“For A Moment” is the written companion to my studio thesis project, “Unfamiliar.” It’s a three-part narrative in computational writing, prose, and poetry. I started by meticulously poring through my decade-plus archive of little black notebooks that I carry everywhere – full of everything from sketches to quotes to work notes to grocery lists and little messages to and from my partner.

I pulled out anything that seemed relevant, then took that body of text and did three things: first, I wrote a small piece about each snippet – where I was, what I was thinking, what was happening in my life when I wrote down that thing. Then, I wrote custom software to deconstruct that writing into progressively illegible chunks: first sentences, then linguistic snippets like noun or verb phrases, then words, then parts of words, down to individual letters. I used that for the first section of the book, in reverse – as you move through, you progress from a jumble of letters through words into coherent sentences, finally arriving at the fully-legible original.

Lastly, I used the original snippets to create a series of assemblage poems – in a sense, the opposite of what I wrote the software to do. Where the software parsed apart my writing into machine-readable but nonsensical chunks, the poetry was a way to drill into the memories themselves and draw out a less cerebral, more intuitive meaning or truth.

As a whole, the book charts the process of sifting out meaning from the chaos of lived experience. The “shape” of the text begins with nothingness, coalesces into long-form narrative descriptions, then tapers off into emptiness and quietude at the end.

An interactive web version is in the works, but for now, check out the pdf version below.