I recently had the pleasure of attending Stephen van Dyck's thesis reading.

"A book-length conceptual writing project called "People I Met from the Internet," a detraumatizing, horizontalizing, decriticalizing of memories, spaces and otherness to sameness/"homoness."

In anecdotal footnotes, Stephen presented a coming out story similar to Joe Brainard's I Remember. The emergent list format, as popularized by the 25 Things, is a style whose parallel structures grants a certain equality to each phrase. The teen tryst in a New Mexico cave is aligned with each encounter thereafter, each with a story, each with the same detached yet ironic delivery.

I was intrigued by the way the text bloomed when read aloud. Having encountered the text in a previous draft, the horizontal legal paper and tiny font was a bit daunting. However, when read selections, the room exploded.

The introduction was by Matias Viegener, recently featured in Vice for Fallen Fruit.