Thanks to Counterpath – an incredibly productive and innovative literary publisher and arts venue in Denver – we are looking for work in writing, performance, film, and sound that directly responds to or reads Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell, co-edited by Derek Beaulieu and myself. Our introduction to the collection, “Media Studies and Writing Surfaces,” is posted here. The Call for Work is below – please submit and/or pass this on to relevant friends, colleagues, and students.

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Counterpath is seeking work in writing, performance, film, and sound that directly responds to or reads Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell (2012, Wilfred Laurier University Press).

John Riddell’s work embraces game play, unreadability and illegibility, procedural work, non-representational narrative, photocopy degeneration, collage, handwritten texts, and gestural work. His self-aware and meta-textual short fiction challenges the limits of machine-based composition and his reception as a media-based poet.

Riddell is best known for “H” and “Pope Leo, El ELoPE,” a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol, but his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions. In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present “Pope Leo, El ELoPE” and many other works in a collection that showcases Riddell’s remarkable mix of largely typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings.

Riddell’s oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently garnered interest among poets and critics engaged in media studies (especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing. As media studies increasingly turns to “media archaeology” and the reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of composition (typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for renewed appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and scholars.

Counterpath will host an evening of approximately 5 performances of 10-15 minutes each on December 14, 2013, at 7p.m. Please send a proposal of not more than 250 words to Counterpath program coordinator Oren Silverman (os@counterpathpress.org) by October 31, 2013. Counterpath is a literary publisher and arts venue in Denver, Colorado. For more information please visit counterpathpress.org.