SPORED: Darryl Joel Berger

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From Darryl Joel Berger's short fiction "Beulah" in his Punishing Ugly Children (Killick Press, 2010).

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I've been collaborating with visual artist/writer DJ Berger the last few months. Which has been nifty...but our exchange has been strictly one-way: he sends me artworks, I send him poems.

But Darryl's also a writer, so I thought I'd bring his words into our realm, if only by desecrating them with mushrooms.

Working with fiction is different from poetry. Usually I pick something nature-y, or something COMPLETELY non-nature-y, and then play with what the mushrooms cover up. Because some mushrooms rain spores down in profusion and others, depending on their age, do not.

So I can control when I remove the mushroom but largely I wait and see what's what. An evening of pulpy mushrooms-on-paper will usually do it...

Anyways, I was happy to see that this piece was thematically right, given the boulevard volunteers, but also the piece's use of the page (i.e. it was short).

Oh Beulah. Buck up.[image error]