty intimate details of my life with--and they would be totally up on [my life], while I wouldn't know anything about them."

Between Burn Collector and Burian's regular column in the sociopolitical magazine Punk Planet, he is constantly exposing his personal thoughts to people, blurring the lines between his living reality and the one he commits to print. "My gears are always engaged, and as everything happens I'm kind of writing it in my head, figuring out how I'm going to put a spin on it.... And that's kind of weird, because then you start being like, okay, well, I've got that column due on the 14th and I'm planning on going to Knoxville on the 10th, so I'll just keep my eyes open for something to happen to me there that I can write about. I've become a lot more self-conscious because of it, and also because of realizing that people are actually going to read it. It's like, when do you actually live your life in between [writing]?"

Burian says he finds some solace in writing about the more mundane details of life, as opposed to constantly seeking new adventure. "I find myself writing more and more about everyday kinds of things," he says. "I don't want to go out and do something crazy just so I can write about it. But one thing that's sort of strange is that now I find people will try to do things around me or will try to tell me some crazy story or get me involved in some crazy thing 'cause they're like, 'I want to be in your zine.' That's your A-plus ticket for not getting in."

While those trying out for parts in Burian's stories don't make the cut, Burian's friends almost always do--a complicated situation for a writer committed to reality. "The new Burn Collector is about Chicago, and it's strange being in Chicago and actually talking about people that I'm hanging out with and telling these anecdotes. I can run into people who are like, man, I just read that, that's not how that happened. That's kind of strange for me," he admits.

Burian says he'd rather deal with the occasional confrontation with his friends, though, than switch over to writing fiction. "Burn Collector 11 started to be more fictional and I really hated it," he says. "I don't think of myself as a fiction writer, I think of myself more as a reporter. Unless it's gonna compromise somebody in some way or really embarrass somebody, it's like, why change things? Reality's already interesting enough."