I am quite excited to announce Paper Engines, a new series of poetry chapbooks that I will be publishing alongside my tabletop games @itchio@mastodon.gamedev.place
While my professional life revolves around games, both digital and analog, my creative practice, including my work as a game designer, flows from poetry. I intend for Paper Engines to be a vehicle for reflection and exploration in that space.
The first entry in this series, releasing for #NationalPoetryMonth, is On the Back of a Tiger, a long, experimental prose poem that I originally wrote in 2015 for Stephen Collis’s poetry workshop at Simon Fraser University.
https://steinea.itch.io/on-the-back-of-a-tiger
At 68 pages, it’s the largest zine I’ve ever published. 1000 lines, over 6000 words—a non-poem, a treatise, a formal oddity that has languished on my hard drive for eight years… Very much of my past, and yet a vital passage in my development as a writer and thinker.
Both digital and physical versions are available at the link above. The physical edition will be a limited, numbered and signed run of 100. I’m funding this printing with sales from previous zines. Supporting this project will make future Paper Engines releases possible.
The chapbook is also available open access at the Internet Archive, and soon in the LAC Aurora catalogue. As an author, I believe such non-profit, public archival work to be of the utmost importance.
https://archive.org/details/2023-stein-on-the-back-of-a-tiger
If the intersection of poetry and games interests you, I’ve conducted research on the progenitors of lyric games in twentieth century avant-garde movements in poetry, theatre, music, organizing, and more. The paper is available open access at Zenodo.
https://zenodo.org/record/4824078
These crossings between disciplines, between territories, are what move me, what inspire me to act, to write, to play. I hope something here can inspire something of the same in you.