Plans

I have new fiction featured in The Collagist! The story, 'Plans', relates yet another wedding disaster excerpted from The Hitch: An Agamist Manifesto, my ongoing material novel (you can learn more about it here!). 

The Tyrant Bride

'The Tyrant Bride' is a letterpress printed pamphlet that is now available at Big Cartel. It's one book of ten in an ongoing wedding-themed material novel called The Hitch: An Agamist Manifesto. While the ten books are thematically and often narratively related, each contains its own visual and textural theme, and the prose shifts in genre, from fiction to experimental memoir to lifestyle magazine feature to dramatic script.

'The Tyrant Bride', subtitled 'As droplets hover above her like spots', is a theatrical short story in which a bridezilla-type figure recounts various nightmarish weddings that have haunted her. Her visions are told through text printed from metal type. The text is interspersed with a shifting configuration of spheres printed from photopolymer plates. To learn more about The Hitch, visit matt-runkle.com/thehitch.

Printing The Hitch at Kala

I'm beginning a three-month residency at Kala Art Institute to print one of the ten chapbooks that will eventually make up The Hitch—an ongoing wedding-themed material novel. The installment I'm printing at Kala, titled 'The Victim', will be letterpress printed from a combination of metal type, photopolymer plates, monoprints from a PVA-painted collograph, and a reduction linocut. 'The Victim' takes a more distanced point of view than the rest of the chapbooks, using a mythic tone as it looks at the shadow side of the bridezilla. There's more info about The Hitch here.

The Next Big Thing

I began studies at the University of Iowa Center for the book last August—around the same time, funny enough, that posts around here started tapering off. But now the talented Amanda Davidson has inspired me to resurrect this dormant blog to “self-interview” for The Next Big Thing series.

I’m choosing to talk about a project that’s just getting started—a wedding-themed novel in ten parts. But I want to take a minute to plug a couple other things. Brooklyn Arts Press will publish a collection of my short fiction this fall (the title is still in negotiation). And I’m now inking the last page of the third issue of my comic, RUNX TALES, so look for it in April.

Also stay tuned for my Next Big tag-ees for February 27: essayist and poet Lisa Wells and cartoonist (and my former collaborator!) Amanda Verwey. 

Here goes: 

What is the working title of the book? 
The Hitch: An Agamist Manifesto 

Where did the idea come from for the book? 
Fascination/torment. From being a guest and working as a caterer at weddings. 

What genre does your book fall under? 
Right now I’m envisioning it as ten separate chapbooks that could be read in any order. Some lean more toward fiction, some toward nonfiction, some are image+text. There is narrative overlap. Despite being created as ten separate books and called a manifesto, I’m thinking of it as a novel. 

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 
Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 
Typical wedding stuff: heavy symbolism; tension between the mystical and the carnal; often comical attempts at idyll; Bacchanalic reveling that can tip that idyll over the brink into the realm of the sinister; the bizarre commingling of people from vastly different strata of the happy couple’s lives. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 
Its characters include a control-freak wedding planner; his romance-novelist mother; a tyrant bride; a victim bride; a groom who is really a tattered newspaper clipping; a cynically poetic caterer; and me. All of these characters are fairly easy to inhabit. 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It will first be printed in limited letterpress editions over the next couple years. I'd like to later adapt it to a trade edition. So ideally, both, although it doesn't seem like something an agent would take on.