This is a story of digression. An excursion in loosening method.

In January I stood with one of this year’s Art Writing graduates and faced multiplied pangrams rendered in cyan, yellow and magenta across multiple media. This work was part of an ongoing exercise in improvisation and restraint, in the approximate senseless, and in discoveries of the associative profound. It is part of Aglaé D. Mouriaux’s graduate project and I turn to it here to demonstrate and reflect on the manner of Art Writing, the programme, its participants and of the genre or discipline. ‘Expect them to vowel,’ reads the third pangram.

‘To ryegrass, to bird funk, to jazz quartz.’1

Expect them to vowel.

I digress.

Expect them to verb. Let this be an excursion. Let the teller disappear into the act of telling. Expect them to err, to errancy, to assemble a programme of negations and reinventions. Expect them to imagine a genre of the yet to be.2

This is a story of digression. Where do we begin?