Monster

Please send me a letter or postcard exploring a human-monster combination, or the urge for one, or the fear of one. This may be something that troubles, obsesses, mesmerizes or confuses you. It may be real or unreal. It may be you or not you. It may be something you yearn for or run from. Consider in particular the body (your body?) and its transformative potential, its monstrous strangeness, its uncanny union with the world around us. Imagine the fiendish conjoining of human and poodle, for example, or the more prosaic melding of the hand with its tools. Imagine what you hate and make it a monster. Imagine what you love and make it a monster.

Write only to me.

For the craft element, consider punctuation. Mess with it!

Punctuation is so curious - it is visible but also invisible! As Jennifer Brody writes in Punctuation: Art Politics and Play, punctuation "is neither speech nor writing; art nor craft; sound nor silence." Weird, right, when you think about it?

Some examples: Susan Steinberg opens her short story "Cowgirl" with a semi-colon, and just keeps going from there! Alice Notley's amazing "The Descent of Alette" is a feminist epic set underground on subway cars and she uses quotations marks, again, all the way through the piece. What do they mean??? And Ander Monson goes crazy with typographical marks in "I Have Been Thinking About Snow" - the essay looks like snow. (I have attached the first pages of Alette and Snow here; they are both amazing pieces.) So, what is monstrous punctuation? Show me!

And what about these exclamation marks?!?! They're feminist. Really .