Build a Story Box at SFCB this April 16

This April 16, I'll be teaching Story Box: Creating Narrative with Relief Collage, a daylong workshop at San Francisco Center for the Book. In this workshop, we'll use bookboard to build a shallow box with three collaged compartments. Participants will receive instruction in 3D collage, layout, and sequence, and will leave with the fundamentals of building, covering, and dimensionally decorating a compartmented box. This will be a a lot of fun—learn more 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.

'Artifice and authenticity ...'

'Artifice and authenticity are central themes tying together Matt Runkle's eclectic debut short story collection,' writes Pedro Ponce in a great writeup of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales in the LA Review. 'While artifice is everywhere in these stories,' he continues, 'it is not a source of cynicism or despair; rather, artifice is elemental—a material both resistant and pliable, with which characters map and navigate reality.' Order a copy HERE!

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.

'... animals out of humans ...'

Zachary Kocanda at the Mid-American Review wrote a really thoughtful and thorough review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. He says the book '... makes animals out of humans, showing them at both their best and worst. It strips what makes us all one confused, messy yet beautiful species.' Get the book from Small Press Distribution!

How Many Muses?

Here's the title slide for an artist talk I'm giving this weekend at the biennial College Book Art Association conference in Nashville. It looks at the production methods of medieval European manuscripts and twentieth-century mainstream American comics, and talks about how they inspired my artist's book, Catholics.

Writing the Visual at Southwestern College

Catholics featured in 23 Sandy exhibition

Seven Deadly Prints

I just finished a 4-flap enclosure to house this suite of prints I made as a companion to Catholics. Each of the seven images is centered around a communion wafer/solar cross, which was printed with heavy impression from photopolymer plates. Surrounding this central image is a Bruce Rogers–inspired frame printed from metal typographic ornaments that alchemically shifts from print to print. The wafers/solar crosses animate a sequence that comments on narrative threads included in the artist's book, while also operating as an independent group. The suite was printed in an edition of ten, and is available either individually or paired with the book in a deluxe edition.