L iberated by constraint: At first it sounds like an oxymoron, but Champaign-Urbana’s William Gillespie knows the value of artistic constraint.
In the art world, “freedom of expression” can sometimes translate to “freedom of stylistic imitation.” Imitating predecessors and contemporaries is inevitable if the artist intends to contribute to a specific tradition or movement, but Gillespie knows that over-absorption of any influence can saturate the work of an artist with redundancies, or worse, — cringe-worthy clichés.
On February 20, 2002 (20-02-2002 in European notation), Gillespie launched Spineless Books, “an independent small press dedicated to the production and distribution of innovative literature, with an emphasis on collaborative writing, formal experimentation and utopian thought,” according to the Spineless Books website. The launch coincided with the release of his collaboratively authored, narrative palindrome 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words. Written by Gillespie and Nick Montfort with illustrations by Shelley Jackson, 2002 is “the longest literary palindrome in the history of the planet, according to some very well-informed sources,” says Spineless Books’ Secretary of the Board of Directors, Dirk Stratton.
If you are asking yourself, “What the hell is a palindrome?”, just take a look at the numbers: 20-02-2002. Read them forwards. Then backwards. Now imagine a story where literally every single one of the 1,001 letters (and digits) composing the narrative’s first half are mirrored in the second half comprising a single narrative, with variation allowed only in punctuation and word-dividing spaces. Talk about artistic constraint.
Gillespie graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 with a degree in Creative Writing, but he has been writing fiction for most of his life; He self-published a single copy of his earliest collection of short stories entitled 3 Great Stories when he was in 3rd grade, complete with his own illustrations. His mentor, Philip Graham, a Creative Writing professor here at UIUC, remembers William walking into class the day his 12-page story was due and handing out a 70-page manuscript to his classmates for peer-critique. Yeah, he was that kind of student.
So why would a writer with so much experience choose a form so restricting that it would make most writers feels claustrophobic? Gillespie admits there is a certain “geeky” aspect to it: a word game challenge in which all of the words are chosen by the author, or in this case, authors. But he also describes it as a kind of “Olympics in which very few people are participating.” Currently.
Though Spineless Books was officially launched as an independent small press on 20-02-2002, Stratton recalls having encountered Gillespie’s DIY productions as early as 1997, “printed via photocopier and bound with staples,” bearing the Spineless namesake.
After graduating from UIUC and taking some time off to wait tables and hone his writing craft, Gillespie enrolled in the Master’s Fiction Writing program at Illinois State University and attended classes with Urbana native and author of one of Time Magazine’s “100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005,” David Foster Wallace. Gillespie described Wallace as an expert grammarian, one who “you’d be relieved was around to proofread your work when a deadline was coming up.”
With a Master of Science in Fiction Writing from ISU, Gillespie headed to Brown University, where he earned an MFA in the University’s Electronic Writing Program. It was during his stay at Brown under the tutelage of author Robert Coover that Gillespie collaborated with three other authors (one of whom was Dirk Stratton) on the award-winning hypertext novel The Unknown, which can be read in its entirety at unkownhypertext.com.
But do not be confused by the name Spineless Books: in addition to the literally spineless, staple-bound DIY productions, the name refers to the company’s lack of institutional or structural spine, which gives its founder complete freedom to print the experimental work that he finds most exciting.
The Unknown is the only work of Gillespie’s that can be read entirely online, though every Spineless Book contains some kind of online component. As Stratton says, “We like books you can hold in your hands, books made of paper.” All of the company’s books are thus printed in hard copy and available for purchase at spinelessbooks.com.
Outside of his work with Spineless Books, Gillespie works at UIUC as the Communications Coordinator in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology. On Monday nights from 8-10 p.m. he co-hosts a radio show, Rock Geek FM, on WEFT 90.1 with his wife, Christy Scoggins.
Gillespie’s most recent work, Keyhole Factory, is an experimental novel that uses innovative text formatting. It was recently picked up by Soft Skull Press and will be available in Fall 2012. Until then, check out spinelessbooks.com for more from Champaign-Urbana’s own independent small press. And keep your eyes peeled for William Gillespie’s name, just in case Philip Graham was correct in his prediction: “I think the world is finally ready for William Gillespie.”
