The Remix Project

by Robert Kloss

This will be a month of literary remixes.

The first seventeen days of December I will post “remixed” versions of stories and poems I solicited from various writers—works I cut apart, recast, disfigured, and redreamed into new shapes and horrors—while the last half of the month will find the tables turned, and many of those fine writers will abuse and dismember my story, “The Clown Show”.

I choose words like “abused” and “dismembered” carefully. A literary remix, to me, is both a collaboration and a conflict—a violence and a union between the words on the page and the words in my brain, between my scissors and tape and the pages printed before me.

It follows logically, then, that the idea of a remix also directly relates to the old conflict of authorship, although I’m not certain if a remix emphasizes or diminishes the author in favor of the text. I do know that I attempted to reshape every work I remixed into my “style” and I often worked hard to misunderstand the intentions or the meaning of the story I was remixing. In a way, I suppose, I wanted to be inspired by the wrong things.

Finally, I do know that credit will be given to all authors and re-mixers involved in this project. Occasionally, author biographies will be posted, as is common in our field. But I also know it would feel just as right to me if only the texts themselves were published, with no reference to which version came first or whose pen or laptop first allowed them to life.

And now, beginning tomorrow morning and continuing every day until the end of the month, we will have remixes.

posted by Robert Kloss