KATE BROWN – VERBLIST FROM SARA PARETSKY EXCERPT P.3

KATE BROWN

To come

To make

To run

To scream

To hurl

To lunge

To grab

To pry

To stick

To roar

To fling

To fire

To spray

To break

To hurl

KATE BROWN – VERBLIST FROM SARA PARETSKY EXCERPT P.2

KATE BROWN

To fall

To fire

To begin

To crack

To slither

To grasp

To twist

To flop

To bounce

To float

To manage

To grasp

To use

To pull

To brace

To heave

To swing

To fire

To shove

To turn

To steer

To shrink

To slosh

To bang

To carry

To knock

To grab

To fall

To manage

To straddle

To connect

To go

To rise

To own

To turn

To see

To come

KATE BROWN – VERBLIST FROM SARA PARETSKY EXCERPT P.1

KATE BROWN

To duck

To begin

To run

To shout

To shout

To scream

To crash

To risk

To turn

To prickle

To expect

To step

To pull

To swerve

To crash

To flail

To propel

To appear

To stop

To fall forward

To pull

To churn

To try

To stand

To begin

To slide

To crack

To break

To stretch

To manage

To slide

To splinter

To see

To run

To grab

THE MATERIALITY OF WORDS – AN UN-MANIFESTO

ANDREA ROBINSON

Words come easily. Flow. Words flow and dip and swim and swing. Words dance in the air cold air, air currents on wings they fly out like a swallow in a Russian proverb. Words disguise words hide in the currents, words hide in language. Words and language become conflated; are not the same.

What happens to words when we share them? We mark the words to our steps to our breath to our heartbeats; our breath and our bodies take on the words, are the shape of the words. We speak in shared footsteps, we speak and we do not understand what we are saying even when we have met the words before. We take the words that once belonged to other mouths. We take them and we let them inhabit our mouths, travel down and settle in guts. We spit them, sing them, whisper.

Use these words to tell, to teach, to bind. Use them anyway we want, they still hold their own meaning and keep it hidden. Take a word, take a phrase, hear it said, repeat it, roll each sound around your teeth and across your tongue. Take the words and try them out like a three year old building a first vocabulary. Listen as they change and take on new meanings.

But these are the words that are spoken, read out loud, sung. And these, these are the words that are written once as they flow from my unedited thoughts to my hand to the pen to the page. And which stage of this process is the writing, the act of writing or is it all a moment a section of thought an unexpurgated free fall that has no context other than to land in symbols on a white page and become a system – part of a system – that is learned, given and received. What if a character enters this set of symbols – a protagonist or antagonist, an actor in the pattern of the signs and sines and symbols – are they absent receiver, the present do-er, distant. Are they the flow or in the flow? What if the actor is Austin, telling me to read it again, telling me not How To Do Things With Words but How Words Do Things To Me?

What if it is Acker telling me I read her wrong, placed too much imagined meaning on what were only other people’s words, repurposed. What if there is no materiality other than this borrowed pen and the blank page. And the coffee cup drained of coffee and my notes of all the words we’ve read and talked about so far. And what if I am the character and this isn’t a story and my character is struggling to understand because this language only looks like their own language and it becomes increasingly opaque as it is written (and typed up and rewritten) and sometimes the only reason for the action of writing the words is to fill the blank page and when it is written and if it is typed then it is no longer about the blank page and the actuality of it, the material ink on the page becomes the original act, (the art?) and the transcription, the rewritten, this is the re-action, the next action, the changing meaning, the version, the punctuation, the reading back for sense and spelling, the edit (but not the final edit).