We have constructed our first TFZ here at the Black Unicorn Press and will be distributing the print versions around the Seattle, WA area for the time being, but we also have an animated version of the zine that can be explored at our companion Youtube site here:
Printable Pdfs of Buddy and Friend are available upon request as well!
This week in the Black Unicorn Press Laboratory we are busy at work developing a new type of hyper textual zine structure called the tetraflexazine, and while we are still in experimental prototyping stages with our new design, we found it entirely too fun not to share with the world.
The idea behind the tetraflexazine begins with the geometrical shape: the tetraflexagon, which can be made with a single piece of paper and a pair of scissors. Mathmagicians have been playing with these shapes for years, and artists have as well, but we at the Black Unicorn Press are especially interested in how this geometric design can be used to structure story telling and idea sharing.
And thus rises the Tetraflexazine! Let’s walk through one potential option for its structure and what it allows.
NOTE: This example was made with a single sheet of 8.5”x11” printing paper. It is low quality, thin paper and thus bleed through is definitely an issue as the pages of a tetraflexazine occupy both sides of the piece of paper. Once a story suitable for the new shape has been developed, we will be exploring the use of heavier weight paper until we get the right mix of flexibility for folding and thickness to prevent muddled images. This blog post is just about exploring the structure itself.
We at the Black Unicorn Press are fans of the booklet/zine, so we wanted ours to fold down into a structure that cold have a front and back cover and appear as zine like as possible.
The tetraflexazine then opens traditionally onto a page 1 and 2, or a potential inside front cover and inside back cover.
The tetraflexazine then folds up into its true tetraflexagon structure presenting another 4 pages that could either be pages 3 through 6 (as represented in the picture) or 1 through 4 if you want to have an inside cover and front matter. From here things get exciting!
The reader now has the option to either fold the tetraflexazine vertically or horizontally to reveal a new spread of 4 pages. Each of these 4 pages is unique and can thus either be pages 7 through 10 and 11 through 14, or more interestingly, be pages 7a through 10a,
and 7b through 10b (In our images we have labeled these as Vertical V1 through V4, and Horizontal: H1 through H4).
Fold the tetraflexazine again along the other axis, and you will get a following 4 page spread, making for pages 11a through 14a and 11b through 14b, or 22 pages total (We have labeled these pages as VH1 through VH 4 and HV1 through HV4, as that corresponds to how you get to these pages).
There is obvious potential here for choose your own adventure comics and narrative zines, but we at the BUP also think there is an interesting rhetorical opportunity here as well to explore two different sides of an argument or philosophical idea. Again, we have just been playing around with the mechanics of the form and are very excited to see what people can do with this structure once they have the opportunity to wrap their heads around how it works.
We will even be working on figuring out how to make a digital tetraflexazine to share here on our website once we get a couple of of examples to share that are not just structural models.
If these ideas are interesting to you, feel free to experiment with them on your own and feel free to share your examples with us by email, or on social media with the hashtags #Tetraflexazine , or #BlackUnicornPress. We look forward to seeing what new stories and ideas this structure can be used to express!
The Black Unicorn Press has officially launched a massive new project in digital media publication called: I F’d Up: the probable digital writing archive of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett! You can find this project now and forever in our brand new “Our Projects” tab under our website menu, or by following the link in the title below.
In addition to including past “print-only publications” of the Black Unicorn Press, such as the original print anthology of I F’d Up, the Digital Archive already includes a selection of new short stories, and the especially exciting new addition of 302 Corrections Drive, which is over 20 new documents probably written by A Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett invested in the state of Arkansas about the relationship 302 Corrections Drive, and the larger Project, I F’d Up: the Digital Archive, are published by the Black Unicorn Press as “Publications in Progress” that will continue to grow and evolve right here in cyber space. Small updates and changes will mostly be announced through our social media platforms, but large scale reorganizations or additions will be announced here as new blog posts. We already have hundreds of pages of poetry, essays, stories, drawings, digital art projects, songs, and other oddities to convert and add to the archive, and we are looking forward to sharing them with the world!
Assembled below is a collection of Logos from past Black Unicorn Press Publications. If you find another one, please let us know!
Note: This post was transferred over from a now defunct Black Unicorn Press site Originally Published in 2015.
“The Janky, like all ghosts, is real in the stories we tell of it.”
People write poems about places because they feel like those places create them as people. The Janky was the opposite. A place that composed its own poems out of the people that made it the Janky. The creepy, dilapidated, funeral-home-turned-punk-house of Kirksville, MO was torn down in 2014, but the poetry it created in the lives of its inhabitants is still being written.
Janky Daze is my contribution to that endeavor. It is a collection of hand-written poetry and drawings of things that may never have quite happened like I remembered and never will again. Below are a couple of snap shots of the work found inside.
NOTE: This post was originally made July 6th, 2015. I Fucked Up will be coming to the internet and available through the Black Unicorn Press website soon!
The concept of autobiography as anthology is rather conceited. But sometimes invented perspective into one’s own life gives the opportunity to put “truth” in its constructed context between the experience and the people experiencing it. I Fucked Up is about the invention of selves and the experiences that define them. As the name would imply, I Fucked up is a semi-linear exploration of the takes and mistakes of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett.
Here is an anonymous review/response to I Fucked Up that maybe explains the content more honestly than I:
“[yr book] which i loved reading and remembering people and having a little window in to your world and seeing/exploring/feeling the depth of male guilt and i also wonder about male essentialism and how that is bullshit and how you are not defined by your gender and can bask in your own amazingness without guilt or i would like to think/hope that that is a possibility for all people. and i felt like you were being to hard on yourself and wanted to offer you a hug and appreciation for all the ways you show up in the world that defy your social conditioning”
Here is another review that strokes an author’s ego:
“Anyway, I was damn glad I read it, and I hope a lot more people get the opportunity. It seems to me you’ve constructed something that a lot of auto/biographies could take a lesson from–namely, a text that looks and reads like a living document. A selfish part of me hopes you keep adding sections to it; a more charitable part of me wonders how possible it is for you to put it down and move on. The inter-text parts were also hot shit. Some of the most emotional moments come in the email inclusions and the letters, not to mention the dialogic divisions of space in the initial text. You’ve really hit on something there.”
The book itself is an unusual project as it is designed to be a living print document. Unlike traditionally bound books, I Fucked Up is designed to rearrangeable by the reader, and additional secret material is available for those that follow the instructions inside. While the first updates to to the anthology, advancing the edition to .01.04 was going be going in the mail October 2015, circumstances led to that not happening. The good news is that new updates to the book will be getting published digitally in the near future and will be accessible, and printable for free online. The Black Unicorn Press has only 1 copy of the book left, so it is no longer available by any means known to us.
Below is a picture of the TRUE cover of the print anthology. All other versions are fakes and their authenticity cannot be confirmed.
