Birkensnake 6

Birkensnake 6 was edited by seven pairs of strangers, who made seven different versions. None of the editors knew one another before the project began. This version was edited by Diana George and Hedy Zimra. Friedrich Kerksieck of Small Fires Press designed and made the print edition of this version. The electronic editions were made by Brian Conn.

Thanks to David Auerbach, Matt Briggs, Martin Browning, Brian Conn, Friedrich Kerksieck, R.Y. King, Rebecca ____, Michael Reagan, Joanna Ruocco, Matthew Stadler, Maged Zaher.

From an evolutionary point of view, our ability to continue to interact with people after they die is something of a mystery, but that habit has surely given us our gift for engaging with people who never cross into our physical space. The right analogy for fictional reasoning is not somebody who dips in and out of our presence... The right analogy is to somebody who we know is gone forever but with whom we still feel connected.
 — Blakey Vermeule.

Albertine, one might object, was only a character in a novel, not a real person. But she was also a real person — she was Alfred Agostinelli — and so the pain here is real pain. But the name Agostinelli does not designate the person in pain, whom we can only know as the fictional, and anonymous, Albertine. And the truthfulness of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, its lesson, is this: that there is something fictional about all people, something susceptible to anonymity, in the vanishing space beyond generality where pure interiority (like the narrator’s) and pure exteriority (like his grandmother’s, Albertine’s, death’s) coincide; and that this fictionality requires our deepest attentiveness, even if it perpetually defeats our acknowledgment.
 — William Flesch.

I would love to co-edit Birkensnake 6. For the past 11 months, I have lived in Providence. I spent five years in Asia before coming here. My syntax is still off. I am obsessed with strangers and spying.

Pair me up. Let’s see what happens.
 — Hedy Zimra