I’ve been working with erasure again lately, and while doing so, it occurred to me that many of the resulting texts, as with standard poetry, can benefit from a reading of the piece aloud. In the past, I had made audio recordings for one or two erasures, but I plan to experiment with doing it more often in the future. With that in mind, I’ll be adding audio files for some of the texts that are already posted on the site under the Erasures tab.

The first one I’ve added is called ‘Human Dust’, which I made in 2012 using Chapter 28 of a book called Nerves and Common Sense written by Annie Payson Call, originally published in 1909. Call was an early mental health self-help author, and most of the chapters in the book were originally published as articles in Ladies’ Home Journal. I’ve actually made a number of erasures from this book, simply because I found its content and tone so ripe for manipulation. As with any of the books I use for erasure, this one is in the public domain and available through Project Gutenberg.