Strange Machinery
Strange Machinery considers contemporary US life, labor, and land use in terms of what's stuck. In the face of political blockage, sunk infrastructure, and imaginative dead-ends, how do you think about the possibilities of collective-minded action and change? Part of my answer involves a deeply place-based mapping of the historical forces that put us here. The other part involves paying attention to the everyday acts of research, protest, and art-making people mount in response. Set in and around the Tucson desert in the early Trump years, the book comes together in a scrappy, lyric collage of conversations with friends, lovers, strangers, theories, plants, animals, and objects. It's part crisis memoir, part experimental field guide, part crowd-sourced handbook for thinking about what to do when it feels like there's nothing you can do.
Infinite Text Collective
The Infinite Text Collective is a vibrant space for critical-creative writing. Beyond the bounds of institutional pressures and disciplinary constraint, against the depredations of late capitalism, my co-founder Paige Sweet and I are exploring how writing experimentation might help nourish our lived-in creative and ethical praxes. Our sense of purpose and pedagogy grows out of a 15 year friendship built on shared writing and ongoing conversation. We have always talked about whatever was currently lighting up our brains: the supersonic dimensions of Clarice Lispector’s work, quantum computing as a metaphor for collective processing, or any number of other concerns about relationships, politics, and how to embody our convictions. These conversations weren’t academic or aimed at professional advance; they sought inspiration and solace and a deep, playful camaraderie premised on questioning—on experimentation—as a way of life. This is the spirit of collaboration Paige and I hope to cultivate. We launched our first class, Autotheory as Practice, in February 2022, where our theories of self and place mingled and were refined alongside the theories of those who joined us. One year later, we have added workshops and project consultation to what we do. Our name, the Infinite Text Collective, reflects our expanded offerings and is inspired by one participant’s estimation of our class spaces: a loving community pursuing the pleasures of language and the elaboration of infinite texts.