Informal Noticings Press
In collaboration with Your Mood Projects
Limited edition, hand-stitched zine
50 pages, 5.5 x 8.5”
Publication Date: 20 May 2025

Edited by
Selby Sohn

Writing Without Permission features ephemeral materials from a performance of five year plan at nnoooo #3, an evening of simultaneous poetic happenings and experimental work curated by David Horvitz, Joseph Mosconi, and Zara Schuster.

For the performance, I taped sheets of paper featuring excerpts from five year plan to each of the fifteen stairs leading from the ground floor to the upper balcony circling the venue. The sheets remained adhered to the stairs throughout the evening, trampled by the audience, accumulating traces.

I initiated the performance at top of the staircase, tearing open a paper bag filled with pill bottles, then descended. Pausing at each level, spilling pills, reading what fragments of the poem were still legible.

At the close of the event, I went to gather the pages, finding the staircase bare. A staff member, cleaning up the venue, had stripped them from the stairs. She led out me back, pulled a crumpled wad of paper and tape from the trash, and handed it to me.

Café 2001 | Los Angeles CA
6 April 2025

An autobiography at a slant, five year plan compiles every Google search made by Emji Saint Spero  between January 2017 - January 2022. As mundane as it is humiliating, this poem is a crash-your-spreadsheet course in understanding how the questions we ask say, perhaps (and hopefully), less about ourselves than they do about the shifting world that moves through us. 

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About the Zine

Writing Without Permission was released in collaboration with Your Mood Projects, an artist-curated space in San Francisco. Copies of the zine are available at all exhibition openings.

Contributors
Samara Alima, Glenna Cole Allee, Pam Axelson, Scott Butterworth, Erin Desmond, James Desmond, Paul Ebenkamp, Brooke Farrington, Juliane Hansen, Alana Heiss, Carrie Hunter, Quinn Ray Keck, Kathleen King, Hanieh Khatibi, Natasha Loewy, Dan Nelson, Chris Philpot, Elizabeth Preger, Marty Rogers, Kate Rhoades, Anne-Lesley Selcer, Danielle Siembieda, Emji Saint Spero, Suzanne Stein, Jean Future Twin, Badri Valian, Lanny Weingrod, and Minoosh Zomorodinia