As a queer boy growing up in many different rural areas, my only source of escape were
libraries and the books they contained. Countless hours were spent among the shelves,
discovering worlds apart from my own. Books became sacred to me, the only constant in
a frequently changing world, their words a verification that there was more for me out
there. And this reverence continues even to this day, not only through a voracious
consumption of the printed word, but in my own creations of hand bound books, papers
and the like. So it was with a sense of guilt that, when presented with a vandalized book
with which to create something, my first instinct was to shred the pages, making a pulp
of them. Text of a Willa Cather short story, imagery from the book, and the spirit of a world
in which a person finds it necessary to damage books to make themselves feel complete,
or possibly assauge their own guilt, transformed itself into new pages. The written work
marred, though never fully healed, becomes a visual story in its own right. Though the
words may be assaulted, they can never be fully destroyed.
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