January 1, 2019
2018: The Year in Review at the Poison Pie Publishing House
In the year 2018, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House produced two books:
Piecemeal, subtitled Proceedings of the International Congress on Exploratory Meta-Living was recorded in real time. It is a post-existential fantasy generated through a non-idiomatic improvisational creative process. It was serially published on a daily basis in 2018, resulting in a novel composed of 365 passages each nominally three hundred words in length. The full text of the novel remains online via free, anonymous access. A one-page flyer describing the novel is online here.
Much of the inspiration behind a literature of non-idiomatic improvisation comes from non-idiomatic improvised music. The novel was improvised in the following manner. The author wrote a passage each day while listening to a different album. For the curious, several indices were generated, noting the artists, labels, countries and years of the recordings. The page numbers in the index correspond to a book, which currently does not exist, in which each page contains the writing from a single day of the year. Thus an entry of "1" in the index corresponds to January 1, 2018 and an entry of "365" corresponds to December 31, 2018. The index is posted as a pdf file here.
A Fractured Portrait of Iris contains a portrait of a woman in twenty-five passages corresponding to five myths, five magical spells, five birds, five excerpts from esoteric texts and five prayers. It is jointly authored by Hebeloma Crustuliniforme, Stuart Tallow, Escarlata Piranga Olivacea, Hong Samud & the late Ms. Aun Wee Park, with an introduction by Poppy Hortie. A Fractured Portrait of Iris is the fifth book in the Hortie pentalogy. A Fractured Portrait of Iris is extracted in its entirety from passages in the Proceedings of the International Congress on Exploratory Meta-Living.
Also of note in 2018, the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House engaged in other literary activities including
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House is no longer setting annual goals. However, two exciting possibilities appear on the horizon for 2019. First, the daily blog will continue, with the intention of generating a third novel in the tetralogy that began with 2017: The Year of the Every-Day Magician (2017) and Piecemeal (2018). Second, we hope that the nascent collaboration with the artist, Julia K. Keffer, which resulted in these holiday postcards may yet materialize in 2019 in the form of an illustrated book.
To our readers, we, the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House, thank you for your patronage and support and we look forward to another mutually creative and unpredictable year.
About a year ago a review of 
