Non-fiction can take any form

Osmosis press pitches themselves squarely where I’ve been aiming to end up. I’ve never known how to describe this, and I’m not sure a long description is useful in most circumstances, but I love this descriptor, especially the last line about nonfiction.

Osmosis Press was established with an aim to muddy the boundaries between categorisations of contemporary writing practice. We publish work that resists the definition of poetry, novel, short story, non-fiction, memoir, and everything in-between. We publish poetry that does not map onto the expectations of what poetry can be. We publish fiction that reconsiders the possibilities of prose – or resists prose entirely. We believe non-fiction can take any form.

I don’t believe in poetry

When you start writing in Twine what comes out seems like poetry and it is easy to fall into a belief that you are writing poetry.

Maybe you are, but I don’t believe that there is a separating line between poetry and all other forms of text.

In fact, I don’t believe there is or should be a dividing line between any forms or genre of writing.

It is all the production of a text. The aim should be to write and merge and erase and edit until you have a palimpstext containing the traces of all the texts that preceded it, all the texts that exist, all the texts that have ever been or can ever been.

Of course, maybe this is a poem or an essay or a short-story of a news article, but they all become the same, otherwise we get nowhere. Tam Lin’s 11 Minute Painting uses the aesthetic of a desktop presentation combined with automated speech and data visualisations to create a hybrid text that ‘speaks in the name of a poem and the form of a slide show’.