Over the past ten years, the vast majority of my publishing practice has emerged in collaboration with students in the classroom. The publication of the resulting books has most often taken place beneath the radar of both academic institutions and traditional literary spheres. Circulating in hyperlocalized contexts (the classes I have taught) and primarily written with the learning outcomes of their writers (my students) in mind, these books challenge the “making public” of publishing. Ranging from teaching assignments in grad school at University of Pennsylvania (Penn) to a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University (NU) and into my current position at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the books assembled here chart a decade of pedagogical work. In the attached essay, I briefly annotate some key works, assignments, and publishing configurations from this period with an aim to shade the greys of this library into a legible pattern. Like the “grey literatures” that elude easy classification in archival systems, this print-on-demand collection—a “grey library”—has proven difficult to pin down. The grey library resists recognizable categories of publishing, just as it affords creative play beyond the genre expectations and formal conceptions of both literary and scholarly books. These books feature wild compilations and unwieldy experiments, serving as records of improvisation and documents of sites of learning. Collections of blank pages mingle with thirty-minute book sprints. Scanners become authors and collective identities mesh in anonymous and pseudonymous creative play. The grading associated with these projects is always non-qualitative: the grey library resists evaluation. Unlike academic publishing, a dramatic failure is far more illuminating than the slight improvement of a mild intervention. Teaching the codex as a form alongside aesthetic and poetic tactics, these books index conversations extruded from their pages.
“Grey Libraries: Publishing as Pedagogy.” Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post- Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism, ed. Andreas Bülhoff and Annette Gilbert. Leipzig, Germany: Spector Books, 2024. |
Published as part of the APOD.LI collection Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism, edited with text by Andreas Bülhoff & Annette Gilbert. For many examples drawn from my work and courses, see: https://apod.li/
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