The Process

Experimental text in ‘Spread Wide: an encounter between Kathy Acker & Paul Buck, John Cussans & Rebecca Stephens’.

In this collaborative volume the writer and artist Paul Buck takes his literary correspondences with Kathy Acker from the early 1980s - a period when Acker was writing Great Expectations and trying to leave America for London – as the bases for a posthumous literary exchange with the now deceased Acker. The text confronts issues of appropriation, sampling, and plagiarism.

'The Process' is a trans-subjective response to this encounter, exploring a complex set of thematic issues threaded through the work of each writer, taking the form of a literary fiction aiming towards a psychic encounter with the spirit of Kathy Acker (KA). As such it is an experimental meditation on the para-psychological aspects of literature and film that uses aberrant research and writing methods to explore parallels between imitation, plagiarism and possession in literary and artistic terms.

The title of the piece is a reference to Process Art which informed Ackers’ writing in the 1970’s and to the technique by which this text came into being.