Outlet Abiding Angel Collage by Paul JJ Payack

After 10 years or so of writing metafictions, I had begun to encapsulate my tales in fewer and fewer words, becoming ever more precise, ever more succinct, until the words, themselves, began to disappear, until there were no words, only images. Thus began my exploration into what I later labelled ‘the collage narrative'. Collage narratives work (and behave) the same as any other form of expository writing with one minor exception: there are no words.

Working in the genre, I began to use pre-20th century sources of black-and-white line art: etchings, drawings, illustrations, wood-cuts and engravings, and the like, collected from the world over.
Any source is fair game or, perhaps, game fare. (For example, I happened upon the basic elements for Santa and the Ho-Ho-Ho Zone at the Grand Place in Brussels.) Only certain images would and will do. No color. No photography. No Twentieth Century, (though I later modified this a bit).

I also came upon the notion that you could create a collage with as few as two elements. This was key. There was now no room for error. It outlet was just like the experience of writing metafiction. Everything extraneous was stripped away, and until all that remained was the essence, the essential, and the elemental.

To fully exploit an art form, it must be bounded. Without boundaries, you can't get to the boundless. Only bounding enables the full exploration of the form. Though I wasn't aware of it at the time, setting these simple rules, allowed me to push the boundaries out into the form of critical essay, non-fiction and fiction.

I've now ‘written' a dozen or so extended collage pieces, including:

•The Oculus Series
•The Book of Hours (An End to History, A Death to Consciousness)
•The Divine Comedy: A Post-Modern Commentary
• Anatomical Plates
•The Perspective Series
•Surface Tension
•A Plague of Darkness
•Santa and the Ho-Ho-Ho Zone

and a number of others.