Putting together this issue was an extended meditation on texts—their origins, their strange and wonderful trajectories, the forms they can assume, and the questions they are capable of hatching in individual readers as well as within diverse communities of text/art production.

When I began this project I held close the question: When does the act of writing become the act of reading (and vice versa)? As a way to engage with this question as well as other questions which erupt from within this question, I sought to place some of the texts in this issue in proximity with their processes—thus the brief, informal interviews with some of the authors throughout. I also wanted these texts/interviews to co-exist with other conversations about the artifact-nature of texts—thus my interview with publisher Matthew Stadler as well as the text/image pieces that appear in this issue.

My hope was to gather a diverse range of intelligences and see what happened when the edges of these multiple intelligences touched.

I would like to thank the generosity of the writers and artists who participated in this issue of Tarpaulin Sky, as well as Tarpaulin Sky’s founder and editor, Christian Peet.

Selah Saterstrom

Author of The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press, 2004) and The Meat & Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press, forthcoming fall 2007).