Transcend|Constrain

Transcend|Constrain: Collective Book Dimensions

An artist talk as part of Mesocosm

Saturday, June 11 at 2 pm

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery

3130 24th Street in San Francisco 

New review: The Story of How All Animals Are Equal

Just came across a thoughtful review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales in The Pleiades Book Review. Jared Wolfe writes, ‘Runkle proves to be a fearless proponent of imaginative power and willingness to push boundaries.’ Buy the book from Brooklyn Arts Press!

Prince among the angels

Like the rest of the world, I've had Prince on the brain, so thought I'd revisit this intensely magical experience of seeing him in San Jose in 2011, from the introduction to RUNX TALES #3. Even then, he existed among the angels, those lucky bastards ...

Artist talk at USF

I'm preparing to give an artist talk tomorrow as a guest lecturer in a Publication Design class at the University of San Francisco, where I'll discuss my body of work and how my love of narrative, sequence, and collage draw me toward the book as an art form. I'll also give students some tips on attaching covers to an accordion structure for their final projects. I had a lot of fun a couple weeks ago giving a workshop on creating a perfect binding in a case for two other sections of the class.

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!). 

Turning scraps into stories ...

 



Story Box: Creating Narrative with Relief Collage is happening at San Francisco Center for the Book next Saturday, April 16! We'll be making story boxes, shallow boxes with partitions that tell three-panel stories using 3-D collage (think Joseph Cornell!). Whether or not you're new to the book arts, if you're interested in boxmaking, visual narrative, sequential art, or collage, this workshop will be a lot of fun! Click HERE to register.

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!