Brandon Wilner ……… writing

For the great Liberated Texts, I wrote about Gloria Naylor's 1996, a semi-fictional work about her experience of being harassed by what she believed was the NSA. It upended her relationships in the publishing industry, was ignored by most media, and wound up as her final book. In this review, I explore why the work brought the celebrated novelist's career to a halt.

i made a second contribution to the believer's distancing series, this time writing about don pullen's evidence of things unseen, my brother's and my nascent effort to memorialize pullen in the hometown we share with him, and understanding contemporary americanness as a process of learning to settle for less.

i contributed to daniel levin becker's quarantine-themed column, distancing, in the believer, which he describes as "A HOMEBOUND REGISTRY OF OTHER PLACES AND TIMES AND THE ALBUMS THAT TAKE US THERE." i wrote about my experience quarantining in florida while listening to federico mompou's complete piano works, the act of staring at the ocean, and the difficulty of contemplating personal and general history at the same time.

two pieces of mine, mirror bookmark and complete works, will be anthologized in the 2020 digital edition of wesleyan university press' bax 2020, guest-edited by carmen maria machado and joyelle mcsweeney. they'll be featured alongside works by anne boyer, jia tolentino, john yau, alice notley, and more.

i had a conversation about mirror bookmark with my friend daniel levin becker. in it we discuss the use of mirrors in the creation of palindromic phrases, and try to discern whether the object has any literary merit.

i helped my friend the artist travess smalley to name the works in his second solo exhibition at foxy production. these began as plant-like ink drawings that were then scanned and photographed, processed in photoshop, and printed. together we devised a system of folk-like nomenclature for each specimen.

i designed mirror bookmark for areaware. though it's a three-dimensional object that's nothing more than a stainless steel mirror, i consider it a writing tool. it's designed to reflect the text of the page it saves, generating an unlimited amount of (sensical and nonsensical) palindromic phrases.

willy smart and i contributed a conversation about our record label fake music to the excellent are.na blog. we talk about authenticity and fakeness, how the label seeks to preserve the latter, and a recent event where the authenticity of fake music itself was called into question.

montreal's spacecraft press published my complete works, which are an update on those of bpnichol. the pdf version of this work is available here

i attended the second summer forum residency in joshua tree in 2014. the journal dilettante vol. 2 came out the following year. i contributed a series of rules entitled "clear suggestions on which you might build."

willy smart and i wrote a book of aphorisms together, and it was published by publication studio. my brother bryce wilner did the design.

acknowledgements is an attempt to work from personal gratitude toward more general expression. Employing a constraint in which the letters in loved ones' names serve as guide marks in the composition of aphorisms, the seeming truths generated encompass a wide range of topics including fashion, sexuality, politics, food, botanical observation, and more. The strictures determining this unlikely system of thought have provided a conflation of two voices, one capable of producing reflections that do not necessarily correspond to what either author thinks on their own (and a book that is indistinguishable from its acknowledgements section).

in late 2014, willy smart and i started a reissue arm for his label fake music. it's since been an ongoing project in which we acknowledge our inability to release the works of silent and nonexistent music that fall into our purview. we periodically issue press releases that describe the music that we will not be reissuing.

i attended the first summer forum residency in new harmony, indiana in 2012. dilettante is the journal that came out of it, and i contributed a translation of the chilean urban planner guillermo fadda's essay "a version of place cemetery."