I am happy to close out my DS106 work this semester by making something completely analog but that is only made possible by the work that I completed as an open online student in UMW’s DS106 Digital Storytelling class.

The project is called “Stop Saying What It Is.”

BACKGROUND: 

When I was 21, I traveled to Vietnam and Japan for a few weeks each, my first trip abroad. I hadn’t been to Canada or Mexico–or further west than Pittsburgh–and the sensations were too much for me to process. I bought and kept a journal, but it didn’t make much sense to me, what I wrote. It wasn’t a diary–I’ve never been able to keep a daily or weekly record of my actions, have never been more than casually interested in the idea of keeping one–but I did make lists, lists of meals I ate, lists of shrines I visited, lists of strange or powerful moments that I didn’t want to forget right away. When I came back to the states, I signed up for a poetry class with James Brasfield at Penn State, and I wrote nothing but poetry for the next four years.

In 2007, I came to Ann Arbor to study fiction at the University of Michigan’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, and there I audited a prose poetry class co-taught by Keith Taylor and Elizabeth Gramm. I was a less than ideal student in the class, opinionated and recklessly critical. But whatever help or harm I was to other students, there were a few books that really impacted me, that I have re-read multiple times since the class, including Charles Simic’s “The World Doesn’t End,” Russell Edson’s “The Tunnel,” Keith Taylor’s “Life Science and Other Stories,” and Donald Barthelme’s “Forty Stories.”

A helpful timeline

Barthelme in particular became a guiding light for awhile as I read through his books, “Sixty Stories” and “Flying to America” and “Not-Knowing” and “Snow White.” I also read Tracy Daugherty’s excellent biography, “Hidden Man,” which helped me with some of DB’s difficult stories, especially ones that weren’t anthologized in either “Sixty Stories” or “Forty Stories.” The New Yorker Fiction Podcast episode where Chris Adrian discusses “The Indian Uprising” was also illuminating.

I wrote a few prose poems that semester for class, but nothing I was very invested in. I enjoyed reading the form more than I enjoyed using it, participating in it. And so I went back to my short stories.

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Graphic for SSWII #09, "Los Angeles"

PROJECT GENESIS AND DEFINITION:

I didn’t make a conscious decision to return to the work I’d done for Keith and Elizabeth’s class, and I didn’t plan out these poems as a final project for DS106. One day, I just started making one-sheet zines and printing them out.

At that time, certain things–a passage in a book, a hike, a conversation–would jog my memory, or get me to put two things together that I hadn’t thought to juxtapose and, before I lost them, I started hashing out these little meditations, fragmented monologues, whatever these weird things were that I was making. Some were responses to books that I was reading, some riffed off of popular culture (superheroes, cartoons, etc.). Some were more lyrical in their efforts to stop time, to make a particular moment stretch or sing.

Simultaneously with these Martian journal entries was a desire to make something visual to accompany each of the pieces, something that would augment or push against the prose poem (for lack of a better term) that I had written, something that would make it bigger, weirder, less flexible, more anchored. An entire book’s worth of stories like “At the Tolstoy Museum.” That’s what I wanted.

I used Gimp and Photoshop, deploying filters, chopping up pictures, grabbing visual elements and sticking them where they didn’t belong, smashing things together and apart until I got something that was interesting to me, and once I hit that bar, I moved on to the next thing. Generally, I spent about twenty minutes to half an hour on each piece.

Here is a slideshow of some of the graphics:

Each zine was made out of a single sheet of printer paper folded twice to make a little book. On the cover were the words “Stop Saying What It Is” on the left side and, at the bottom, the title of the poem.

Inside, on the left page, was the graphic. On the right page, the prose poem (or whatever). On the back cover was my twitter handle, @andessurvivor. That’s it.

I have made 32 issues so far. Only 14 can be distributed; some of them have people’s names whom I no longer know how to contact to get their permission, some are just too personal to share.

But those 14 are good to go. I have a few bookstores in San Francisco and Detroit that I’ll probably feel out, to see if they’ll carry them. But if you want one, you’ll have to contact me because these will never live online. Paper only. Punk rock, not New Wave. Vive la resistance.

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Whatever else happens, these things that I learned in UMW’s Digital Storytelling MOOC will be out there in the world, starting fights and causing trouble. Thanks for letting me leech and troll everybody. The time at the beep will be 6:16 #andscene