Writing

The writing practice treats found text — product warning labels, transcribed voice recordings, and other discarded language — as raw material for finished literary work. Each piece receives its own atmospheric design, derived from the register of the specific writing. 34 pieces locked and ready, 19 needing one shaping pass, across five categories and several hundred pages of source material.

34 locked pieces · 5 registers · Wonderful Garbage methodology
Domestic Warmth
Careful, Children
The label said careful and we took it personally. Every surface in the house a warning we chose to ignore with grace and bare feet on the kitchen tile.
Noir Chanson
What's on Blend
Tuned in late. The frequency was already carrying something we recognized from a kitchen we used to know. Reception came and went like weather.
Sound Writing
Tier Heart Wetness
A musicological listening piece. Human and other natures attending to what the water does when nobody is performing for it.
Domestic Warmth
Hand Me the Matches
Sleep comes dropping slow now in these our later years. The season is over and we together make the best of what we been given. Somewhere between purgatory of pure goodness and heavenly so grateful for this luck.
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Noir Chanson & Sound Writing
Noir Chanson
The Flour & the Fuse
All purpose. Bleached or unbleached. The choice was never about baking and we both knew it from the start. Something detonates quietly in flour dust.
Sound Writing
Sleep Architecture
The hours between two and four belong to a country neither of us has a passport to. We go there anyway, nightly, without luggage.
Noir Chanson
Balcony Season
From up here the street sounds rearrange themselves into something we could almost sing to. Almost. The railing is warm from a day of sun we missed.

The writing practice does not begin with an idea. It begins with a label, a recording, a scrap of language someone else discarded. The practice begins where attention ends.

— from the methodology

Domestic Warmth
Porch Doctrine
The screen door theology of letting things in and keeping things out at the same time. An American paradox built into every hinge.
Process Record
Voice Note: Summit Ave
Walking east. The rhythm came from the sidewalk cracks, not the thought. Transcription reveals cadence that the mouth already knew.
Domestic Warmth
Carlos at the Gate
He sits at the gate with the patience of someone who has never been betrayed. The latch is easy. He could leave at any moment. He stays.
Sound Writing
Tier Heart Wetness
Human and other natures. A musicological listening piece attending to what the water does when nobody is performing for it. The wetness is the witness.
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Process & Raw Material
Raw Material
Label Archive: Cleaning Products
Forty-seven warning labels collected from under the kitchen sink. Each one a small sermon about consequences. None of them about cleanliness.
Process Record
Shaping Notes: Matches
The drawer that stays closed is doing the most work in the piece. Three drafts before the closing line found the opening. Notes on structure.
Raw Material
Transcription Batch: February Walks
Fourteen voice recordings from the same route. The mouth finds its rhythm before the mind catches up. Raw transcriptions, uncorrected.
Noir Chanson
Cigarette Weather
The kind of day that makes former smokers remember their hands had something to do. A frequency in the air. An old habit of listening.
Domestic Warmth
Basement Frequency
The luxurious bunker. Down here the furnace hums a note we've tuned our marriage to. Two chairs, one remote, a kingdom.
Sound Writing
Waterfall Residue
What the mist leaves on your face is not water. It is the memory of falling from a height and surviving the landing. Minnehaha, after rain.

Showing 18 of 34 locked pieces · Scroll continues or filter by register