A Mouth Holds Many Things: On the Magic of Hybrid Writing

I am walking along a shoreline. A shoreline is a place, a geography, where two elements—water and sand—meet. We call this place of meeting a line, but it is also the continual erasing of line. How water writes, erases, rewrites. Its own delineation of: the encounter. The shape of how these two realms meet a constant Inconstant. Fluctuation of. Demarcation. Is it water’s tendency to- ward a constant inconstancy that insists on this snaking of lineage—this lineal snaking? Is it water the agent of erasure, even: self- erasure? Or is it the sand’s nature—of both yield and subsume— that refuses, resists, the holding of line? Resists inheritance of the notion line makes record? Surely we know sand is an unreliable canvas. Is ambiguity of canvas. A mutable, shift ing substance of page that does not wish to be page. Together sand and water conspire. Repeatedly evolving and eroding the writing of their own betweens— which is to say: what is a boundary? But a temporality of attempt. At holding anything. (All writing begins as boundary.) I am walking along a shoreline. Line that refuses lineal nature. I begin here, with this image and attempt to send text across the page evocative of the shape of water, because this is how the hybrid journey begins for me: a realization of the transmutability, the very tenuousness, of boundaries that separate, that supposedly demarcate realms otherwise as distinct as ocean and land. My own arrival into the realm of hybrid writing was, like this tracing of a shoreline, not a direct, not a fixed or predictable path. Here are the facts: I had written and published two books of fiction—the genre that had thus far identified me as a literary author; I had, since my early 20s, also been writing songs on the side; I had an undergraduate background, a naive once-ambition, in filmmaking. I was trying to write what I believed might be another novel, a long-form book. But, images wanted to invade, and a straightforward throughline, characters with character arcs, plot, all those conventional narrative devices, continued to evade me. […]

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